It has been roughly a year since I started volunteering at a mental health charity. This is a reflection on what motivated me to do so, and how these motivations have developed over the course of the past year.
The Grand Finale of ‘Adventurers Wanted: Rebellion’ at the Edinburgh Fringe 2018
27 Monday Aug 2018
Posted in PhD Life
The last four hours of the Adventures Wanted: Rebellion show at the Edinburgh Fringe, 2018, and how it was a fitting end to the adventure that brought out the best of table-top RPGs.
Arts Festivals and the ‘Hostile Environment’: the Need for More Nuance
21 Tuesday Aug 2018
Posted in Comment
Tags
Edinburgh International Book Festival, Hostile Environment, Immigration, Structural Violence, WOMAD Festival
Recent visa refusals for visiting artists and writers at festivals in the UK have prompted discussions about the ‘Hostile Environment’. This is an intervention that argues that characterising the problems faced by these artists as aspects of the Hostile Environment is misleading, and the conversation around immigration needs greater nuance.
Adventurers Wanted: Rebellion at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe
12 Sunday Aug 2018
Posted in PhD Life
Tags
Adventurers Wanted, Dungeons & Dragons, Gabrielle Hecht, Public Engagement, Table-Top Roleplaying Games
At the Edinburgh Festival Fringe this year, I was on stage as part of a show called ‘Adventurers Wanted: Rebellion’ a couple of times, which was a live play of Dungeons & Dragons, combining table-top role-playing with improvised story-telling. These are some of my thoughts on how I managed to make my PhD research dovetail with the character I played.
‘I Want to Tell You’: Beatles Songs for Talking About Mental Wellbeing
29 Sunday Jul 2018
Posted in PhD Life
Tags
A Day in the Life, George Harrison, John Lennon, Mental Health, Paul McCartney, Ringo Starr, The Beatles
When it’s difficult to initiate conversations about mental health, it might be easier to talk about mental health through the medium of Beatles songs. We will have to pretend, however, that none of these songs are about drugs. But many of the Beatles songs express complex and contradictory states of mind, which can be quite reassuring and illuminating.
Hailsham Dark: Turning Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ into a Table-Top Role Playing Game
24 Tuesday Jul 2018
Posted in PhD Life
Tags
Cthulhu Dark, Graham Walmsley, Jane McGonigal, Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go, Table-Top Roleplaying Games
Over the last two months, I adapted Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’ into a table-top role playing game, and I enjoyed myself immensely in the process. This is my account of what it was like adapting the novel, what difficulties I faced while GMing such a game, and what I gained from the whole thing.
Whose ‘Home’ is it Coming to?: Supporting England in the World Cup
07 Saturday Jul 2018
Posted in PhD Life
Tags
England National Football Team, FIFA World Cup 2018, Football, Hostile Environment, Imagined Communities, Nationalism
I drew England in a sweepstake for the FIFA men’s World Cup. However, I find it really difficult to get behind supporting England, and I find the forms of imagined community and the internal contradictions within them hostile and difficult to negotiate.
Volunteers’ Week
06 Wednesday Jun 2018
Posted in PhD Life
1 to 7 June is Volunteers’ Week in the UK. While I find volunteering to be quite a radical form of collectivism and solidarity, I am nevertheless quite circumspect about the ways in which voluntary work gets co-opted as unpaid labour in capitalism as a way of externalising costs.
Sara Ahmed: Complaint as Feminist Pedagogy
17 Thursday May 2018
Posted in Conferences
My write-up of a talk by Sara Ahmed titled ‘Complaint as Feminist Pedagogy’ organised last week by Quilting Points at the University of Leeds.
Musée des Beaux Arts
27 Friday Apr 2018
Posted in Photography
Tags
Brussels, Ekphrasis, Musée des Beaux Arts, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Pieter Bruegel the Younger, Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, W.H. Auden
My visit, back in February, to the Royal Gallery of Fine Art of Belgium in Brussels, taking a leaf out of W.H. Auden’s poem about the gallery, where I wander through the Old Masters gallery and look at the Bruegel exhibit.