It’s likely that postgraduates will easily have a chance to access high-quality public engagement and impact training which is often discipline-specific due to an increased desire that researchers respond to and collaborate with institutions and organisations external to the University. This is undoubtedly a good thing, and this increased awareness of the need to develop work beyond academia has led to some fantastic projects and events being run across the country and by researchers at varying stages of their careers.

However, there is sometimes a tendency for this training to lack the opportunity to put theory into practice. Training in public engagement is only the beginning; ideally, it should be followed up by an implementation of the skills taught. Particularly for researchers in the early stages of their careers—such as postgraduates—it is not immediately clear how best to use and progress these skills, or how to put their training into action. This led myself and some colleagues from neighbouring Universities to develop a training programme specific to postgraduates which would have a practical element built in from the very beginning.

‘People & Place: Public Engagement in the North East’ was funded by an AHRC Collaborative Skills Grant and organised by Nicole Bush (Durham), Kate Katigbak (Durham), and Beatrice Turner (Newcastle). Running across 2013, it was concerned with how a sense of place informs and is informed by academic research within local, regional and communal settings. We wanted to explore the relationships between the higher education sector, culture and heritage organisations, and their surrounding communities here in the North East, in order to ask how public engagement projects might nurture and benefit from those relationships. However, we also wanted to address the practical side of public engagement: how do you assess the need for a particular project? What sorts of projects work in what contexts? Who do you approach, and how do you approach them? Where can you find support for your project? What collaborations have been successful in the North East, and why?

This project comprised two strands which addressed both theoretical and practical issues: a public engagement workshop series, open to all, and featuring representatives from culture and heritage and higher education institutions from across the region, and a public exhibition exploring local industrialist Lord Armstrong’s role as a philanthropist and civic figure in the Victorian North East. We selected 10 applicants from Durham and Newcastle Universities working in a variety of disciplines (music, cultural and heritage, English studies, history, and archaeology) who attended both workshops and then went on to design, plan, and curate the public exhibition in partnership with local culture and heritage institutions (many of which offered training at the two workshops), and provided an opportunity to put the skills and ideas gained at the workshop into practice and use Lord Armstrong’s civic activities as a case study to interrogate the role of cultural institutions in the construction of local identity. Some of the external organisations we worked with included the Laing Gallery, Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums, Palace Green Library, the Laurence Sterne Trust, TUSK Music, Durham World Heritage, and the Beamish Museum. It was fantastic to hear directly from museum and heritage professionals, and to see the postgraduate participants building relationships across the project.

The final exhibition was held at the Jesmond Dene Visitor Centre and was open to the public across the summer. It was composed of a number of posters filled with archival research, photographs, and information about Lord Armstrong and his connection to Newcastle, and accompanied by a display case of nineteenth-century newspaper clippings and a ‘kid’s corner’ where children could make their own rhododendrons—a flower popular in the Jesmond Dene which Armstrong designed and landscaped. It was a great success, demonstrated by the number of positive comments left in the visitors book, and really gave the postgraduate participants a structure through which this type of public engagement project could be organised again.  The training workshops were practical and meaningful in this context, because the attendees could immediately put into practice the skills they had learnt.

At the final project de-brief, we had a chance to both celebrate the successes of the project with the participants, and also to ask what kind of questions the project as a whole raised. Below are some of these, and we as researchers would do well to keep searching for ways to answer them when we design further public engagement projects:

• ‘How do we define ‘the public’?
• What importance might public engagement projects have for the local community or the region?
• How can we ensure that the knowledge generated is genuinely meaningful to the public we seek to reach out to?
• What can we do to ensure public engagement initiates two-way conversations that enhance our research as well as deepening public understanding and interest?

For further details, see our project website and the participants’ exhibition website.

Nicole Bush | @Nicole_Bush

Last night [Wednesday, 3rd September] saw the last of the At Home in Scotland events this summer with 'PhD in an hour', held at Lovecrumbs on Edinburgh's West Port. As I chatted with visitors about my research on the jewellery craft in Scotland, a clear theme emerged on the idea of a sense of place.

The working lives of jewellers in Edinburgh - the historic and administrative centre of the industry in Scotland - played out in the streets and closes surrounding the West Port. The lives of these jewellers, and indeed of their fellow craftspeople throughout Scotland, looked very different at the end of the eighteenth century to how they did on the outbreak of World War I. New technologies brought about by industrialisation, the irruption of wealth, emerging groups of middle-class consumers and the decline of the aristocracy from the 1880s, saw the industry experience profound transformations.

Objects made by Scotland's jewellers - their materials, design, making and wear - can tell us about these changes. In addition, they can speak of much wider stories that take us across UK, Europe and across the world. In doing so, they represent a nexus of space and place concerning rural and urban, home and away.

The metals, gems and stones used in their production came from caves, mines, mountains and rivers in Sutherland, Montrose and the Cairngorms, as well as Africa, India and South America. The transformation of these raw materials into finished objects takes us through cutters and dealers in Amsterdam, and the centres of fashion in London and Paris, and back around to shops and workshops throughout Scotland.

But the life of a jewellery object did not end with the making of a crafted piece, fitted in its box or displayed in a glass cabinet, ready for sale. The biographies of pieces of jewellery intersected with the life-cycles of the individuals who bought, gifted, owned and wore them. They symbolised friendship, love, marriage and family ties. Owners carried their rings, pendants and brooches and bracelets on bodies, coats and dresses with little regard for geographical boundaries.

Thinking about the stories contained within jewels always brings me to a quotation from Sherlock Holmes in 'The Blue Carbuncle'. As Holmes surveys the rare stone, holding it up to the light, he says:

... just see how it glints and sparkles. Of course it is a nucleus and focus of crime. Every good stone is. They are the devil’s pet baits. In the larger and older jewels every facet may stand for a bloody deed.

Holmes uses the blue carbuncle to highlight how the timelessness of jewellery objects enables them to build histories of their own; to contain traces of the people, places and events of their past. His observation draws attention to the troubling, more brutal aspects of the British empire and reminds the reader that the stories contained within material things often concern death, the destruction of communities and landscapes, and the insatiable human desire for increased wealth and status.

Jewellery objects functioned not only as markers of money and status, but as expressions of self adornment and as a facet of property relations. At a time when women, particularly married women, had few rights to their own wealth or assets, items of jewellery were particularly important items of property as well as important personal possessions which symbolised their biographies. These ideas are evident in the memories contained within the jewels of Scottish author, philanthropist and advocate of women's rights and social reform, Lady Aberdeen, which were stolen during her honeymoon. In Lord and Lady Aberdeen's joint autobiography, "We Twa", written over 50 years after the theft, she speaks with striking clarity about the things that were lost, which included highly valuable family jewels and wedding gifts made by Scottish jewellers, as well as:

the articles of less intrinsic value but possessing associations which made them irreplaceable.  … a very pretty christening locket given me by my godmother, which I had worn continually as a child, and a lovely little old chatelaine given me by A. on our wedding day, in the form of an enamelled egg, inside which was a miniature globe representing the world, inside that again a blood-red heart. I had worn it till that very morning, when I put it back into the drawer, because a fastening was loose.

She describes the colours and form of these objects, and the deeply personal memories and attachments contained within them, with striking clarity. In doing so, she highlights how the things taken contained traces of the people who were special to her as a child; how they charted her journey through life; and how they symbolised her new status as a married woman. Thus, she highlights the different ways in which things contain both financial and symbolic worth and documents the life-stories of individuals and the traces of the people who have made, gifted and used them.

The work of nineteenth-century jewellers in Scotland's towns and cities tells us many different stories of home and nation, space and place. The objects they made, sold, altered and engraved contained layers of meaning, and individual and collective memories of real and imagined people and places. They tell us about gender and class experience, and illuminate details about the place of Scottish people and things in the wider world during a time of deep and wide-reaching economic, social and cultural change.

Sarah Laurenson  | @reformlane

How do you establish trust from a distance, with correspondents whose expressions and reactions you can’t vouch for? Perhaps you have to create an epistolary place, a shared space of correspondence in which both correspondents feel at home.

The basic techniques for this can be blunt and simplistic. Sign-offs, for example, are surprisingly crude. When someone wishes you “all the best”, they are making a generic, replicated statement of affection, which is in itself essentially meaningless – but its removal would be significant. Similarly, if you routinely sign off your personal e-mails with two kisses, a reduction to a solitary “x” would seem hostile. By negotiating such clumsy conventions, correspondents construct a mutually acceptable structure, albeit a basic one, in which to interact.

The eighteenth-century letters that I read in the course of my own PhD research are often dull, dry, stiff and formal. The vast majority are matter-of-fact business exchanges which succumb to all the unimaginative conventions of eighteenth-century letter writing. The correspondence archives of Enlightenment Edinburgh bookseller John Bell, for example, are dominated by business invoices, and the details of orders and deliveries. A long day in the archive can be considerably enlivened, then, by the discovery of some creative or literary flair, or even the faintest trace of a story: for example, a hastily scribbled note from a Robert Trotter Esquire of George Square, requesting that two “new comedies” be delivered to him at home as “a cure for the heart ache”.  From a mere scrap such as this, especially on a particularly boring day, the imagination can run wild.

The breakdown of Bell’s relationship with the London bookseller John Murray, a man with whom he corresponded almost entirely through letters, is also fascinating to trace from its warm and intimate peak to its frosty denouement. In 1774, Murray becomes exasperated with his counterpart’s absent-mindedness, and he adopts an occasionally passive-aggressive tone. He wishes Bell well on a new publication, adding: “perhaps you would have done as well had you confined yourself to one London publisher – any of the three would have done.” He signs off this letter with a particularly naked plea for Bell to “Command any services here & believe me to remain, Dear Sir, your affectionate, humble servant”. Two months later he uses the unprecedented sign-off “very sincerely yours”; but shortly afterwards, their relationship has clearly soured, and any meagre correspondence between them takes the form of generic, impersonal business invoices. The epistolary structure remained essentially the same, but the tone became hollow and cold.  

It is the subtlety of letters – their hints and traces of intimacy and emotion – that can make them so powerful; and I am struck by the power of epistolary dialogue to drive a story. And it is not a dialogue like any other. It is a less immediately reciprocal form of communication. Unlike the listener in a face-to-face conversation, readers cannot use their physical responses to encourage or discourage their correspondents. Nor can they interject or contribute to the conversation at will; they are bound by the structure of the message that the writer intended.

Nevertheless, letters resemble “real life” interaction in the sense that they generally have to adhere to certain mundane formalities before the more intimate exchanges can occur. A show called Letters Home, part of the Edinburgh International Book Festival, explores this idea beautifully. Unlike site-specific theatre company Grid Iron’s previous work, which made the settings of their performance a distinctive feature of the drama, Letters Home uses empty spaces and non-specific locations to transport the audience to this imagined epistolary place, where dialogue flows freely and the facts of geography and physical distance are secondary to the stories of love, longing, and loss. The epistolary form allows for the primacy of language, in all its agile glory.

In Letters Home, stage directions are few, and perhaps the most effective part is when the audience listens, blindfolded, to disembodied voices, the dialogue alone driving the story. In the drama, each correspondent waits patiently for their turn, as layer upon layer of intimacy is added, each correspondent responding to the boldness of the other in revealing their feelings, and revealing hints and traces of a wider story along the way.

The weaker parts of the drama, though, are spoiled by attempts to counteract the supposed limitations of epistolary dialogue. Ham-fisted stage decoration and absurd over-acting are particularly distracting in one of the four segments, a clumsy attempt to obviate the criticism of a straight dialogical drama as “dull”, a symptom of the director’s lack of trust in the audience’s imagination. But, more pertinently, the whole suffers from the unnatural insertion of context and background. Sections when the characters on stage are addressing not each other but the watching audience, making sure that we understand the context of the scene, are jarring.

Of course, letters are “limited” in some crude sense. Unadorned and contextless in the archive, their meaning can be unclear. Performed theatrically on stage, they offer only a partial picture of a wider story. But while the insight they offer isn’t complete, it is rich, deep, and extremely valuable. Letters act as a powerful imaginative spur, an inspiration to explore the epistolary place that distant correspondents have created, and to construct a story from its fragments.

Phil Dodds | @PA_Dodds

Some reflections on the storytelling process

I don't exactly have what you would call a job description. I was thrilled to see that my name badge for At Home in Scotland's opening conference read 'Storyteller and Folklorist'. As I have faffed about, piecing together bits of work, the three main threads of storytelling, oral history, and reminiscence, have emerged. They're all about the unseen exchange of thoughts and ideas between human minds. They're all, when it comes down to it, just fancy names for conversation. I often feel uncomfortable with the idea of these things being somehow special, something you need to study, rather than something you just do. These activities are formalisations of what used to be the only way to exchange information - that is, through speaking and listening to one another. Storytelling, in particular, is a troubling activity to define - where's the line between traditional storytelling and stand-up comedy and spoken-word performance and chatting to your neighbour at the bus stop? Of course, there is no line except that drawn by our personal tastes, and one person's eye-opening raconteur is another person's insufferable show off.

For me, the most important thing defining traditional storytelling is the utter lack of a fourth wall. Although the audience (hopefully) aren't interrupting you in the midst of your narrative, you are in conversation with them. Their thoughts and reflections and reactions to your words are the only reason to do this. I once read a piece of advice to beginner storytellers saying you should practice in front of a mirror. No. Tell your story to a cat or a pot plant if you can't find or face a human audience yet, but tell it to something living. Because it's about the story, and the listeners. Recently I told a story on a stage, at Mareel in Shetland, and was immensely thrown by the lighting – it was set up so you couldn’t see the audience’s faces from the stage. I felt like I was speaking into a void, trying to feel my way by the laughter and silences.

Where to find your stories is another question with a thousand answers, all of them wrong to somebody. Does it dilute the tradition, to have taken your words from a page into the air? Or take them from – heaven forbid – such a vulgar thing as the internet? I can't help being prouder of the stories I learnt from hearing them, even though I know that's a bit silly. Songs and tales come on and off the page easily. The singer declaiming ballads from a cheap chapbook on a street corner, the Penny Dreadfuls spawning and reinforcing urban legends, the viral online hoax. All stories, all worth the telling. And all stories transform with each telling. It depends on your audience, your mood, the place. Allowing yourself to let go, to go with the story, is incredibly freeing – once you get over the sense of being in freefall. As a counterpoint to the mirror suggestion, some genuinely good advice: know the story, not the words of the story.

Scotland's traditional storytelling scene is in the midst of what you could call a revival. The dedicated Storytelling Centre, on the Royal Mile, has become one of Edinburgh's favourite venues. As well as young and not-so-young upstarts, we're lucky to enjoy the company of a number of tradition bearers, people for whom this seems to be simultaneously a lifetime's worth of painstaking dedicated artistry and as straightforward as breathing. In recognition of the time and effort it takes, the Centre operates the Scottish Storytelling Directory – having your name on this is proof you’ve put the time in, not just to learn stories but to deal with a range of audiences and their reactions – and as far as I know, it’s the only one in the world. I’m currently at the apprentice stage.

There are more questions – about the dangers of professionalising tradition (important to remember, on this point, that even ‘back in the day’ it took work – tradition bearers are not accidentally channelling the amorphous carrying stream which surrounds them, they are actively shaping and re-creating their stories with each telling), who ‘owns’ a traditional story, and how far you can change it before you’ve broken it – than can be addressed here. All I can say is, sometimes it’s better not to overthink things. Go and hear some stories, then tell some stories. It's good for you, and not necessarily bad for your career. I hear the Prime Minister of Greenland is a storyteller.

But why would you listen to me? I make things up all the time.

Erin Catriona Farley | @aliasmacalias

“Your ethnicity: mixed”, the man at the desk states confidently. Tania nods, but wonders which box she would have ticked herself. Her father’s ancestors were African and her mother’s ancestors were Indian. But she usually thinks of herself as Surinamese. What does that actually mean, to be Surinamese? Tania ponders over this question while the man continues ticking boxes that supposedly confirm Tania’s identities. Am I Surinamese because I live in Suriname? Half of the Surinamese population lives in the Netherlands. Is it about my passport? There are Surinamese with Dutch passports (rarely the other way around: a colonial legacy of inequality?) Is it about where I am at home, where I belong? Or perhaps it is about how others identify me? Ticking boxes may inform others about who they think I am, where they think my home is, or where they think I belong. But is that how I see myself? The man has finished his administrative duties. Tania leaves the building, greeted by the scorching hot subtropical sun and hungry mosquitoes – that’s my Suriname, my home. Perhaps self-identification is about the spaces we call home?

My friend Tania’s mixed African-Indian heritage coupled with her Surinamese self-identification stems from the colonial history of the transatlantic slave trade and mass migration to plantation work in the Caribbean and wider Americas. Across the Atlantic in Europe and Africa, mass movement of people has perhaps been more gradual, but questions of ethnicity and national belonging have also been complicated and open to dispute if not outright war – as the experiences of people in the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s and at present the Ukraine painfully show.

Closer to ‘home’, Scotland has been concerned with self-determination for centuries. Scotland’s history remains important in the hearts of many Scots, and national recognition is particularly urgent now in light of the upcoming referendum. Regardless of the result in September, everyone living in Scotland is at the moment confronted with their self-identification. Are we Scottish? Are we British? European? Does it matter that some of us are foreign nationals, and that most of us are probably ethnically mixed in some way or another? As a Dutch national with a Scottish husband, a daughter born in Suriname and a son in Edinburgh, these are large questions.

Battles for and against independence are never fought over economic issues alone. They are also about a sense of home, of where we belong, the places and people we identify with. And about what and whom we do not want to be identified with. 

To me, a sense of home is imbued with the stories we connect to. Stories that give us a feeling of being there, of being part of it all. Stories of heroic historical as well as contemporary figures. Stories of people, of landscapes, objects and places. Stories give meaning to things that might be inexplicable otherwise. Stories offer an option of relatedness and shared understanding. A personal story can grow into a communal feeling of belonging when other people are able to transfer this story to their own personal context. Stories, thus conceived, shape to a large extent who we are.

As Dr. Williams so rightly pointed out during his storytelling workshops, stories belong to those who listen to them. Perhaps some of you will listen to Tania’s story, and make her questions ours. Are we ever challenged to question who we are, until we are seen as or reminded of being different?


Iris Marchand (Academia.edu)

It was during a 5 minute stint playing Pinocchio in a primary school drama class that it became evident I wasn’t particularly interested in the subject of good. And whilst the puppet and I initially shared this inclination our tales were not to end quite so symmetrically.  Filled with ennui at the thought of being shackled to this wooden make-good-er for an entire play I begged my teacher to return me to the original role I had abandoned. So, with a sigh I snuggled back into the character of Fire-eater and spent the rest of our rehearsal tormenting little puppets.

No, I did not spend my adolescence torturing kittens. No, I am not a member of any deviant online forums. And in answer to my sister’s question - No, I have no intention of becoming pen pals with an incarcerated serial killer. Nor do I plan on marrying said incarcerated serial killer. I am just really interested in evil. Sorry Mum.

If the past two years of research have taught me anything it is that this subject makes most people rather uncomfortable. It’s either that or my experience of averted gazes, nervous laughter and backwards stepping is connected to my personal hygiene or perceived mental health status. But I’m all in favour of blaming it on evil. Aren’t we always.

My practice-led research is concerned with strategies for constructing more productive dialogues with the subject of evil through art. However, I must confess to having self-indulgently reveled in a few cathartic orgies of hatred and horror, facilitated by this umbrella term, in my time. Let’s be frank here, there’s much pleasure to be had in booing a baddy and tut tut tutting a terrorist.

Which brings me to the subject of the fairytale and it’s realms of darkness that we so delight in. At a lecture on the positive psychology of fairytales at Edinburgh University, Dr. Licia Masoni argued that the genre performs as a kind of daydreaming, catharsis and collective analysis session that provides its audience with the ability to engage with the taboos and traumas encountered there, but at a safe distance. And she is not the only one to take up this position in praise of the fairytale; among others Bruno Bettelheim, Sheldon Cashdan and Marina Warner have written on the subject of its capacity to help us cope and rationalise distressing relationships and circumstances in our lives.

But with the likes of Disney at their helm, children’s experiences of fairytales have been taking a detour away from the dark and productive towards the, well, simply delightful. Perhaps in this case the emphasis should be on the ‘simply’. Don’t get me wrong, Walt, ‘cos we’ve had some good times and tone-deaf sing-alongs but I’ve got an army of cruel stepmother’s, wolves, witches, ogres, giants and other equally heinous bogeys that would like a word with you... and the kids. That’s if they can pry the red tape from their mouths.

I am not saying that there isn’t value or a need for censorship to protect our children from inappropriate subject matter. But there are some things, disquieting and disturbing as they are, which need to be said and fairytales are one of those places to say them. We do the fairytales and ourselves a great disservice when we sanitise them. The darkness is there for a reason, and there is much to be seen within it once you let your eyes adjust.

Like several At Home in Scotland participants, I attended storytelling training sessions in May. The workshop leader, Dr Michael Williams, argued that storytelling was one of the best ways for researchers to communicate their findings, but I was not sure how storytelling might relate to my research. I study early nineteenth-century charities and spend a lot of time reading their administrative records. These records often contain ‘personal’ stories but there is something unsatisfactory about them. Reports of the Edinburgh Society for the Relief of the Destitute Sick, for example, described the lives of the individuals aided by that charity, but these descriptions were limited, formulaic and sanitised. They were included merely to tell donors that the charity assisted the ‘right’ sort of people. The At Home in Scotland Project has demonstrated how storytelling can capture complexity and diversity, but nineteenth-century philanthropists often seemed more interesting in producing a single narrative, with little reflection on the individuality of those they aided. 

This somewhat bleak conclusion raises a question: why would I be interested in these organisations at all? Thinking about this made me realise how stories have been central to my research. My overall motivation and my specific research questions have been greatly influenced by personal accounts written by the recipients of charity. It would be naïve to think that personal narratives provide unrestricted insight into the ‘real’ experiences of their authors, but they do highlight the multifaceted nature of historical charities. They reveal the many interpersonal interactions among donors, managers, employees and inmates, which characterised these institutions. They also emphasise how charities often had a profound effect on their wider societies.

Bella Aronovitch’s little known memoir Give it Time, An Experience of Hospital 1928-32, is probably my favourite example of such a story, even though it is set almost a century after the time period that I study. It details the four years that she spent in London hospitals following a failed appendectomy. Aronovitch’s vivid descriptions of contemporary voluntary hospitals encouraged me to discover more about how these institutions functioned. I want to find out how charitable hospitals affected the lives of all those associated with them, including patients, administrators and medical staff. The hospitals’ reliance on voluntary contributions meant that their doctors were under severe pressure to discharge patients like Aronovitch, who were seen as a drain on resources. Give it Time highlighted the power that the hospitals’ lay governors exercised, it described the deference that they expected from both doctors and patients and it showed how individual patients could become problematic ‘statistics’. Being shuttled between five different hospitals made Aronovitch’s experience unusual, but this is what made it so valuable. It allowed her to provide a fascinating comparison of the standards of care in different contemporary institutions. Focusing on a single personal experience allowed the book to successfully communicate the gravity of the decisions made in these hospitals. Two of the institutions described in the book were former Poor Law infirmaries. They mainly catered for incurable patients, and their doctors almost decided that Aronovitch, too, was beyond help. Only her transfer to yet another charitable hospital led to her cure and eventual discharge. Aronovitch’s story deserves to be more widely known and I highly recommend Give it Time to anyone who wants to find out about healthcare before the NHS. It was through reading personal accounts like these that I realised that pre-Welfare State charities were fascinating, complex institutions that are worth exploring further.    

Give it Time, An Experience of Hospitals, 1928-32 was published in 1974 and can be accessed in the National Library of Scotland, extracts from it and from other accounts of hospital care can be found in Deborah Brunton (Ed), Health, Disease and Society In Europe 1800-1930: A Source Book (Manchester, 2004).  

Joe Curran (@JokeCurran)

Is the migrant’s journey that different from the hero’s quest? A call to adventure, a descent into the unknown, the movement from light to shade, into the dark night of the soul. Documentary film can play an important role in illuminating these journeys, capturing the physical and psychological trials along the way. If one is lucky, one may even be able to follow the transformative journey such survivors make, ascending out of the belly of the whale into a world that is much altered, not in the physical sense, but through the lens of experience. While the migrant makes the journey home, he may be filled with forewarnings, lessons, and a renewed hope for redemption, while loved ones sense that they he has been altered in some way irrevocably. While some, never return: the trials too great, the darkness too seductive - caught in-between two worlds interminably.

At Home in Scotland reminds me of the role myth plays in our storytelling history, despite the constantly evolving mediums of our oral histories, printed tomes and visual ethnographies. Documentary film is one of the most recent innovations in how we tell non-fiction stories, yet the narrative structures remain ancient, and archetypal.  While a part of my research seeks to uncover the hidden stories experienced by survivors of forced labour and human trafficking, I am conscious that these stories do not necessarily start and end in tragedy. Behind each story, a person lives. A person who is not defined by a single, traumatic experience, but who brings with them years of lived experiences, a crowd of voices, and a range of sentiments, ideas and contradictions. They are not static, nor are their stories. And like the hero, they are experiencing a complex journey that we as academics, filmmakers and spectators may be fortunate enough to witness at a point in its cycle. We may have a singular snapshot that captures this quest, but ultimately they will experience it alone, and continue alone.

Stories that illuminate the issue of modern-day slavery in the UK are growing exponentially. Yet these investigations that uncover gross human rights violations and call into question the moral integrity of our citizenry are not easy viewing. While I argue they are necessary, it is equally important for the storyteller to take her listeners on a truthful journey: no singular event happens without causality, no one person represents the whole. We are responsible for the telling of the story, not the story itself, and it is here where the use of generalisations may not be reckless, but also dangerous.

As a witness to stories, we can only faithfully document the experience. And despite our love of myths and our need for heroes, we cannot alter the journey to suit our appetite for tragic pathos or happy endings. In our rush to elaborate on an important issue, we must not forget this is someone’s else story we are narrating. In our efforts to recall, inscribe and sing another’s experiences, we must be conscious that our role, in the end, must remain where it began - in the chorus.

Mei-Ling McNamara @MLMcNamara

How do you help kids understand money? Encourage them to create it themselves.

Explaining the workings of money and finance to
children would seem to be a virtually impossible task. After all, how many adults can say that they grasp the mechanics of stock and bond trading or currency speculation, let alone the opaque realm of credit derivatives and insurance swaps?

As the language used to describe the world of finance suggests, however, money and markets possess fantastical, imaginary elements with which children have a natural affinity.

This is a world populated by magnificent beasts (stock market “bulls” and “bears”), magical beings (the “wizards” and “sorcerers” who create new investment vehicles), and fearsome monsters (corporate “vampires” and “zombie banks”). 

Conjuring up a gallery of enchanted figures that might have emerged from the pages of J.K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, or Stephenie Meyer, financial metaphors speak directly to the imaginations of young people.

And this affinity is not simply a matter of language. We talk about finance in these ways because the abstractions of money and other credit instruments so often strike us as imaginary or make believe – qualities with which children are more at ease than most adults.

Children are fascinated by the distance between fantasy and reality. Not necessarily more credulous than grown ups, they’re nonetheless willing and able to grasp how things that don’t
really exist may have powerful effects on the ways in which people think, feel and behave. As such, they may be better placed to understand finance than their parents.

That’s the thinking behind “Show Me the Money,” a free smart phone and tablet app targeted at children and teenagers that aims to stimulate thinking about the imaginative aspects of
finance.

Tied to the exhibition, “Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present,” which opened at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland last month, the app allows users to create their own bank notes, test their nerve in a stock market investment game and design outrageous outfits like the ones worn by pro traders on the floors of futures exchanges.

The design of money is more important today than it has ever been. Because, since the 1970s, currency has not been “backed” by gold, central banks like the Bank of England and the US Federal Reserve have had to try all the harder to convince us that money is worthy of our belief: that it is based on strong, solid, dependable foundations.

Bank notes call on the power and authority of presidents, queens and even God. They showcase respected historical figures, carry resounding Latin mottos, bear the signatures of important officials and feature grand buildings and proud national emblems like flags, crests and symbolic
animals.

As the “Show Me the Money” exhibition makes clear, artists who use money in their work often mock banks’ attempts to produce notes that command belief and respect. Artists scrawl political slogans over real notes, create fake notes bearing their own faces or cover their designs with the names of invented banks or denominations that are crazily high or low.

By providing a fun and intuitive means of designing money for the “Bank of Me” (complete with “selfied” portrait), the “Show Me the Money” app encourages users – young and old – to think about how symbols and icons generate or subvert value, and harnesses their creativity and imagination to help them become savvier about the financial values in which they are more and more obligated to believe.

Children’s love of role play also lends itself to learning about money and finance. Within the app, “Bulls and Bears,” a simple stock investment game, gives users an opportunity to experience the unpredictability of the trading floor and the surge of “animal spirits” that can turn an optimistic “bull” into a pessimistic “bear” in a heart beat. And “Dress for Success” allows users to kit themselves out for the role of City slicker or Wall Street mogul by designing one of the garish trading jackets worn by futures traders, and encourages them to think about how the ways in which financial professionals present themselves shape how they are perceived in the wider world.

Users of the app can share their bank note and trading jacket designs with friends and with the “Show Me the Money” exhibition. Selected submissions will appear in the gallery and on the exhibition’s web site. So to “show me the money!” let me add another exhortation: show us your money!

The exhibition, “Show Me the Money: The Image of Finance, 1700 to the Present” is on view at the Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art in Sunderland until 30 August, and then tours. More details at imageoffinance.com.

The “Show Me the Money” app is available to download for free for iPhone and iPad from the Apple App Store and for Android devices from Google Play.

Dr Paul Crosthwaite
@p_crosthwaite and @imageoffinance 

My favourite Edinburgh street name – and a salute to my PhD research into British Sign Language storytelling traditions – is Dumbiedykes Road, site of the first Academy for the Deaf and Dumb and named for the ‘dummies’ that frequented the area. Established in 1760, the school relocated to London 23 years later; that brief period 231 years ago is fossilised in today’s Edinburgh.

This is a rare example of Scotland’s deaf heritage appearing on the map. The deaf community’s histories go unnoticed, and British Sign Language (BSL) is often overlooked on lists of the country’s indigenous minority languages. People may mistakenly believe that BSL is not a ‘real’ language at all, that it was ‘invented’ by hearing people; in fact, it developed naturally – as languages do – through communities. There is regional variation in BSL and many sign dialects in Scotland, even some debate about whether these are distinctive enough to constitute “Scottish Sign Language”. One thing is certain: BSL has never been a manual ‘version’ of spoken English. It has a completely different grammar and an equal capacity for complexity; I’ve heard it described as a ‘visual-spatial sketchpad’.

There have been deaf signing communities in Scotland since at least the Industrial Revolution, and even some evidence from the 15th century. Yet there is no written form of any sign language, therefore no historical records of signed literature and lore. Deaf culture was – perhaps ironically – passed on through the ‘oral’ tradition: ‘by sign of hand’ not ‘word of mouth’. Equally ironically given its visual nature, BSL culture remains essentially invisible to most hearing people – simply not on their radar.

Place-names are one example of this. Missing from maps and road-signs are their unwritten sign-names. Granted, many of these are borrowed from the hearing world, which reflects the influence of majority culture on BSL. To illustrate: BSL’s fingerspelling alphabet can transliterate written names, as in FK for Falkirk, GW for Glasgow. Other sign-names are based on homonyms: a sign for live is employed for Livingston, and a sign for bath combines with gate to form Bathgate. Yet some sign-names have no apparent connection to the ‘hearing’ name for the place, having developed from a different set of references. Some are obscure (I know no explanation for the sign-name Perth), while others play on visual associations (Shetland’s sign-name alludes to the patterned sweaters traditionally worn there) or historical ones (Stirling may be a cognate of victory, referring to the Battle of Bannockburn; Portobello may allude to its links with the beer industry). There are, predictably, many potential interpretations and folk etymologies for sign-names, and there has not yet been a comprehensive place-name survey undertaken in BSL.

For me, one particularly inspiring thing about learning BSL is that another dimension of nomenclature is emerging on my map of Scotland, and with it a sensation of strangerhood in places I felt I knew intimately. My general understanding of the Celtic, Anglic, Scandinavian and Pictish roots of Scottish place-names is enriched by a set of toponyms in a different modality, developed in a signed tradition. If Scotland of the past and present is a palimpsest of overlaid and interlocking communities, then there is another heritage written in invisible ink: the handprint of the deaf community, another lens through which to explore our surroundings.

Ella Leith is a third year PhD student in Scottish Ethnology, a BSL learner and an amateur place-names enthusiast.
Twitter: @leithyface
Many thanks to Bryan Marshall for the conversations that inspired this blog. Any errors in the sign-name clips are my own.