Recordings of presentations by Shamser Sinha and Stephen Sunderland from the What Happens Next radical creative writing symposium, 21 June 2023, Salford, UK and online.

Sunderland, Stephen; Sinha, Shamser

Abstract

Name Dr Shamser Sinha

University Affiliation: University of Suffolk

Contact: [e-mail]

Title: “Mardoche Yembi Sat on a Bench: What Stories know that Data can't.”

Abstract: Interviews and transcripts are like leaky buckets. More life escapes out of them than is left in. Whereas stories are full of life (hopefully). In sociology the ways we turn people into data ‘cuts-up’ the sensory, spatial and temporal context of what they said, what they are talking about and filters the life out of them . In contrast, stories hold space, and time together. That bringing of different spaces and times together in an accounts of people’s lives, can allow us to see things we other wise could not. We are able to make a knowledge beyond what turning people in to transcripts, and cutting-up data segments from their words can. We will see this in my work with a research participant called Mardoche Yembi over a period from 2009 to 2022. We will see the opposite through an Innocuous Quote from Interviewee 11 from my 20th Century PhD. I will then allude to the politicisation of knowledge within sociology that sees large, representative numbers as knowledge, and people’s qualitative perceptions as at very best as provoking questions for sociological theory. I argue this political choice filters out counter hegemonic insight, and its circulations.

Keywords – sociology, stories, knowledge, transcripts, interviews

Bio: Shamser Sinha is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Suffolk. He is also a playwright with a number of plays and tours for both adults, and also ones for family audiences. As a sociologist he is an ethnographer, with a lot of experience in working with separated and unaccompanied young asylum seekers, children, young people and other vulnerable groups. As a playwright, he writes about people at the wrong end of money, fortune and the wars we fight.

Dr Stephen Sunderland

University Affiliation: University of Salford

Contact: [e-mail]

Title: “Diving to The Cinema Beneath the Lake: Surrealism, Mimicry & The Practice-led PhD.”

Abstract: The concept of mimicry or simulation has often been omitted from accounts of Surrealism, which tend to emphasise the movement’s belief in the authentic unconscious. Renewed discussion of mimicry/ simulation has evolved contemporaneously with broader investigation of other significant omissions from historiographical accounts of Surrealism’s cultural productions, in particular the work of women artists and writers. The prose fiction of women surrealists has, until recently, received scant attention.

Following the proposition that ‘doing precedes knowing’, this research project has evolved a surrealist practice in order to better understand the practice of three surrealist women writers. The investigation takes the form of an unfilmable surrealist film-novel, The Cinema Beneath the Lake, composed by a method of creative mimicry as evolutionary process; including the adoption of the surrealist principle of objective chance as a guiding framework in both creative and critical spheres of the work. Other mimicry derives from creative engagement with a range of surrealist games, techniques and practices and from study of these writers’ work.

In allowing the project to be determined by the exigencies of surrealist method, I give my own traumatic experiences permission to inform the work. The embodied nature of its understanding of the value-set of mimicry/ simulation thus brings with it an opportunity to personally reflect on its importance not only as a creative strategy but as providing an initiatory function within the development of self-knowledge and recovery from psychic trauma. In this regard, the project aspires to stand as a demonstration of creative-critical engagement as a form of communion and self-therapy in Covid time, reaching out to similar usages of the jarring effects of automatism and other surrealist reveries in the writings of Cahun, Colquhoun and Carrington during their turbulent experiences of life in the shadow of war.

Bio: Stephen Sunderland successfully defended his PhD ‘Diving to The Cinema Beneath the Lake: a novel as immersive, synthetic-magical exploration of the surrealist prose of Claude Cahun, Ithell Colquhoun and Leonora Carrington’ in June 2022. He’s the author of the surrealist film-novel The Cinema Beneath the Lake, three BBC radio dramas and three visual poetry collections, Eye Movement (Steel Incisors, 2022), Oneiroscope (Kingston University Press, 2023) and Refrains (forthcoming Steel Incisors, 2023). His work also appears in anthologies Seen as Read (Kingston University Press 2021) and Seeing in Tongues (forthcoming Steel Incisors, 2023); and in publications Mercurius Magazine, feminist-surrealist journal The Debutante and Lune: A Journal of Literary Misrule. Find him on Twitter @stephensunderla - and on Mastodon @[e-mail]

Citation

Sunderland, S., & Sinha, S. (2023). Recordings of presentations by Shamser Sinha and Stephen Sunderland from the What Happens Next radical creative writing symposium, 21 June 2023, Salford, UK and online. [Video]

• Digital Artefact Type: Video
• Online Publication Date: Nov 6, 2023
• Publication Date: Nov 6, 2023
• Deposit Date: Jan 20, 2025
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.17866/rd.salford.24243358.v1
• Publisher URL: https://salford.figshare.com/articles/conference_contribution/Recordings_of_presentations_by_Shamser_Sinha_and_Stephen_Sunderland_from_the_What_Happens_Next_radical_creative_writing_symposium_21_June_2023_Salford_UK_and_online_/24243358