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School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures

Orality, Technology and the 'Narratisation' of Everyday Life

23rd-24th May 2008

The second in the CEELBAS-funded series 'Doing Culture' (January-October 2008), this workshop focused on the 'narratisation' of everyday life (understood as the transformation of everyday life into aesthetic-creative experience and multifaced communication). Among the issues considered were the significance of various oral, visual and technological constructs in the narrative transformation of everyday life; the functions of everyday narrative practices; ways in which non-traditional media (e.g. tattooing and graffiti), new media and new genres (blogs, flash animation, talk shows, reality TV) have influenced and been influenced by everyday narrative practices; and the extent to which narratisation practices are specific to a particular situation, time and place--or, conversely, shared across cultural, political, social and temporal boundaries. An overview of speakers and presentations is available below.

Workshop Overview


DAY 1

Panel 1: New Media, New Narratives?

Julia Davies (Sheffield): Location Location Location: streetart and online spaces--a traveller's tale          
Adi Kuntsman (LJMU): Narrating Cyberbelonging: the Russian-speaking Internet as post-Soviet diaspora space
Vlad Strukov (Leeds): 'Flash' Narratives: discourses of byt and bytie on the Internet

Panel 2: Across the Airwaves: mass media and narratisation

Stephen Hutchings (Manchester): Russian TV and the Global Format: sitcoms and talk-shows
Nuria Lorenzo-Dus (Swansea): Reality TV and the Narratisation of 'Moral Worthiness'
                       

DAY 2

Panel 3: Body Language, Body Canvas: body art and narratisation

Jane Caplan (Oxford): The Tattoo between Criminology, Volkskunde (Folklore) and Popular Culture in Germany      
Julie Draskoczy (Pittsburgh): The Criminal Body: Gulag tattoos as language

Panel 4: We Are the Folk: folk culture and urban lore

Seth Graham (SSEES): Folklore of the Intelligentsia? the Russo-Soviet anekdot
Klaus Roth (Munich): Narratising Socialism and Postsocialism in Bulgaria
Grzegorz Szpila (Jagellonian University): Folk Wisdom in Contemporary Graffiti in Poland                               


Methodological Roundtable: working with sources

Lynne Attwood (Manchester): Interviews: everyday narratives and everyday life
Sue-Ann Harding (Manchester): News as Narrative: reporting and translating violent conflict   
Yngvar Steinholt (IKL, Tromso University): Music Recordings: idealised performance, source, and analytic tool