UPCOMING EVENTS
Countermapping Urban Palestine, May 14-15th, Lancaster University Campus
Lancaster University is delighted to announce this 2-day event, featuring work-shops and papers by independent scholars, journalists and visiting professors, including Dr Mohammed Hamdan and Dr Rami Qawariq, An-Najah University of Palestine. Events are open to all staff and students of Lancaster University. To register, please contact: l.c.moore@lancaster.ac.uk.
Day 1:
Tuesday 14th May, County Main SR 4, 2-5pm
Narrative Maps of Urban Palestine: Mapping and Place-writing Workshop
Led by Dr Duncan Hay (University College London) and Dr Tajinder Hayer (Lancaster University)
This workshop will introduce the ‘Narrative Maps of Urban Palestine’ project, and enable participants to explore place-writing and mapping in relation to their own lives and memories. We will consider notions of ‘place’, ‘home’ and hospitality (anywhere in the world), and explore the challenges and possibilities of Palestinian literary mapping.
Please bring your own laptops wherever possible!
Day 2:
Wednesday 15th May, County Main SR 4, 10am-3pm
Countermapping Urban Palestine Research Day
This event will include a range of talks and flash papers by members of the project team, visiting professors and independent scholars, serving as an excellent opportunity to share knowledge and techniques of writing, reading and mapping ‘place/space’. Please see below for the full programme:
10:00-10:30 Dr Lindsey Moore (Lancaster), Introduction to the project and ‘“Walking the Suit”: Urban Palestine Before the Nakba, in Two Contemporary Palestinian Novels’
10:30-11:00 Dr Ruth Abou Rached (Manchester), ‘“I feel that I am read before I write”: How two ‘pre-digital’ diaspora Arab world periodicals (re)mapped imaginaries of Palestine in English paratranslation’
11:15-11:45 Flash papers: Sam Naseem, Bayan Al-Ammouri, Michael Pritchard
11:45-12:30 Flash papers: Dr Atef Alshaer (Westminster), Dr Philip Dickinson (Lancaster), Dr Johann Unger (Lancaster)
(short break)
1:00-1:45 Dr Mohammed Hamdan and Dr Rami Qawariq (An-Najah National University of Palestine), ‘Narrative, Myth, and the Conceptualization of Space: Nablus as a Case Study’
1:45-2:15 Dr Manal Massalha (https://www.manalmassalha.com), ‘Doing Urban Ethnography’
2:15-3:00 Next Steps: Roundtable Discussion
We hope to see you there!
“Voice Notes”
Book Launch and Research Talk with Dr Sarah Jackson
June 11th 2024, 2-3 pm, County Main SR1 (Lancaster University Campus)
We are delighted to host Dr Sarah Jackson, Nottingham Trent University, who will be presenting on Campus during the summer term!
In this seminar, Sarah will examine the politics and poetics of the distress call in Caroline Bergvall’s Drift (2014). Discussing the ethics and aesthetics of ‘answerability’ (Ronell 1989), she will argue that Bergvall resists the wordlessness of the refugee imposed by the legacies of colonialism and instead opens up an affective space in which we find ourselves – in the words of Butler and Athanasiou (2013) – ‘affected, undone, and bound by others’ calls to respond and assume responsibility’. Reading the failures of human speech in the poem as an invitation to listen beyond words, she will demonstrate that Bergvall’s use of distressed – or stretched apart – language not only ‘calls out’ global injustices but also ‘calls for’ new ways of thinking about the relationship between technology, hospitality and voice.
In the second half of this presentation, Sarah will discuss the ways that her critical work on the distress call inspires her current AHRC project, which is an international creative writing and sound arts project working with displaced communities in Nottingham and Slemani (Kurdistan Region of Iraq). Exploring telephone technologies in experiences of exile, and working in partnership with Nottingham and Slemani UNESCO Cities of Literature, the project will result in an interactive audio exhibition featuring recorded phone calls left by young refugees from around the world.
Biography
Sarah Jackson is Associate Professor at Nottingham Trent University, where her creative and critical work explores the intersections of literature and technology in order to address questions of social and environmental justice. An award-winning poet, BBC New Generation Thinker, NTU VC Outstanding Researcher and AHRC Leadership Fellow, her recent outputs include Literature and the Telephone: Conversations on Poetics, Politics and Place (2023) and a short film entitled Calling Across Borders (2021).