Culture-Media-Text Research Centre

VariAbilities is a gathering of disability studies scholars and other medicine and health scholars from around the world. An inclusive event, the organisers go to great lengths to make sure that all of the participants and attendees are comfortable with the format and location. This year's conference theme is "Bridging the Gap: Bringing the Human Sciences together with the Humanities".

VariAbilities 2023 will take place at the Hunterian Collection of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, in collaboration with the University of Winchester, on 19-21 July 2023.

What does the body mean to you?

How do we understand our bodies? Our own bodies might be the first we experience as children, but how do we use this lived experience to understand the bodies of other people? The bodies of everyday folks we meet on the street, bodies that may range from healthy to diseased, able to disabled, sports fit to couch potato, real to represented, cared for to cared by, and everything you can think of in between—how do we think about people who are like us but also somehow different? What knowledges do such encounters between variAble bodies create? 

Our conference location, the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, has at its heart the anatomy and pathology collections of the eighteenth-century surgeon and anatomist John Hunter. The venue invites us to encounter the full range of humanity that has been and is still the subject of study, and exhibition. But what is this study, this exhibition? 

As John Hunter suggests: “Some Physiologists will have it that the Stomach is a Mill; others, that it is a fermenting Vat; others, again that it is a Stewpan; but in my view of the matter, it is neither a Mill, a Fermenting vat nor a stew-pan, but a STOMACH, Gentlemen, a Stomach.” We all have experience of a stomach, but embedded in Hunter’s statement is metaphor (the object of study of the Humanities) and an apparently directly understandable truth (the object of study of Science). Is there a discussion possible between the way we, as lay people and as surgeons, understand one another?

In this conference we turn explicitly to the experience of specific and variAble bodies and their humanity. The conference itself will give space for papers about individual bodies in their particular histories, approached from whatever methodology seems to be the most appropriate, written in common language that all may share. The histories may be any, from classical antiquity to the contemporary, and the methodology of approach from contextual to theoretical, or whatever combination of these.

Please send your proposal (300-500 words) by 8th January 2023 to chris.mounsey@winchester.ac.uk and stan.booth@winchester.ac.uk.

The University of Winchester Culture-Media-Text Research Centre hosted a one-day symposium on ‘Intersections between Culture, Arts and Nature’.

The recent lockdown saw many of us finding solace in the natural world for its restorative attributes, and nature has long been celebrated and exploited as a unique selling point by marketing and advertising industries as a signifier of untainted health, wellbeing and truth. This symposium seeks to explore our changing relationship with nature and our place within it, encouraging an interdisciplinary focus on diverse identities from local, national, transnational and global perspectives.

‘Nature’ has long found expression through literary, sensory, material and audio-visual arts and media, just as cultural practices and texts channel meanings of ‘nature’ as both a sign of lost traditions and a force for regenerative progress or change. The arts redefine the natural world, creating new ways of framing and perceiving its qualities.

The symposium aimed to encourage conversations about new possibilities of sustainable media, accessibility and equality, and the relative impacts of cultural phenomena such as ‘rewilding’ or ‘living wild’. Through cross-disciplinary considerations of ecological/environmental concerns, looking at lifestyle and industrial structures and boundaries, together with cultural discourses and representations of ‘nature’ and ‘the natural world’, the symposium allowed space to reflect on these richly varied and complex human connections to nature, in the hope of instigating meaningful dialogue and change.

The symposium encouraged cross-disciplinary dialogues related to intersections between nature, arts and culture, including (but not limited to):

• Conservation or Intrusion?
• Ecocriticism/Theories of Nature
• Equality and a ‘Just Transition’
• Nature and Philosophy
• Nature and the Pandemic
• Nature as Brand/Commodity
• Nature, Health and Wellbeing
• Natural Limits: Borders, Lines
• New Pastoral
• Pollution
• Representations of Nature/the Natural World
• Rewilding/Living Wild
• Science, Arts and Nature
• Sustainable Media

Programme

Welcome and Opening Remarks (Laura Hubner and Daniel Varndell)

Marilene Cardoso Ribeiro (Visiting Research Fellow, University of Winchester and Visual Artist): ‘Photography-based Research and the Environmental and Political Agendas’

Panel 1, chaired by Daniel Varndell

Chris Mounsey (University of Winchester): ‘Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border: Fact and Fiction’

Gary Farnell (University of Winchester): ‘Organicism at the Intersection of Culture, Art and Nature’

Panel 2, chaired by Laura Hubner

Abigail Whittall (University for the Creative Arts and University of Winchester): ‘Monstrous Mycelium: Exploring the Contemporary Fungal Gothic in Resident Evil: Village (2021) and Mexican Gothic (2020)’

Daniel Varndell (University of Winchester)

Eco-songs

The film research cluster encompasses a range of interests regarding a variety of filmic practices, diversely identified formally, stylistically, historically and/or with respect to national or trans-national structures and boundaries. Research undertaken and in process includes work on British and European cinema, classical and post-classical Hollywood cinema, African and Third Cinema, animation, film genre, film authorship, the intersection of film, politics and culture, and the larger theorisation and critical reception of the filmic medium.

In addition to individual and collaborative work published and presented at conferences and other symposia, members of the cluster have organised the highly successful international conferences 'Violent Film' (2006) and 'Framing Film: Cinema and the Visual Arts' (2009) at the University of Winchester.

Research in this cluster interrogates the representation and construction of identity across different cultural forms. We are particularly interested in cultures of ethnicity and the use of material and visual culture in connection with national identity, in examples such as Nigerian television and the official sanctioning of art-historical narratives in national portrait galleries and museums. Our approaches engage with debates over the trans-Atlantic and the post-colonial, and over gender and sexuality.

The Arts Council England-funded project The Boat, by Prof. Andrew Melrose and Jonathan Rooke, is an example of current topical research in this theme. A collaboration between the University and four primary schools, it is designed to show how the creative arts and education can help promote social justice on the subject of (im)migration and refugees. Visit the The Boat website.

The journalism and media research cluster encompasses media theory and critical investigation of contemporary journalistic practice.

Ongoing research projects include:

• A volume on crime, capitalism and the media
• A special issue on Brexit and the rise of populist celebrity politicians in contemporary Europe
• A special issue on the TV show Friends
• A book on Generation X and 1990s popular culture
• A collection on Nigerian media
• A monograph on media and information literacy in the 21st century

Research in this cluster focusses on the cultural aspects of language use in constructing and defining identity.

Current projects include:

• Research into contemporary performances of medieval drama
• Identity construction through attitudes to language and dialect in NE Scotland and Bavaria

See also the Centre for Research into Language.

Research in this cluster explores the relationship between written texts and the cultures from which they emerge and within which they are interpreted. Viewing literature as one cultural practice among others, we are particularly interested in the relationships between literary texts and the following: urban space, globalisation, gender, and political activism.

Members of the cluster specialise in periods from the eighteenth century to the present, and in genres including literary naturalism, Jewish writing, detective fiction in literary, cinematic and televisual forms, and 'chick lit' and 'chick flicks' from Britain and the USA.