Experimental Feminisms

Panellists, the artists and writers Julia Calver, Heather Phillipson and Isabel Waidner, reflect on their experimental practices, exploring questions such as: What is the relation between experimenting with form and experimenting with feminism? How does experimentation allow us to rethink the materiality of writing, as well as the relationship between bodies, words, images and things? Each practitioner speaks about and reads examples of their work. The panel was devised by Sara Ahmed and Helena Reckitt as part of the Feminist Writing Conference, Centre for Feminist Research, Goldsmiths, University of London, and was followed by a conversation moderated by Reckitt

The (in)visibility of equality, diversity, and inclusion research in event management journals

The field of events management has been critiqued for being overly focused on operational and managerial concerns to the detriment of critical analysis of power and representation, of which equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) is an important aspect. This paper reports on an audit of the four leading events management journals over the period 2011-2021 to assess the current state of play in relation to engagement with EDI issues and consider whether this critique remains justified. After screening, 49 articles were included. Findings reveal that EDI remains a marginal issue in events management journals, often confined to special issues, with no evidence of increasing engagement over the review period. EDI needs to become more integrated in the core body of knowledge of events management to ensure that events research is socially useful to students, other researchers and practitioners, contributing to the development and reputation of the field

Roland Barthes's Party

The Roland Barthes Reading Group is Emma Bolland, Julia Calver, Daniela Cascella, Helen Clarke, Louise Finney, Susannah Gent, Sharon Kivland, Debbie Michaels, Hestia Peppé, Rachel Smith. For four years we have been reading The Preparation of the Novel by Roland Barthes, the collection of the series of lectures he gave at the Collège de France between 1978 and 1980, completed shortly before his death in 1981. He declared his intention to write a novel, and in this pedagogical experiment, explores the trial of novel writing. In this book the authors riff on a tiny remark Barthes makes: a. Example (from personal experience) –> I want to narrate a party: as a rule, anecdotal material: people I’d not met before, particular characters, conversations, rituals, etc. But when I set about telling the story, I find myself weighed down by the ‘necessary’ details (necessary for the logic of the narrative) that I personally find it too tiresome to recount. I only need ‘retain’ two notations from the party: the yellow dress worn by the hostess (a kaftan) and the sleepiness of the host’s eyes, the droopiness of his eyelids, sorts of realistic haiku that exhaust the saying and don’t belong to narrative discourse (at least not my practice of it) because they’re: not functional. b. Conversely, I can find something in a story that jumps out at me, like a film jumping, a sliver flying off, something that has all the spirit of haiku but is in fact no way related to the story: something that sets a bell ringing, that brings with it all the particular features of haiku I’ve tried to articulate [...] The Short Form is its own necessity and suffices in itself: it can’t be stretched. Roland Barthes, Session of March 3, 197