Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: Lived Experiences Roundtable

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

While the importance of research has been placed centre stage during the current Coronavirus crisis, it is often still valorised solely based on quantifiable impact. The Modern Languages Research Showcase, held on Friday 25 June 2021, emphasized how research undertaken in the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group goes beyond this reductive ideal to be informed by and interrogate real lived experiences, both that of researchers themselves and those of others. The Lived Experiences roundtable, chaired by Dr Rosalind Silvester and Dr. Steven Wilson, foregrounded this multi-directional focus through two PhD students’ work.

Kathryn Nelson defies research’s perceived narrow focus in her trans-disciplinary project examining the role of cultural intermediaries in distributing environmental artwork in Northern Ireland. A practising artist, informed by her MSc in Ecological Management and Conservation and by her childhood connection to nature in South Devon, she articulated her lived experience of its woods and coastline through video, an experience she fears will not be shared by children today. Her own installations have tackled what she called ‘regime shifts’ (Scheffer et. al. 2009), where the smallest details accumulate to form tipping points of irreversible damage, narrating the linear past, present and future life of our oceans, underlining how solutions to these problems are cultural. We must reimagine our culture/nature divide to forge a new eco-culture where all of us understand our unique place in the biome. This was brought to the forefront in the Tate Modern’s exposition of Damien Hirst’s In and Out of Love where curators culturally sanctioned the consumption of the lived experience of dying butterflies for aesthetic pleasure as ‘good art’ and led to our misunderstanding of the vital role these animals play. Far from art being for art’s sake, we depend on cultural intermediaries to influence our understanding of this new world through revaluations of the relationship between consumer and art.

Fig. 1 (left): Current Inshore Marine Life with Taxonomic Labels
Fig. 2 (right): Possible Future – Simplified Marine Life with No Labels… (Artwork by Kathryn and Roy Nelson)

Discover more of Kathryn’s own work here.

Similarly, combining death studies, literary studies and medical humanities and informed by time spent with the La Brise palliative care unit in Brittany, France, Jordan McCullough’s project delves deeper into the writings of the lived experiences of parents grieving after losing a child, seeking to deepen understanding of why these parents write. Their writings intertwine us with their lived experience and create a multi-directional caring dynamic in palliative care units beyond merely feeling empathy.

I found it interesting how different forms showcase how we respond to interconnected public and private losses such as our loss of innocence through the loss of a childhood eco-system, a loved one and the familiar. Jordan discussed how the writing parent shows a desire to do something larger than their own lived experience through transgressively revealing the private truth of their grief, defying the social expectations of the grieving process. Kathryn commented on the power of the overtly public nature of visual art to draw wider community attention to highly personal phenomena and its public stakes. In both cases, there is an expectation of a response from us to identify with and share this personal legacy through public action.

Report by Lauren McShane, final-year undergraduate in French and Spanish

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