Culture and Creativity Seminar Series

Dr. Andrew Sneddon spent a career writing about other people – by delving into their archaeology, assessing the significance of their heritage places – before he turned his hand to writing about himself. Was it liberating? At first it felt that way. In his memoir (Prehistoric Joy), about growing up in a family beset by domestic violence and alcoholism, Andrew found himself writing in a new language where he was the boss, telling his story, in his own way, instead of having to accommodate a ‘multivocal past’ and competing academic opinions about how things should be interpreted. But during the editing process, and since Prehistoric Joy’s publication, he has entered a world of difficult conversations, where he has learned that his personal story intertwines with those of others and that no story is univocal. Andrew will talk about his memoir and the writing experience, drawing on his career as an archaeologist, while describing how it is that storytelling is at the heart of everything, that it has consequences, and carries with it responsibilities.

Bio
Dr. Andrew Sneddon is an archaeologist and heritage practitioner with over thirty years’ experience in Australia and internationally. He has published monographs and peer-reviewed articles on the prehistory of Cyprus, a collection of poetry (Ghost Armies), and most recently a memoir entitled Prehistoric Joy.

This presentation was accompanied by slides. View the slides HERE.

The Junior Red Cross was formed in 1914 in both Australia and Canada. It grew quickly and by 1922 had been organised in 22 countries. By 1928, with a global membership of just over 10 million, the Junior Red Cross boasted greater numbers than its senior counterpart. There are rich photographic archives—most notably at the Library of Congress— documenting the work of Junior branches of the Red Cross, as well as the lives of children assisted by its programs. In many cases these images and the accounts that go along with them testify to the incredible creativity and productivity of children who contributed both materially and affectively to rapidly expanding international humanitarian networks. While these contributions were by no means always on children’s own terms, this paper explores the possibility of re-storying child-created archival materials to tell different stories about children’s experiences with, and contributions to, humanitarianism. In particular, this paper will share some of the author’s work-in-progress developing a graphic novel: Joka and the Blue Rabbit. An experiment in using a primarily visual genre to grapple with a largely visual archive, Joka and the Blue Rabbit re-stories the rise of transnational humanitarian networks during WWI through engaging with child-made objects that travel. These travelling objects in turn enable the mobility of a little boy (Joka), and his rabbit, who, alongside the children they meet, have several scores to settle.

Bio
Dr. A. McCarthy is currently a Lecturer in Global Studies at the University of Canberra. Their work has focused on children’s participation in development programs. Their 2021 book “Children and NGOs in India: Development as Storytelling and Performance” documented the way slum children in Delhi creatively pursue their own projects of development through participation in NGO programs. More recently, they have begun to build on their ethnographic research by exploring the historical dimensions of children and young people’s participation in development, humanitarianism, and peace activism both in the global south and the global north. In particular, they are interested in the transnational flows of child-authored materials – drawings, stories, poems, letters, etc. – exploring their role in making and enacting humanitarianism, internationalism, and highlighting their critiques and grievances against the adult world.

This presentation was accompanied by slides. View the slides HERE.

The Right to Research brings together the scholarship of nine scholars working with oral history in the context of their lived experiences of displacement. Covering topics from Burundian refugee drummers to Kurdish photojournalism to pottery and identity in Rwandan refugee camps, the volume asks what it would mean to take seriously a “right to research.” In this talk, the editor Marcia Schenck will reflect along with contributor Gerawork Gizaw on the essence of research and the transformative potential of a right to research for unsettling academic conventions and reimagining power dynamics. Together, they think through the challenges and opportunities they see for changing what it means to produce scholarship from and in displacement.

Bio
Marcia C. Schenck is professor of global history at the University of Potsdam, Germany. Her research interests include global history, African history, oral history, migration history, and the history of international organizations. Her latest books are the open-access monograph Remembering Labor Migration to the Second World (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) and the co-edited anthology The Right to Research (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2023).

Gerawork Gizaw has an MA in Development Economics (PA). A development practitioner, teacher/learning facilitator, and environmentalist; he is an enthusiastic wonderer with a strong interest in understanding the human condition, community organization, and development. He is the recipient of Potsdam University’s Voltaire Prize in 2024 and contributor to The Right to Research.   

This presentation was accompanied by slides. View the slides HERE.

A character lying asleep across the length of Ireland is described in the following terms: “The meteorpulp of him, the seamless rainbowpeel. . . His bellyvoid of nebulose with his neverstop navel. . . And his veins shooting melanite phosphor, his creamtocustard cometshair and his asteroid knuckles, ribs and members. . His electrolatiginous twisted entrails belt” (Joyce, 475).  James Joyce’s 1939 novel/poem, Finnegans Wake, is widely regarded as one of the strangest and most linguistically experimental books ever written. Yet for all the strangeness of Joyce’s diction, critics have since the 1960s noted that the Wake’s phrasing possesses “a fundamental syntactical clarity” (Hart, 31). What is more, phrases like those cited above cannot simply be passed off as nonsensical.  For even as we are bamboozled by Joyce’s diction, we seem simultaneously—as with Lewis Carrol’s relatedly perplexing and illuminating poem “Jabberwocky”—to have an intuitive sense of how to say these seemingly meaningless words as if we mean them; and to gain a smattering sense of the sorts of things the writer is probably getting at in the process. In my paper, I suggest that both these readerly outcomes are functions of the “syntactical clarity” noted above, a phenomenon much more related to meaning and performativity than a common wisdom would have it. But if syntax has such a structural role in the Wake, what are we to make of claims like Philippe Sollers, that Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake “in such a way that the English language no longer exists” (Sollers, qtd in Lacan, 2). How can we attribute syntactical clarity to a language that no longer exists? I suggest that recent work by linguists in the field of Construction Grammar might offer some leads.

Bio
Paul Magee studied language and literature in Melbourne, Moscow, San Salvador and Sydney. He is Professor of Poetry at the University of Canberra, where he directs the Centre for Creative and Cultural Research. His most recent book is Suddenness and the Composition of Poetic Thought (Rowman and Littlefield, 2022). A third book of verse, The Arranging of Skin,is forthcoming from Puncher and Wattmann in 2024.

This presentation was accompanied by slides. View the slides HERE.