糖心TV

Seminar Information

Law and humanities scholarship in recent years has expanded from specific engagements with specific aesthetic texts or artifacts towards broader claims about the instantiation of modes of cultural representation in constituting legal subjectivity. These claims have circled around words like the imaginary, the archive, and the counter-archive. Drawing on this work, I introduce some of my recent efforts to explore the basis of colonial legal imaginaries, and the 鈥� mainly Indigenous - artists challenging it. In order to broaden the argument, I begin to talking about the forms and implications of the colonial imaginary in contemporary Singapore, before looking at two images of the Australian settler colonial imaginary that stage an opposition between archive and counter-archive, constitution and unconstitution. Finally, I look to the Kith & Kin, Archie Moore鈥檚 prize-winning Australian representative at last year鈥檚 Venice Biennale, for a work that brings together both these discourses, colonial legality and counter-colonial legitimacy, settler law and Indigenous tjukurrpa. This word is often translated as 鈥榙reaming鈥� or 鈥榚verywhen鈥�; but I think that dao or indeed jurisprudence better captures what is at stake.

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Seminar Information

How do people incarcerated in the United States and in the United Kingdom consume popular cultural representations of imprisonment? And how do they represent themselves in creative narratives written for audiences of their peers on the other side of the Atlantic? To probe these questions, this short presentation explains an educational programme that was simultaneously conducted in prison facilities in the UK and the US in 2023/24. Funded by the British Academy, we critically studied representations of prisons found in films, poetry, music, memoirs, and novels. These discussions were followed by a range of linked creative writing exercises and then writings were swapped across the Atlantic between the prisoner participants for peer review. Our findings suggest that when incarcerated writers use an international lens to critically interrogate pop-cultural representations of incarceration, it can help them to understand the structural conditions of imprisonment while also articulating the personal and political struggles they have faced as a result.

Speaker Bio

Jo Metcalf is a Senior Lecturer in American Studies and Criminology at the |University of Hull. She is the co-founder and co-director of the Cultures of Incarceration Centre鈥痑nd has research interests in US / UK prison cultures, in particular the culture and politics of reading and writing while incarcerated.

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Prisoners at HMP Perth in Scotland have been engaging with archive birdsong and oral history recordings 鈥� some more than sixty years old 鈥� in a unique, creative audio art collaboration. Peesweeps meet hip hop beats, grouse unlock coded prison language, and an unhatched kestrel chick provokes philosophy鈥�

The sound artist Steve Urquhart explains how this project came about, in the context of his work within prison settings. We鈥檒l listen to excerpts from the Doing Bird mixtapes, and we鈥檒l discuss the inventive ways in which prisoners responded to this extraordinary project, and re-evaluated their connection to the world beyond prison walls.

SpeakerBio

Steve Urquhart is a sound artist, radio producer and composer. He creates documentaries and series for BBC (Radio 4, Radio 3, World Service) plus many other platforms worldwide, as well as audio installations and soundscapes for exhibitions and arts festivals. Steve prioritises projects which enable marginalised communities to explore and excel in audio production. His pioneering work with National Prison Radio has led to funded research in criminal justice settings across Europe. Steve lives in Glasgow.