On Collaborative Research and Writing

Like so many PhD students these days, I did many other projects while I was "writing my thesis". A mixture of trying to avoid the isolation that plagues doctoral study, insatiable curiosity and an inability to focus on a sole project for too long lead me to take any collaborative opportunity which came my way. The longest running of these was the "How to Get an Academic Job" project, which I joined as a bright-eyed, naive first year PhD. As our article based on the project has recently been published, now seems like a good time to reflect on the whole process.

Back in late 2012, Dr Anna Mountford-Zimdars - Senior Lecturer at King's Learning Institute, specialising in access to Higher Education and employment - put out a call through the Graduate School for PhD students to participate in a project on academic hiring, which would involve interviewing academics from our discipline. She ended up with 12 researchers from different arts, humanities and social science disciplines, as well as two international students (from Italy and Korea) who provided an insight into academic life and hiring in their home countries. Over the course of the academic year, we worked collaboratively to develop research questions, carry out the study and analyse the results. The first stage was a meeting with Anna and Charles, our learning technologist, which began with a discussion about what we, the student-researchers, wanted to get out of the project. This was a decisive moment: while Anna had planned a project on academic hiring - what do junior academics think helped them to get their jobs, what do senior academics look for when they are on hiring panels - it soon became clear that as student-researchers we were concerned about whether we should be trying for an academic job in the first place. Is it worth it? The interview plan thus developed to include questions about what academic life is like day-to-day, what academics value about it and what they dislike, alongside the questions about career histories. When the time came to analyse the results, the most interesting findings in my mind came from the interplay between these two areas. Of particular note was the fact that many academics gave human interaction - above all nurturing students - as what they valued most about the job, and yet it was one of the least recognised factors in academic hiring.

The research itself involved each of us interviewing two academics in our field - a new hire and a professor or head of department. In the article we eventually published, we recommended more dialogue between graduate students and staff about career trajectories, as the real life stories are often quite different to the image created by just looking as person specs or job adverts. Some participants also noted that it made high-up academics seem much more human to them, perhaps opening a path for more collaboration across career stages. To carry out the interviews, we were all given training on qualitative research methods and ethics, entirely new to some of us.

After our first interviews, we posted recordings and our preliminary thoughts on a private online discussion forum. We were paired up so that researchers from different disciplines listened to each other's interviews (I learnt about Management) and also wrote down our thoughts on them. This both allowed reflection on similarities and differences between subjects, and established closer relationships between members of the team. When we met up to discuss findings and next steps, all of this was celebrated with cake, a much needed part of any project.

After this meeting, we set up a working group to process the data. Between five of us, we produced materials including top tips, case studies and visualisations, used in a leaflet for students, a website and on a poster presented at a teaching and learning conference at King's. 

The final stage was just Anna and me. This is where the real collaborative work began. Rather than each working on separate sections, we worked together to write first a presentation for a Higher Education Academy conference on student transitions, and then the aforementioned article. Over tea, pizza, and more cake, we discussed the shape of the paper, what was important to include, and how to respond to the reviewers' suggestions. Anna brought expert knowledge of the discipline, I brought my linguist's eye for the nuances in words used in interviews, and for crafting a story out of data. Such collaborative writing seems to be the done thing in Education, it is much less common in languages (although notable recent examples include this paper on Modern Languages and Digital Humanities by Claire Taylor and Thea Pitman. I'm hoping to continue writing collaboratively if any volunteers are reading! 

Ironically, I'm pretty certain the article did not help me to get an academic job. The academics we interviewed offered a wide range of factors they look for when hiring - including enthusiasm for the discipline and collegiality - but, as to be expected, publications came out on top. And publications means publications in your discipline which can be submitted to the REF- as recent job interviews have confirmed - not an education article. But the skills I learned from it, the intellectually challenging experience, and the social aspects have strengthened me as a researcher and will no doubt influence my future work.

International Translation Day: Where do academics fit in?

On Friday 30 September the British Library hosted International Translation Day, an annual celebration of the work of translators - especially literary translators - organised by Free Word Centre and English PEN. It was a great chance to catch up with friends and colleagues, but it left me wondering where academics fit in.

The day began with a plenary session highlighting how many stages a book goes through on its journey from one language market to another. Chaired by translator Daniel Hahn, the session featured: literary scout, Rebecca Servadio; editor of Hispabooks, Ana Pérez Galván; Kate Gunning, who organises sales to independent bookshops for Penguin Random House; Sarah Braybooke, publicist for Scribe UK; everyone's favourite bookseller, Gary Perry from Foyles; and Fiammetta Rocco, culture editor of The Economist. Each explained their role within the field of literary translation and reflected on how their own section could work better. The general consensus was that there is too much to read and too little time, leading to the conclusion that "We don't need to publish more, we need to publish better".

While I really enjoyed this session, I would love to see academics as an integral part of the chain, both at its early stages and at the very end. Those of us who work in modern languages and specialise in literature spend most of our lives reading books in other languages, often seeking out writers who haven't found success outside their country yet. If we didn't love these books, I doubt we would spend so much time painstakingly researching them and writing academic articles on them, so why aren't we more instrumental in pushing these books to publishers, or scouts, or even to translators? I know there are some academics who do just that, but there seems to be scope for this to become much more common practice. At the other end of the spectrum, I'd like to see translations recognised by academics as more than just an easy alternative for those students who can't be bothered to read the Spanish or French original. The translation market, the way books are selected for translation, reviewed and read by the public, tells us so much about the way that the English speaking world views or imagines other countries, other cultures, and yet this is something almost totally ignored in academic circles. In this respect, Dr Richard Mansell's work on the translation and reception of Catalan literature is pioneering and a real inspiration for my own fledgling research into the way books from across the Hispanic world make it into English translation. More generally, I believe academics in modern languages should be promoters of literature in translation, given that among our core values is understanding people from different places and different backgrounds. Although I teach in the Spanish department, I would like my students to be curious about Russia or Korea, to be open to new ways of seeing the world, and reading translations can help them to do that. I recently asked my final year class if they read translations and they said no, with the exception of one girl having read Ana Karenina. I'd like us to have a discussion, between translators, publishers, booksellers and academics about what we can do to promote translations to our students and better incorporate them into the syllabus.

In this respect, I was particularly looking forward to the panel on 'The Current State of Translation in Higher Education', but found that the panel was focused almost entirely on how we can better involve professional translators in university programmes in translation and improve the translation training offered at universities. I wholeheartedly agree that professional translators - like Ros Schwartz, who spoke very engagingly about her experiences of teaching translation in university contexts - should be hired as professors in literary translation, following the model I recently witnessed at King's Policy Institute, where the likes of Dave Willetts and Nicholas Macphearson have been given professorships based on their work in government and the treasury respectively. Their expertise and experience of translation as an industry - as opposed to abstract theory - is essential for training future generations of translators. But I also think we could make better use of them to understand the translation industry as a force in shaping the way people in one country view those in another. In one of my modules, I'm asking translators to tell us how and why the book they translated came to be chosen for translation instead of another, or the cultural background they needed to translate that text well. 

Within this panel, successful literary translator Peter Bush spoke about his experience of the RAE/REF, the bureaucratic nightmare by which academic output is judged. Peter first submitted his translations from Spanish to English as a research output in modern languages. The feedback was that, although brilliant translations, for the purposes of the RAE they could go straight into the bin. The linguistic and cultural knowledge necessary to write a good translation was not taken into account. At the next research exercise four years later, and renamed the REF by then, Peter submitted translations not in modern languages, but in creative writing, and the creative writing submission as a whole was judged world leading. While this approach works if you are only submitting translations, what about those of us who consider ourselves primarily members of modern languages, who want to submit a mixture of academic articles and translations? Peter mentioned Prof Nick Harrison's Translation as Research Manifesto, published on Modern Languages Open, which argues for translations to be accepted to the REF. Although translations are already acceptable, the problems come from many places, including managers who don't want to risk a low REF score with submissions they're unsure of, and other academics who don't feel confident assessing the research quality of translations. With the impact agenda and recognition that translations are a way for academics to reach a much wider audience, it seems attitudes are changing, but a lot more training and discussion will be necessary. What I would like to see more of, and what was not even mentioned at ITD, is exploration of how translating adds to our research, and our research adds to our translations. Working on contemporary Venezuelan literature, I've found that I've learnt an enormous amount about my subject from co-editing and contributing translations to an anthology of Venezuelan writing in translation. I'd love to hear more stories about academics who have had a similar experience, and to share ideas about how to bring what we've learnt through translation practice into cultural studies classes.

If any translators, editors, publishers, academics or readers of translations are reading this, I'd really love to know your ideas.

Connections, collaboration, and communication: what I learnt from the LAHP Languages and Policy Workshop

On Monday 7 December 2015, I attended a workshop on languages and policy hosted by the London Arts and Humanities Partnership. Having worked for The Policy Institute at King’s while completing my PhD on literature and cultural policy in Venezuela, I was very keen to learn more about how languages – or, more broadly, language-based area studies – interact with policy. This thought-provoking workshop highlighted three areas of interest: how policy affects the study of languages, the intersection of languages and policy outside of academia, and how aspects of language-based academic research can link to policy. For me, the workshop can be summarized in three linked key terms: connections, collaboration, and communication.

From Jocelyn Wyburd’s facts and figures about the crisis in languages education, particularly the deficit of secondary school language teachers, it was clear to me that we need to work together across the languages to lobby the government and encourage the study of languages. To do this, we must also reach out to other disciplines, such as neuroscience to show the cognitive benefits of language learning, or social scientists to discuss multilingualism and social cohesion. Philip Cavendish from the School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies at UCL gave an example of a department which combines traditional language-related research (study of a language and its related culture) with subjects including politics and international relations, while also working with institutions beyond the university (the FCO, Open Democracy, the Calvert Foundation). I found it a shame, however, that there is not much communication between SSEES and other languages departments. I strongly believe that scholars in different languages have a lot to gain from working together; not only the traditionally taught European languages, but also the Asian and African languages which are often limited to specialist institutions such as SOAS.

In the second session, Chris Murray (Institute for Public Policy Research), Helen Laker (Southwark Council), Carolina Gottardo (Latin American Women’s Rights Service) and Lucila Granada (Coalition of Latin Americans) all demonstrated the interplay between languages and policy in the real world, in sectors such as education, health care, housing and employment. What struck me most was that all four depend on volunteers. While it was suggested that volunteering could be considered as an internship for PhD students, I thought that as undergraduate students often complain that they do not get enough speaking practice, why not put them in contact with associations or charities? I would like to explore further how to integrate this useful language practice into the undergraduate degree.

The final session stressed the importance of putting yourself out there, meeting people, making connections and being prepared to go beyond your comfort zone. I noted that Hilary Footitt called her work on the language policies of NGOs ‘a strange project to have arrived at’, and I paraphrased Ben Schofield with ‘If someone offers you something weird and wonderful, go for it’. The panel encouraged us to think creatively about links between our research of obscure literature (in both Ben’s and my case at least!) and wider policy implications. They suggested going to conferences on subjects outside of our own to find links, as Hilary did, both with other disciplines and other institutions. From lobbyist Zacahary Bishop, I learnt to develop my USP/‘elevator pitch’, so that if I’m ever in a room with policy-makers they can tell straight away if there is an opportunity for collaboration. Finally, Ben (who is something of a Twitter personality: @haben_und_soll), reminded us that social media is a useful tool: we should let the world know what we’re doing so people can find us!

Given the focus on connections, communication and collaboration, it was great to have not only speakers but other attendees from a wide range of disciplines, including sign language, education and medical humanities. We definitely learnt a lot from each other, and left inspired to build more connections beyond our own disciplines.

For more information about the LAHP, visit www.lahp.ac.uk

Fabrication: KCL Arts & Humanities Festival 2015

Given that I started my PhD writing about the KCL Arts and Humanities Festival, it seems only fitting that I end in the same way. This year's theme is Fabrication. As usual, it's a broad theme, ambiguous enough to allow King's staff and students to shoehorn in their wide range of interests, but - to the joy of my inner five year old - staff from the Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies department took it literally and got us engaging in arts and crafts.

Fabricating Across the Atlantic

My beloved supervisors, Professor Catherine Boyle and Dr Elisa Sampson Vera Tudela, decided to celebrate the Andean tradition of making arpilleras, small tapestries sewn onto sacks, which have been used for decades as a form of protest or a way to share life stories. Chilean Human Rights advocate and researcher Roberta Bacic curated an exhibition of arpilleras from Chile, Argentina and Peru, with narratives of dictatorship, strikes, or making a stand against domestic abuse. Also on display was an arpillera created by Chilean exiles in Sheffield and South Yorkshire, telling the story of how they had started a new life.

Catherine and Elisa wanted to take the festival as an opportunity not only to display arpilleras but to consider how they can be understood in and adapted to our own context. They asked: 'What does it mean to tell our own stories of here and now in a city of movement and transition like London, through a creative form borrowed from elsewhere?'

To answer that question, they turned the Council Room of KCL into an arpillera workshop, led by artist Linda Adams who, inspired by the Andean example, explores political themes through tapestry. Armed with thread, fabrics, paper templates and PVA glue, we were challenged to make a collective tapestry narrating our own experience of London. Naturally, I made myself dancing.

The day ended in a dramatised reading of Tres Marias y una Rosa, a Chilean play by David Benavente and Taller de Investigación Teatral depicting an arpillera workshop. The four women of the title discuss their financial and marital struggles as they make arpilleras for export, the only way for them to support themselves and their families. Catherine had worked with the Head For Heights Theatre Company in a mixture of translation and devising to make the play work and resonate in an English context. While we had been busy cutting and sticking, Catherine, director Karen Morash and four very brave actresses spent the afternoon locked away rehearsing. After only a matter of hours with the play, they put on an incredibly engaging performance. I was surprised to learn that the original play had been written in 1979 as the frank discussions between the women and their struggles to support their families through economic crisis are just as relevant today.

Translation games: weaving translation into a poetic collage

I've been a fan of Translation Games since it launched in 2013, to the point where I invited the organiser Dr Ricarda Vidal to introduce her fascinating project at the Migrating Texts colloquium last year. Translation Games plays with translation across not only different languages but different media in a ‘public-facing programme of ludic workshops’. The project employs the arts to make languages interesting for the general public, while at the same time trying to discover whether there is an ‘essence’ of a text which carries through different media.

As Ricarda explained, Translation Games began with a project called What We Made in which a short narrative text commissioned from the American Colleen Becker was translated in a sort of telephone game from English to French to Italian and so on. Each translator only had access to the previous step, although the text was also translated back into English at every stage. At the same time, the text was translated from writing to film to ceramics to an audiovisual piece and finally to choreography, and simultaneously from text to textile. Translation Games has since run further projects, including translation from poetry to scents, and a challenge for students and artists to translate a photographic version of a poem by the Serbian Vasko Popa into an English poem.

My favourite Spaniard Dr Maria-José Blanco has now joined Ricarda and thanks to an AHRC grant the pair organised a translation train beginning with the poem Still by Denise Riley, through 12 artists, each using a medium of their choice. They then set a competition to translate the final image back into poetry. The original poem, 12 images and the winning poetry translation can be seen here. One of the artists, Sarah Sparkes (whose playful musings on death and the afterlife I was first introduced to at the launch of Ricarda and Maria-José's book The Power of Death), also teaches classes at the Tate on paper engineering, and so it was decided that participants at the Fabrication event would be challenged to translate one of the poems or the images into a paper structure.

After practising different cuts and folds, I chose the last image in the chain by Domingo Martinez to translate into paper. Although I had a great time cutting, sticking and drawing with ink, I did also reflect seriously on what were the key aspects of the image which gave it its meaning: the colours, the contrast between dark and light, the layering and the image of one hand grasping another.

At the end of the day, all the translations were sewn to canvas to be displayed in KCL. As you can see below, we each had very different ideas, which demonstrates the impact of the personality and interests of the translator on their output, but we still found elements in each of them which convey the meaning of the original poem.

This is just a tiny part of a packed two weeks of festival. For the highlights, check out King's Arts and Humanities' Storify.

A Playlist for the Pelican

As my favourite model and sister Zoe has just launched a fantastic fashion blog, The Pelican in Briefs, I've been thinking about songs focused around items of clothing. I could have gone with Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini, but thankfully some of my all-time favourite songs are sartorially themed. Please comment with your fashion favourites. 

Bob Dylan - Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat

'You know it balances on your head just like a mattress balances on a bottle of wine, your brand new leopard-skin pill-box hat'.

Leonard Cohen - Famous Blue Raincoat

'Ah, the last time we saw you you looked so much older, your famous blue raincoat was torn at the shoulder'.

Velvet Underground & Nico - All Tomorrow's Parties

'A blackened shroud, a hand-me-down gown of rags and silks, a costume fit for one who sits and cries, for all tomorrow's parties' 

The National - Fashion Coat

'In a fashion coat I float down my city. Don't you think I look pretty any more?'

I have a very depressing taste in music, so perhaps it's best to end on a happy note. I caught these guys supporting Augustines twice in a week last December. This song is so ridiculously catchy that by the second gig I was singing along.

Arkells - Leather Jacket

'I pulled on up and with a southern accent I offered you my dad's leather jacket'.

New Arts Centre at University of Bath

When I joined the University of Bath as an undergraduate in 2007, the demands for a new arts centre had already been bubbling away for some time. Over my four years there, reporting on the arts for the student radio station, and later attending regular student representative meetings, the fabled arts centre - supposedly 'in progress' - began to feel increasingly utopic. So it was with delight that on my most recent visit to Bath this Tuesday I visited The Edge, which houses not only a theatre and rehearsal space, but arts studios, music practice rooms and a dance studio. The most pleasant surprise for me, though, were the three galleries run by the ICIA (Institute of Contemporary Interdisciplinary Arts), ensuring that free contemporary art would be a permanent feature of the new student experience.

Passage - Miranda Whall

A perfect fit for the inaugural exhibition at the ICIA, interdisciplinary artist Miranda Whall has created a multi-screen and surround-sound installation, charting her physical passage through Europe, Mexico and Thailand and the simultaneous artistic passage through her recent projects developed in each place. A Turkish dancer twirls from screen to screen, later a solitary goldfish swims the same path. Vibrant flashes of fruit flying through the jungle and smashing against a tree juxtapose the stillness of an old woman at rest. Singing in French and Spanish, bird calls, music, and muddled underwater whispers combine with the images to create an immersive and hypnotic experience.

http://www.mirandawhall.com/projects/passage/


0º00 Navigation (Part II) - Simon Faithfull

Equally interdisciplinary artist Simon Faithfull brings together a video, a slide show, a globe, and a range of postcards reproducing line drawings and diary extracts, to represent his 'obsessive and deranged journey exactly along the Greenwich Meridian'. Part I charted his journey through England, while in this second part, we travel from the top of France to the bottom of Africa. The slide show is particularly striking: rapidly progressing from verdant French countryside to barren Burkina Faso, with the coordinates at which each photograph was taken in the bottom left corner, it forces the viewer to confront the common usage of 'West'. The written extracts, meanwhile, predominantly from the African leg of the journey, give fascinating glimpses of a part of the world rarely present in travel literature.

www.icia.org.uk/whats-on/visual-arts/0o00-navigation/

Find out more about the new centre and what's on at www.icia.org.uk

Final Year Begins

With the new term upon us already, the countdown begins: just one year until submission.

Writing for King's Arts and Humanities life blog over my first two years at KCL really helped me to keep track of progress. Now that I need it more than ever, the blog is no more, so I've determined to keep up the blogging here instead.

So what's going on?

Migrating Texts
Three workshops about subtitling, translation and adaptation at the Institute of Modern Languages Research. The three of us organising have been working on this for over a year now and not a week has gone by without some emails, meetings or phonecalls related to it. It's amazing how a two-day event can take so much organising! We now have a website (migratingtexts.wordpress.com), social media presence (@MigratingTexts), and most of our speakers booked (I do a happy dance in my bedroom upon confirmation). Still to do: finalising some funding, registration, hoping enough people will come to cover costs!

Sticking with the IMLR, arranging the 7 sessions for next year's graduate forum was spectacularly easy by contrast. I sent an email to various mailing lists asking for participants, got lots of interesting proposals, matched people with dates. As my favourite meerkat would say, simples. Find us on Facebook: IMLR Graduate Forum

Then there's what I should actually be working on...my PhD. I now have a word document for every section of my dissertation, alrhough the conclusion at this point mainly reads:
WHAT?
SO WHAT?
WHAT NEXT?
(thanks to the @ThesisWhisperer)
I still haven't finished writing the section I had planned to have drafted by the beginning of June, but mainly because I keep finding new things to read (i belatedly discovered the Senate House treasure trove). I'm now flitting between rewriting/adding to my first section and drafting the second.

I'm also on a reading binge, working my way through my Sudaquia collection. I need to build up my Venezuelan literature website! As teaching begins next week, I'm alternating Venezuelan novels with Spanish travel writing, enjoying working on the peninsula again for the first time in years.

Most importantly, I've decorated my desk for inspiration. Hopefully my next blog will show that it has worked!