At the end of April, a team of five UBCO researchers from the AMP Lab travelled to Dublin, Ireland to present work at the TEXT/SOUND/PERFORMANCE: Making in Canadian Space conference (April 25-27, 2019) held at University College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland. Mathieu Aubin (PhD candidate), Megan Butchart (Honours English candidate), Dr. Emily Murphy (Assistant Professor, Digital Humanities), Dr. Karis Shearer (Associate Professor, English), and Amy Thiessen (Honours English candidate) all presented new research. The event featured 125 Canadian and Indigenous poets, performance artists, and literary critics alongside over 75 Irish writers through the newly formed Associated Writers Program Ireland, and was reported in an article in the Irish Times.
On day one of the conference, Dr. Emily Christina Murphy delivered “Settler Flamencas: Genealogies of Spanish Dance and English-Language Poetries” in a collaborative performance-talk with Dr. Katherine McLeod (Concordia) who presented “Making Shadows with Recorded Sound: A Response to Gwendolyn MacEwen’s Audio Archives.” Murphy and McLeod, both flamenco artists, alternated speaking and dancing.
Karis Shearer (in collaboration with Deanna Fong, who participated remotely through pre-recorded audio segments) presented “‘But you can’t put that in a book’: Feminist Close Listening in the SoundBox Collection” sharing the panel with Mathieu Aubin who spoke about “Writing Between the ‘Slippery Lines’: Lesbian-Feminist Kinship in Tessera.” Together their panel focused on “Mapping Feminist Relations and Labour across Media in Contemporary Canadian Literature.”
In collaboration with SpokenWeb Calgary team members Dr. Jason Wiens and Leah van Dyk (MA English candidate), the SpokenWeb UBCO team consisting of Dr. Karis Shearer, Megan Butchart (Honours English), and Amy Thiessen (Honours English) put together a panel on “Sound Pedagogies.” Both teams brought teacher and student perspectives to bear on the digital sound archive in the classroom and discussed a variety of assignments that invited critical examination of sound, interface design, user experience, recording practices, and archives.
The conference also featured a dazzling array of performances, master classes, and plenary talks:
The UBCO group found time before and after the conference to discover some highlights of Dublin’s cultural heritage as well. Megan, Amy, and Karis made their way to tour Trinity College Dublin’s Old Library housing the famous Book of Kells and the Long Room:
The team gratefully acknowledges the support of the SSHRC SpokenWeb Partnership Grant; Tuum Est Undergraduate Initiative (UBC Okanagan), and the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies (UBC Okanagan) for making this research travel possible.