Sadler Seminars 2015/16
In the scheme's inaugural year, we supported four projects.
Cultures of the Book
The death of the book has been long-heralded yet the book survives, a privileged cultural object in both the scholarly community and wider society. These Sadler Seminars, organised by the Centre for the Comparative History of Print (Centre CHoP), ask: ‘Why Books?’ What do we mean by the word ‘book’ and why do we remain so invested in it?
Starting off with the White Rose's 'Debating the Book'programme, 'Cultures of the Book' is a year-long series of events that explore different dimensions of book culture. Our interest is both in the book as idea as well as object. In other words, we want to know why the book continues to have such a hold upon us while, at the same time, think about what it means to hold a book. 'Cultures of the Book' investigates the lives or both books and their readers. Centered around the print room in the School of English, the project is deeply interested in the printed codex - the processes of its manufacture and the meanings of its material culture - but also recognizes that the history of the book goes much further than this, encompassing the different ways books function in society. It explores the way that the form of the book has shaped the way we understand the world and considers how this might change as the book takes on new, digital form today. If books are the principal means through which we have come to learn about our past, then the forms of the book will also shape our future.
Flow: Supermarkets and the movements of food and people
The central aim of the supermarket is to optimise the flow of goods and people. These shops differ from others because so many of their main commercial innovations, from the trolley to the self-service counter, help people not to linger but to leave. At the heart of these smart and intuitive organisations is a pursuit of efficiency—a coordinated effort to allow as many goods as possible to flow as quickly as possible into as many homes as possible. Outside the industry itself, however, the supermarket’s pursuit of optimum flow remains little understood. Our storytellers often just allow it to carry them back outside, their work rarely glancing back at such stores; our scholarship can seem no quicker to reflect the fact that many of us shop in them too. (Some of us even have Clubcards.)
Through this Sadler Seminar series we seek to arrest the supermarket’s flow and take a long look at its astonishing economic, cultural and social success. Our series will reach across the disciplines, bringing historians and literary critics into conversation with nutritionists, social scientists and psychologists, and it will culminate with a public reading from a major novelist who has also sought to pause and consider the flow of goods and people through commercial nonspace.
Supermarkets have transformed our relationship to food and its production and consumption, and in the process they have also transformed the way we think about our families, our bodies, our land, our communities, and our wants and desires. It is imperative that we hold these transformations to the light, bringing our specialisations together to gain a fuller understanding of this dominant commercial form. The following seminars aim to do just that.
More information can be found on the project's website.
Leeds Voices: Communicating Superdiversity
Superdiversity involves the dynamic interplay of social variables, including: country of origin, migration channels and legal status (Vertovek 2007: 2-3). Research into superdiversity has impact on governmental social policy, and is particularly timely in terms of the migration debate. Current studies and publications on superdiversity, however, fall short of addressing the role of multimodal semiotic resources in successful accommodation within our new superdiverse world, and the subjective histories of players in superdiversity.
Multimodality denotes the set of communication strategies we as human beings have at our disposal, and includes aural, visual, textual, tactile and spatial resources. The emergence of multimodality as a field of enquiry has been facilitated by the availability of inexpensive, high-quality technology to capture the full range of communicative resources, such as the now ubiquitous mobile phone, and the textual/visual opportunities provided by social media platforms.
Kirkgate Market is the ideal space in which to explore superdiversity and multimodality. It constitutes a historically dynamic linguistic and cultural hub for multilingual/cultural exchange, containing both similarities and differences when compared to traditional indoor markets in towns and cities elsewhere in the UK. A contained open-access public space, Kirkgate Market contrasts with religious-community-led diasporic public spaces, e.g. mosques, and the managed diversity of statutory environments, e.g. schools, hospitals, focused on in much existing research on superdiversity (Hiebert et al. 2015). This public space exhibits dynamic examples of hybridising and enterprising superdiversity in practice, with juxtapositions and intersections of different ethnicities and identities, including “Yorkshire” elements. This space disturbs dominant understandings of multiculturalism in terms of bounded cultural difference: Polish shops are commonly a symbolic figure of hate in the UK immigration debate, representing ‘new’ EU migrants, yet in Kirkgate Market some are run by Kurds, Arabs or Pakistanis, with Arabic as a lingua franca.
As the national migration debate becomes increasingly toxic and public policy in the UK threatens our traditional markets, this research is timely. Our findings will have implications for public policy discourses relating to diversity and migration, and the research could be replicated in other traditional urban markets within the UK and Western Europe, adding vital evidence to debates about the public value of markets, which typically focus on economic decline.
You can view the Leeds Voices project website.
Performing Violence
'Performing Violence’ is a trans-disciplinary research initiative that links the creative and performing arts with political, cultural and psychosocial analyses of violence. It is a collaboration between academics, Opera North, artists, educators and other research centres and cultural institutions in Britain and internationally.
The major purpose of the project is to demonstrate the value of cultural practice and critical analysis to the challenge posed by contemporary violence to the continuing project of democracy. It seeks to understand current forms of violence as well as implicit and unacknowledged violence relayed through representation in mainstream media, social media and cultural performance. Its different strands will combine academic research, live performance art practices and the engagement of different publics, specifically school-age students and young adults. The project will build on long-term research at Leeds involving the cultural analysis of the Holocaust, concentrationary and colonial violence, and other instances of trauma related to extreme violence.
‘Performing Violence’ is already part of the DARE initiative between the university and Opera North. It received Ignite funding (which funded two PG interns, Matthew John and Beatrice Ivey) as pump-priming for a major grant application. It was the reserve as the university’s proposal for a ten-year Leverhulme Research Centre and is one of the chosen strands for the university’s ‘Culture’ theme. It is part of the university’s successful bid to participate in this year’s ‘Being Human’ festival. A number of events have already taken place (sandpit event / workshops / ‘impact in 5’) at the Howard Assembly Rooms and the university, and outcomes include interviews and podcasts.