Re: Silences- The Sensing of Sound

There is always a pressing need to make sense of the inexplicable. Research as teaching, writing as inquiry, texts as performative—we embark on a series of encounters and engagements. We draw and write lines in, and around, our experiences. Straightforward is not a geometry that sense, time, identity, or language takes. Usually, texts are considered to be the domain of authors but we ask that you engage with us as we explore how matter and fact warp and where theory is practice rather than applied, expressed, or attached to practice

The Royle Collection: Who do we think we are?

This workshop anticipates the birth of a project. In a joint collaboration between MMU and University of Lincoln, Who do we think we are? is a project which seeks to explore the very work of archiving. We will use materials from the Royle Collection, (Arthur Royle, Wythenshawe, Manchester). Arthur Royle was a pioneer recorder of Wythenshawe local history and heritage and amassed and created items of historical importance over 60 years which includes maps, letters, receipts, photographs, sketches, and prints. He also recorded local dialects and pronunciations. He was emblematic of public service and duty. The collection is, as yet, unarchived, and there is a unique opportunity to explore what an archive might do beyond the traditional modes of identifying and classifying. We aim to contribute to the co-design, and co-production methodologies and processes conference theme. Our workshop seeks to open up what it might mean to actively archive materials in and with those who come into relation with it. In actively exploring connections between disparate objects, systems and processes we also seek to question how histories and cultures are produced, recorded, lived and enacted. To ask questions of the relation between an archive and its audience is also to invite diverse groups and people into a conversation about universal meaning making and particularities. This workshop will present some materials from the archive and explore the ways in which they may be used, interpreted and worked with, to house and harbor meaning

Papery Graveyards: Sense and Silence With Archives

This article seeks to explore the problematics of engaging with archives. In exploring how nonexperts may come to a new topic and area to ask pertinent questions, this article seeks to put to work the author’s own reflexive engagements with an archive. The archives drew the author in both material and bodily senses and invited thinking about how we might reuse data or at least reengage with materials. The article challenges notions that reflexivity is circular or upholds sameness and proposes that the movement is iterative and one which seeks critical engagement with difference

METACOHORTS for the study of vascular disease and its contribution to cognitive decline and neurodegeneration: an initiative of the Joint Programme for Neurodegenerative Disease Research

Dementia is a global problem and major target for health care providers. Although up to 45% of cases are primarily or partly due to cerebrovascular disease, little is known of these mechanisms or treatments because most dementia research still focuses on pure Alzheimer's disease. An improved understanding of the vascular contributions to neurodegeneration and dementia, particularly by small vessel disease, is hampered by imprecise data, including the incidence and prevalence of symptomatic and clinically “silent” cerebrovascular disease, long-term outcomes (cognitive, stroke, or functional), and risk factors. New large collaborative studies with long follow-up are expensive and time consuming, yet substantial data to advance the field are available. In an initiative funded by the Joint Programme for Neurodegenerative Disease Research, 55 international experts surveyed and assessed available data, starting with European cohorts, to promote data sharing to advance understanding of how vascular disease affects brain structure and function, optimize methods for cerebrovascular disease in neurodegeneration research, and focus future research on gaps in knowledge. Here, we summarize the results and recommendations from this initiative. We identified data from over 90 studies, including over 660,000 participants, many being additional to neurodegeneration data initiatives. The enthusiastic response means that cohorts from North America, Australasia, and the Asia Pacific Region are included, creating a truly global, collaborative, data sharing platform, linked to major national dementia initiatives. Furthermore, the revised World Health Organization International Classification of Diseases version 11 should facilitate recognition of vascular-related brain damage by creating one category for all cerebrovascular disease presentations and thus accelerate identification of targets for dementia prevention

Reflexivity, the picturing of selves, the forging of methods

This paper addresses alternative models for a reflexive methodology and examines the ways in which doctoral students have appropriated these texts in their theses. It then considers the indeterminate qualities of those appropriations. The paper offers a new account of reflexivity as 'picturing', drawing analogies from the interpretation of two very different pictures, by Velázquez and Tshibumba. It concludes with a more open and fluid account of reflexivity, offering the notion of 'signature', and drawing on the work of Gell and also Deleuze and Guattari in relation to the inherently specific nature of 'concepts' situated in space and time

The wonder of method

Postmodern and deconstructionist approaches are necessarily concerned with 'making visible' and working with marginalized 'others'. This article explores how theory as method might enable us to revisit methodological approaches that have conventionally relied upon semantic readings of the text. Deconstruction clears the way for such approaches without necessarily providing an optimistic or hopeful way forward. This article seeks to explore how we might offer some new ways of thinking 'human' 'agency' 'subject' in a creative assemblage of mind, body, world, and where encounters with the 'unthought' 'unknown' 'uncertain', and 'unclear' need not be paralyzing but a call towards a wonder of methodology itself

The Politics of becoming: . . . making time . . .

This article seeks to explore a politics of becoming. Emphasizing the dynamics of both time and the affects produced with it, we engage by following the questions that are taken up, which bubble through the middle and which niggle at the margins of our thoughts. In sensing out the imperatives that seek to tie emotions to subjects, we argue that there is also an imperative for researchers and scholars to inquire into their own and we do so with a specific project in mind—that of reconstituting the conditions of hope that we want to argue are key for any educative role. Deleuze’s three syntheses of time have enabled us to consider both retrospective and prospective trajectories in ways that prevent any simple linear, mechanistic, or deterministic patterning. As we reevaluate and explore emotion’s reliance on subjectivity, we also search for the impersonal affects that connect