Location: Clattern Lecture Theatre, Main Building, Penrhyn Road Campus
Penrhyn Road, Kingston upon Thames, Surrey KT1 2EE
(All performances/presentations will take place in the Clattern Lecture Theatre, except the evening dance performance which will be at The Rose Theatre - see location details below)

10:15-10:30 – Arrival & Registration, refreshments

10:30-10:40 – Welcome remarks

10:40-11:00 – Emma Filtness, Bandaged Dreams
Emma Filtness, Brunel University, will kick-off our symposium with a poetry reading from her new pamphlet, Bandaged Dreams (Broken Sleep Books, 2022), a poetry sequence created by applying the erasure or black-out technique to every paragraph in Part I of Lawrence Durrell’s 1950s novel, Justine. The resultant text explores the poet’s experiences of the body, disability, chronic illness and pain, of night-terror and sleeplessness but also, conversely, of pleasure, rest, and healing.

11:00-11:45 – PhD student presentations and joint discussion

Nicola Field, The Body as a Lantern

Drawing on her trauma-focussed reading of the writings and paintings of David Storey, and her own visual life-writing, Nicola will explore transgenerational trauma as a collective social and political experience. Through applying a Marxist analysis of the structural role of the institution of the family, Nicola will illustrate how traumatised bodies ‘speak’ through symptoms, poetics and stories, illuminating hidden atrocities which are endemic and normalised in everyday life in capitalist society.

Sian Loxston, Orgasm, Space, and Touch in Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet
Loxston explores the materiality of touch and the patterns created in female orgasm and sexual touch. She is interested in the way that Karen Barad’s theorising about touch and diffraction can embolden a new consideration of the sexual body and sexual pleasure of Nancy Astley in Sarah Waters’ Tipping the Velvet.

11:45-12:00 – Short break

12:00-12.45 – Hannah Ballou
Dr. Ballou will share extracts from her practice research goo:ga II which investigates how the re-performance of material made by/about a joyously pregnant body in the context of a later traumatic pregnancy might further develop Iris Marion Young’s theories of the doubling of the pregnant subject. She will also perform extracts from her practice-research work-in-progress, Shhh, which investigates the aesthetic, creative, and economic impact of motherhood on arts praxis by performing live with her (hopefully) sleeping baby.

12.45-14:00 – Sandwich lunch provided and informal networking

14:00-14:45 – Anna McFarlane, A Fantastic Voyage: Abortion, Child Loss and Science Fiction
Anna McFarlane had a 14-week abortion, following the diagnosis of a significant foetal anomaly. This talk tells that story and draws on imagery from science fiction and horror to show the emotional impact that such an event can have. The talk explores the value of popular culture in allowing the expression and exploration of traumatic experiences. 

14:45-15:30 – PhD student presentations and joint discussion

Crystal Sam, Writing on the Body: Memories/Trauma/ Healing
In this paper, Sam will identify the different ways in which intergenerational trauma affects the mother-daughter relationships represented in Nafisa Haji’s The Writing on My Forehead and Mohja Kahf’s The Girl in the Tangerine Scarf. She hopes to speak about the trauma responses manifested through the bodies, their repetition on the daughters’ bodies and a journey towards healing as the protagonists return to their mothers.

Anna Johnson, Motherhood and Haunting: Failure to Play by the Rules of Time
Johnson explores the temporal strangeness that motherhood might engender as it fails to fit within what Karen Davies calls “a linear conception of time […] grounded in gendered power relations and in a discourse of masculinity” (TimeSpace). She looks particularly to poet and theorist Denise Riley’s work Time Lived, Without Its Flow, in its attempts to unpick just one such example of motherhood failing to play by the rules of time.

15:30-16:00 – Break, refreshments

16:00-16:45 – Rachel Long, The Body in the Poetic Imagination
Poet, Rachel Long offers a reading of poems exploring the body in the poetic imagination. Followed by audience Q&A

16:45-17:00 – Summing up and details for day two

Location for dance performance: Rose Theatre
24-26 High St, Kingston upon Thames KT1 1HL

18:00-19:30 – Rosalind Holgate-Smith, Vibration
Vibration is dance theatre performance that investigates what happens when we commit to states of instability. Addressing the body as a collection of forces we explore what happens before touch, in the spaces in between us. Featuring dancers Rosalind Holgate Smith and Katja Richter with live music composed by Kéké Sol. Please come prepared to be rocked.