Conferences

Conference: Artists, Archives and A/Gender, March 2017

The Centre for Research on Communities and Cultures convened the symposium: Artists, Archives and A/Gender at the Sidney Cooper Gallery on March 16th 2017. This sell-out event provided an opportunity to gather for an exciting and provocative day of exhibitions, performance, in-conversations and presentations. Prompted by Calude Cahun's exploration of identities and masking, Artists, Archives and A/Gender was delivered through partnership and collaboration with UAL's Photography and the Archive Research Centre (PARC), PARC's biennial of research Moose on the Loose Festival (2017) and Canterbury Christ Church University's Intersectional Centre for Inclusion and Social Justice (INCISE); the Centre for Practice-Based Research in the Arts, plus the Sidney Cooper Gallery in Canterbury and the South East Archive of Seaside (SEAS) Photography.

Speakers and contributors included: Dr Karen Shepherdson (Co-Director of the Centre for Research on Communities Cultures), Dr Katie McGown (Director of the Sidney Cooper Gallery), Dr Sara Davidmann (PARC), James Stevenson, (Director of the V&A Photographic Studio, rtd)

Dr Sam Vale (CCCU), Prof Stephen Maddison (UEL) independent artists Carlos Maria Romero Sam Causer, Prof Val Williams (Director of PARC), Performance Poet Leah Thorn (ECPD Internation Research Fellow), Prof Chris Mounsey (University of Winchester) and Prof Bee Scherer (Director of INCISE/CCCU) as Responder.

Beyond the View: New Perspectives on Seaside Photography

This conference was held on 10th-11th July 2014 and explored seaside photography in its very broadest sense and provided an exciting critical space for debate and enquiry: the seaside as boundary between different environments; its location in contemporary photographic practice; seaside photography in an historical context, including community, culture, class, gender issues and youth; the vernacular; the demotic; regeneration and the rise of leisure as captured in seaside imagery etc.

Keynote speakers at the conference included:

• MARTIN PARR (Magnum Photographer)
• BRIGITTE LARDINOIS (Deputy Director of the Photography and the Archive Research Centre at the University of the Arts in London)
• AUDREY LINKMAN (author of The Victorians Photographic Portraits and the recently highly acclaimed Photography and Death)

View the conference website