An afternoon workshop for Pre-doctoral, Post-doctoral, and ECR researchers
Thursday 12 December, 2-5pm
School of Art History, University of St Andrews, 79 North Street, Barns-Graham Room, or online via MS Teams
This afternoon workshop brings together current research on queer, trans, and feminist approaches to art and visual culture by researchers at the Universities and St Andrews and Edinburgh, with a focus on methodologies and approaches, particularly in relation to archives. The emphasis will be on discussion and exchange, with short presentations alongside opportunities to discuss projects-in-process on gender and sexuality from PhD, post-doctoral and early-career researchers in a supportive and generative environment.
Questions that we might consider together:
• In what ways do our research projects address and theorise questions of gender, sexuality and embodiment, including for example in relation to protest, representation, and/or resistance?
• What are the methodological connections and affinities between queer, trans, and feminist approaches to art and visual culture?
• How have queer, trans, and feminist approaches to art and visual culture related to archives and processes of archiving, particularly regarding questions of politics, ethics, ephemerality, erasure, and power?
Presenters will share their research informally for a maximum of 10 minutes, using a single object, image, or case study to explore these questions and to suggest further questions and issues; there will also be plenty of time for discussion.
Organised by Catherine Spencer and Pedro Merchán Mateos for the St Andrews Centre for Contemporary Art. To register to attend, please email Catherine: [email protected]
Presenters:
Richard Bolisay is a PhD student from the Department of Film Studies at the University of St Andrews. He is the author of Break It to Me Gently: Essays on Filipino Film (2019) and Nothing Deep (2022) and the editor of Daang Dokyu: A Festival of Philippine Documentaries (2020). His research interests include gender and sexuality studies, film theory and criticism, and independent cinema and screen cultures, particularly in Southeast Asia and the Philippines.
Cicely Farrer is a PhD researcher undertaking a collaborative doctoral award with History of Art at University of St Andrews and Glasgow School of Art Archives. Taking a transtemporal approach, Cicely is researching the history of art, gender and activism at the GSA through the research question How have the women of Glasgow School of Art performed acts of resistance in response to an industrial military complex of the 20th and 21st century? Stemming from my interests in activism, art and performance, the research methodology will identify specific women and non-binary artists who are recorded in the archives, who have engaged with Peace activism, focusing on their performative, playful or aesthetic approaches. Cicely is based in Dundee and has been working in the arts in Scotland since 2014. She studied BA History of Art at University of Leeds and MA Curating Contemporary Art at Royal College of Art London.
Lucy Howie is a PhD candidate at the University of St Andrews. Her research explores the intersecting histories of photography, disability, sexuality, and the politics of representation in 1980s Britain. In autumn 2024, Lucy was the Singer Doctoral Fellow at the Image Centre in Toronto working with the Jo Spence Memorial Archive. Lucy was Research Associate at the Women’s Art Collection in summer 2024, and has previously worked in assisting the Curatorial team at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge following her MPhil studies at Cambridge. Lucy has programmed public events and film screenings at Kettle’s Yard (UK), Cambridge Central Library (UK), Edinburgh College of Art (UK) and the University of St Andrews (UK) on projects spanning feminist collections, community art and aesthetics, and HIV/AIDS and disability.
Pedro Merchán Mateos is a PhD student at the Department of Art History and Art Theory at the Autonomous University of Madrid. His research explores—beyond representation politics—the intersections of cultural history and visual culture of gender dissidence activism, with Queer Theory’s impact on contemporary art productions, curatorial practices and cultural institutions in Spain since 1992. He has completed a curatorial residency at Centro Huarte/Uharte Zentroa (Navarra, Spain) focused on queering the archive and the curatorial. He is currently a visiting PhD at University of St Andrews.
Evelyn Whorrall-Campbell is a researcher, writer and artist. They completed their PhD in Film and Screen Studies at the University of Cambridge in 2024, with a thesis on British trans cultural production and trans theory in the 1990s. Their PhD combined historical and theoretical approaches to map radical transgender practice in late twentieth-century Britain, arguing that the present difficulties of thinking transgender in trans studies is founded in the political horizons of this period. Informed by their creative work, Evelyn’s research attempts to develop strategies of trans theorising and practice that challenge the foreclosure of gender transition as material reality. Their writing has been published or is forthcoming in British Art Studies, world picture journal, Art Monthly, and Cambridge Literary Review, amongst others. Evelyn is also the author of Memoirs of a Child Plot Hole: How to Escape Yourself Without Even Trying, a work of experimental fiction published in 2022 by Sticky Fingers Publishing. Their work has been shown, performed, and/or read at TACO!, Kaunas Artists’ House, Auto Italia, Kupfer Project and Kingsgate Project Space.
