What Happened Here: A Photographer in Sarajevo, 1992-1996

An essay discussing Paul Lowe's photographs, made during the Siege of Sarajevo. The essay appeared in Fieldstudy 21, to accommpany the exhibition SCAR, which was the lead exhibition in the 2015 Moose on the Loose Biennale of Research: Archives in Time and Spac

Enchantment and Haunting: Bimbling in Jarra: Chris Harrison’s Photographs

An essay which discusses Chris Harrison's project, I Belong Jarrow

Figures of Folk

A collaboration between London College of Communication, the UAL Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC) and the Museum of British Folklore, Figures of Folk, curated by Val Williams, explores ongoing traditions through a series of large format photographs by Graham Goldwater of objects associated with British folklore, alongside letterpress posters created by LCC students, inspired by ancient phrases and words. In 2009, Simon Costin, the Director of the Museum of British Folklore, put out a call to the nation’s Morris sides to replicate their team kit in miniature, as handmade dolls. The response has been overwhelming, with nearly three hundred sides participating in the creation of a physical archive. Together with the Morris dolls, The Museum of British Folklore owns a collection of jig dolls – articulated wooden figures which were used by street performers to create a rhythmic beat and movement, mimicking traditional folk dance. Both collections have been photographed by Graham Goldwater, exploring the ways in which the photographic image both documents museum objects and extends their meaning and reach. Both object and photograph become an artefact of dancing and celebration which has taken place in Britain for nearly five hundred years. As a temporal equivalent, letterpress has also been in continuous existence since 15th century and the work produced by LCC students, Oliver Zandi, Emily Jane Todd and Vaida Klimaviciute, pays homage to this tradition. Much as Morris dancing has grown in popularity after an earlier decline, the letterpress was superseded by industrial and digital methods of printing. Today, Morris now has over eight hundred active sides and letterpress has seen a huge resurrection of interest. Both of these activities represent a means of reaching out and connecting to the old ways. But, rather than being a purely nostalgic exercise, their acknowledgment of a rich, deep-rooted past serves to highlight the value of continuity in building a stronger future

Road: artists and the stop the M11 link road campaign 1984 - 1994

The project 'Road' is an archive of text, images and oral recordings that document the living history of the 'No M11 Link Road' campaign in East London (Leyton, Leytonstone and Wanstead) from 1984 to 1995, and the people that lived in and visited the area. Road: Acme Artists and the Stop the M11 Link Road Campaign, 1984 – 1994, celebrates and preserves the experiences and thoughts of artists, protesters and the community that lived and worked on the route of the M11 link road

It is Time to Stop Talking and Start Doing: The Views of People with Learning Disability on Future Research

There is a need for people with learning disabilities to be involved in directing research to ensure that the research is meaningful to those it concerns. This paper describes a scoping exercise to determine the research priorities for the field of learning disabilities for the next ten years. It focuses specifically on the role of people with learning disabilities in setting this research agenda and describes the methodology used, which involved a series of consultation workshops. Analysis of the data from these generated six priority themes: access to health care; getting good support; the right to relationships; housing options; work and personal finance; inclusion in the community. The findings showed that it is possible for people with learning disabilities to participate in setting a research agenda and there was agreement between the different stakeholders on the fundamental priorities. Moreover, the inclusion of people with learning disabilities provided a perspective that could not be adequately represented by other stakeholder groups. People with learning disabilities were concerned that research has a meaningful impact and can lead to demonstrable improvements in care. In order for this to happen there is a need for widespread dissemination of accessible outputs that reach the relevant stakeholders

Choice and control: social care must not disable people with intellectual disabilities

People with intellectual disabilities should not have to prove their abilities in independence skills before having the right to live the life they want, argues Val Williams. Policy should allow for a personalised focus on the identity of an individual, with personal assistants able to step back and facilitate choice. Inclusive research helps build up this attention to detail in a relationship and can highlight how shifts might occur from being mutually supportive to becoming defensive, judgemental or even abusive

Being researchers with the label of learning difficulty: An analysis of talk in a project carried out by a Self-Advocacy Research Group

This thesis examines the talk-in-interaction in an inclusive research project carried out by four people with the label of learning difficulty. They set out to see whether other people in similar positions shared their feelings about labelling, which they perceived as part of the social oppression of being a service user, a less-than-full member of society, restricted by dominant and naturalised discourses about Learning Difficulty. Through a close analysis of the talk, this work characterises and describes the research activity which they undertook. The analytic method draws on elements of conversation analysis and critical discourse analysis, and examines identity work as a matter of local interactional business. Inclusive research as exemplified by this project is shown to be a new and distinct type of activity, drawing on academic models, but also creating its own parameters, through its essential link with the self-advocacy movement. The discourses of resistance and self-reliance are a necessary backdrop to this type of research activity, which springs from strong personal and collective feelings about injustice. Distinctive features include the open nature of meaning-making, blurring of the distinction between researcher and researched, and the working up of a shared identity. Further, the supported nature of the work is critically examined. Reflexive analysis reveals some discursive strategies to support self-advocacy talk and research, and explores the dilemmas of power and ownership. It is concluded that members did in fact address the social problem from which they started, by the very act of doing research. In reclaiming interactional rights, they challenged notions about their own rights to knowledge, and their presumed incompetence as people with learning difficulties. The talk not only reflected the instability of meanings within the world of Learning Difficulty, but members also contributed to these debates, by taking on the right to define themselves

Storage

Professor Williams chose to commission the film 'Storage' to document her own archive and its history. A screening of the film was followed by a Martini bar reception at the group exhibition 'FINDS 1' in the gallery of London College of Communication. Williams explains: "My first instinct when offered the opportunity of participating in the series of Professorial Platforms was to try to discover how some new creative work could emerge from this event. I had decided that I would like the Platform to be about my archive, material from all my past curatorial and publishing projects which I have been collecting and editing for over thirty years. The archive has had many homes - in the Shoreditch Biennale office in Hoxton Square in the mid 1990s, followed by a dark eight years spent in the attic of a house in East London. Then to Sussex, where it was based for a short time at a disused school in Rye, then up to the Beacon, an arts centre/home run by Judy Dewsbery in Hastings, and finally, in the last few weeks, to a shared studio space in Hastings Old Town. I have never wanted to share living space with my archive - too many memories, ghosts of past projects, excitement, event, travel and effort reduced to a pile of papers. But it is nevertheless an integral part of what I am and what I do, a narrative of people, projects, places and times.

Considering Vietnam

The Vietnam War is evolving from contemporary memory into history. Fifty years on, it still serves as a benchmark in the history of war reporting and in the representation of conflict in popular culture and historical memory. This conference seeks to explore the legacy of the US involvement in South East Asia and the resonances it still has for the coverage of contemporary warfare. In particular, the conference will reassess the role of the media in covering the war and the implications this has had for the coverage of subsequent conflicts, the impact of the war on popular culture, the ways that wars and their aftermaths are experienced on the ‘home front,’ and issues around memorialisation and memory, particularly in museum culture. The conference will bring together practitioners, academics and curators in an interdisciplinary engagement with this complex but important issue

Being a researcher with intellectual disabilities:The hallmarks of inclusive research in action

The current chapter stems principally from work done at Norah Fry Research Centre at the University of Bristol in the UK, where inclusive research has been one of the hallmarks, and where from the outset, it has been acknowledged that there are many different models and approaches … However, all of these approaches aim … to introduce the voices of people with intellectual disabilities, as active agents in shaping their own lives and their own knowledge. This chapter therefore aims to showcase some of those voices, and to show how we can learn more about what constitutes inclusive research by analysing the fine detail of the interactions that take place during the conduct of research studies. … [The author] will focus here on a couple of points only. First … [he has] come to the conclusion that this link between the personal and political is one of the hallmarks of inclusive research ... Much depends therefore on the relationship between the disabled person and those around them, and how that plays itself out in everyday interactions. That point is also directly relevant for inclusive research contexts, and is one that [he hopes] to illustrate through data taken from two projects. The first study was carried out by and with a small group of people with ID in 1998 .... The second project … was a fully funded, national research study carried out in partnership with a self-advocacy organisation, looking at the interactions between support workers (personal assistants) and people with ID. … For the purposes of the current chapter, [the author focuses] on the study as an example of inclusive research, showing how it contrasted and added to the interactional knowledge from the earlier study in 1998. (DIPF/Orig.