Study Day 30 May 2014

Organisers: Ella Leith, PhD Student, University of Edinburgh; Kyra Pollitt, PhD Student, University of Bristol.

Escaping logos: edging beyond words through creative visual language

The Edge of Words project explores that which exists before, outwith, or beyond the control of words; this interactive study day seeks to demonstrate the limitations of traditional logocentric analytical frameworks by focusing on alternative, ocularcentric and/or phenomenological approaches which provide new lenses for exploring how the seen / unseen, and the spoken / unspoken, work together.

Through cross-disciplinary academic papers, participants are invited to ‘read’ image, movement and sensation. From the figurative iconography of stone carvings to the creative Signart (performed ‘poetry’) of deaf communities from the ethnopoetics of co-speech gesture to the innovative French ‘cinema of the body’, Escaping logos will provide a platform for lively discussion around the inventive possibilities afforded by alternative modalities.

The less traditional elements of the day will include a Signart performance by renowned practitioner Paul Scott, and a workshop wherein attendees with no experience of sign languages can challenge their own verbal assumptions and explore some of the resonances of non-verbal communication.

Programme

Morning Session: 10am - 1pm

• A Serpent’s Hiss: ‘reading’ the early medieval stone sculpture of Scotland – Tasha Gefreh, University of Edinburgh (PhD Candidate, History of Art)
• Fleshing out the ‘text’: transcribing the gestural topography of a storytelling performance – Ella Leith, University of Edinburgh (PhD Candidate, Scottish Ethnology)
• When words move through bodies: some issues of recognition, categorization and translation – Dr Kyra Pollitt, University of Bristol (History of Art, Centre for Deaf Studies)

Lunch (included): 1 - 2pm

Afternoon Session: 2 - 5pm

• Workshop: Encoding the Visual (led by Edinburgh-based British Sign Language tutor and Signartist, Mark MacQueen)
• Embodied Narratives and the Logic of Sensation in Contemporary French "Cinema of the body" – Sophie Walon, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris (Film Studies)
• Gesture-dance, gesturology, the cinematic and Signart: an alternative aesthetic history of the communicative body – Dr Kyra Pollitt and Paul Scott (Centre for Deaf Studies), University of Bristol.
• Signart performance by Bristol-based Signartist, Paul Scott

This study day will appeal to post-graduate students and staff members with interests in poetry, performance, cinema, translation, transcription, sign languages, storytelling and traditional arts, art theory, art history, phenomenology, embodiment, dance studies. All welcome, but space is limited. To reserve a place, please email: