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Dear Members and Friends,
“Tempus fugit”, as the Romans told us – time flies, especially when you are busy. The second trimester (since I started with the Romans, I better continue, giving three-month long university terms their proper Latin label …) is almost over. You may have noticed a slight change in the pattern of our events: rather than a single seminar series, we have been moving towards a set of themed series offering different things for different audiences. The Ethnographers’ Gathering has been one such series, and continues into its fourth year. We initiated a small REF-seminars series, which will have events 2-3 times per year in the run-up to the next REF exercise. Some of the best innovations are the unplanned ones that just happen – and this has been the case with the Creative Ethnology movement, that spontaneously arose from a couple of tweets I sent after attending the inaugural lecture of a colleague, Prof. Gary West, at the University of Edinburgh last St Andrew’s Day. One of the activities of this new socio-academic movement will be the Creative Ethnology Studio, a joint venture with Scottish Studies at Edinburgh, which will provide a platform for interdisciplinary and creative engagement with ethnological issues and practice. You will find a report on the first Studio event in this Newsletter. Of course, our “normal” seminars continue, as do other events. This year’s IRC Conversation will take place at the Scottish Storytelling Centre on Wednesday, 17 May 2017, and focus on intangible heritage; more details will follow in the next Newsletter and on the IRC website.
As always, if you have any news that may be of interest to the wider IRC community, please use the Newsletter to share it – whether it is an event you are organising, a publication, a new project, a funding success, a course, or anything else that is relevant in the context of intercultural research in general, and the IRC in particular. Deadline for forthcoming issues is usually the last working day of the previous month, although brief notices (e.g. of forthcoming events) may be included up to the point of circulation.
The next Newsletter is planned for May 2017.
Email us your news at: irc@hw.ac.uk.
Ullrich Kockel
IRC Acting Director
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The Intercultural Research Centre hosted the British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award workshop on 3rd March 2017 for early career researchers. The event was co-organised by IRC Associate, Dr Philip McDermott (Ulster University).
How much fiction can be integrated in ethnographic portraits we write? To convey a particular ambience to an audience, we need to describe colours, sounds, smells, feelings, and so on. Thus we should consider our senses when writing ethnographic portraits. Writing that is alert to the senses can establish a special bond between reader and author. However, as writers we ultimately have responsibilities towards the people we write about. On 1 February 2017 we continued our series of ethnography workshops initiated in 2014. The 6th gathering of ethnographers considered ethnography as a genre of writing in the widest sense. The session, on the theme of "Ethnographic Portrait Writing", was led by Dr Delwar Hussain, Chancellors Fellow in Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh and author of Boundaries Undermined: The Ruins of Progress on the Bangladesh-India Border. This workshop was adapted from the session he facilitated at the Autumn School 2016 of the "Transformations in European Societies" doctoral training programme, in which the IRC is a partner.
Following the inaugural lecture by Edinburgh University's Professor Gary West (30 November 2016), on 'Performing Testimony: towards a creative ethnology for the 21st century', a Creative Ethnology network emerged. The Creative Ethnology Studio was initiated as a joint seminar/workshop series of the Intercultural Research Centre at Heriot-Watt University and Scottish Studies at the University of Edinburgh with the aim of facilitating a network of researchers interested in exploring the creative aspects and potentials of ethnological practice.
Kerstin Pfeiffer M.A., PhD, FHEA
Cait McCullagh - IRC first year PhD Student based in Orkney
On March 20th 2017, the IRC will organise a one-day workshop focused on heritage festivals and tourism, to take placeat Dynamic Earth, Edinburgh. The event is organised as part of CoHERE, a Horizon 2020 research project funded by the European Union, which aims to identify, understand and valorise European heritages, engaging with their socio-political and cultural significance and their potential for developing communitarian identities. The IRC is leading a Work Package on "Cultural forms and expressions of identity in Europe" and engages particularly with language, tourism, music and festivals within heritage contexts. The Work Package explores heritage festivals as tourism events and sites for re-framing collective memory and re-interpreting the notion of a common European heritage. Preparations for the event are underway and the workshop will be attended by both academics and professionals from relevant cultural organisations across Scotland.
