SRUC Islands Webinar: Mike and Kathryn present on islands enterprise research

Enterprising Islanders. The promotion of localism, foundational economies and community wealth building.

Danson, M. and Burnett, K.A. SRUC Islands Webinar Series Invited Talk. June 2021

'Enterprising islanders' – join our next #islands webinar on Wed 30 June 2-3.30om, led by @MikeDanson1 and @KA_Burnett who will present and discuss their recent work. Sign up here ➡️ https://t.co/N4lM6pnlGo#landreform #community #Scotland #rural https://t.co/0zzahbO2ha

— Rural Policy Centre (@RuralPolicySRUC) June 18, 2021

Big thanks to SRUC @RuralPolicySRUC, Dr Jane Atterton and colleagues for the Islands Webinar series invitation and really great to have all questions, examples, observations, and ‘where and what next ‘comments and feedback from webinar participants.

The wealth of island community knowledge, activity and energy is crucial in any wider policy and evaluation process; so too is the opportunity to connect, bridge and share old and new history and experiences. Thank you: loads “to think with” and “to do with” together!

Please see the recent book, a collection of island studies essays for further linkages discussed in part in our talk Scotland and Islandness (2021).

See also our invitation to submit an idea or suggestion for our Tides essay series. This series in the 2020-2021 Year of Coasts and Water is just launched this month. Do look at the information on how to get in touch and offer a note of interest to contribute a short essay or commentary to our Tides focus online: scotcis.wordpress.com/tides-short-essays-and-commentaries-on-and-of-interest-to-scottish-island-studies/.

The first Tides essay was by Mike on this very theme of Enterprising Islanders. The promotion of localism, foundational economies and community wealth building. June 1st 2021.

Islands Cultural Work: A Canadian – Scottish Focus

Research is being developed on the theme of cultural work on islands in both Scotland and Canada. Dr Lynda Harling Stalker, St Francis Xavier University, Canada and Dr Kathryn A Burnett, UWS, Scotland are developing a series of research objectives on the theme of cultural work in island settings. A number of field sites have already been explored and ethnographic work undertaken.

SCIS UWS at Cape Breton island cultures conference

 

Gaelic College Centre for Celtic Arts and Crafts, St Anns, Cape Breton

Kathryn A. Burnett, Ray Burnett, and Mike Danson all of SCIS@UWS each delivered papers to the Eighth International Small Islands Conference, 6-9 June 2012, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada.

The conference theme was Traveling in Time: Islands of the Past, Islands of the Future, and organized by the Centre for Cape Breton Studies, along with the Department of History & Culture and the School of Art & Social Science at Cape Breton University, in collaboration with the Small Island Cultures Research Initiative (SICRI). http://sicri-network.org/. The conference was an excellent opportunity for SCIS colleagues to meet up with other island studies academics, creative artists and performers. Links were refreshed with colleagues from several island studies focused institutions including especially University of Prince Edward Island, St. Francis Xavier University, and Cape Breton University, Canada, and many new collaborative links were made with new friends from both Canada and beyond.

Key themes for the conference papers and the various field site visits and cultural activities on offer included: music legacies, art practice and performativity, indigenous culture and language of islands peoples,  island narratives and practice of political resistance and expression, examination of island assets and community resources, and island industry and cultural entrepreneurship in the context of island studies critiques and global futures. The conference programme can be found here http://sicri-network.org/callforpapers/.

Cape Breton, Sydney Harbour

Gaelic College Centre for Celtic Arts and Crafts, St Anns, Cape Breton

Scottish Island Studies research chapter in Community Media edited collection

Kathryn A. Burnett and Tony Grace (2009) ‘Community, Cultural Resource and Media: Reflecting on Research Practice’  in Gordon, Janey (ed.) (2009) Notions of Community:  A Collection of Community Media Debates and Dilemmas; Oxford, Bern, Berlin, Bruxelles, Frankfurt am Main, New York, Wien, 2009. 310 pp., 5 ill.

ISBN 978-3-03911-374-3 pb.

This volume gets beyond simple descriptions of the values and processes involved in community media and is deliberately seeking argument and structured debate around the issues of this vibrant sector of the media. The contributors examine the dilemmas that have emerged within this sector and provide an incisive overview. The chapters use case studies and data research to illustrate the major debates facing community media, along with a sideways look at the dilemmas that community media practitioners and their audiences must engage with.
This collection provides an international perspective and covers the traditional formats as well as newer media technologies. It also gives some intriguing examples of community media, which get beyond simple good practices.

http://www.peterlang.com/download/datasheet/50337/datasheet_11374.pdf

Contents: Janey Gordon: Introduction – Saba ElGhul-Bebawi: The Relationship between Mainstream and Alternative Media: A Blurring of the Edges? – Lawrie Hallett: The Space Between: Making Room for Community Radio – Janey Gordon: Community Radio, Funding and Ethics: The UK and Australian Models – Kathryn A. Burnett/Tony Grace: Community, Cultural Resource and Media: Reflecting on Research Practice – Katie Moylan: Towards Transnational Radio: Migrant Produced Programming in Dublin – Gavin Stewart: Selling Community: Corporate Media, Marketing and Blogging – Michael Meadows/Susan Forde/Jacqui Ewart/Kerrie Foxwell: A Catalyst for Change? Australian Community Broadcasting Audiences Fight Back – Kitty van Vuuren: The Value and Purpose of Community Broadcasting: The Australian Experience – Pollyanna Ruiz: Manufacturing Dissent: Visual Metaphors in Community Narratives – Janey Gordon: The Mobile Phone and the Public Sphere: Mobile Phone Usage in Three Critical Situations – Jason Wilson/Barry Saunders/Axel Bruns: ‘Preditors’: Making Citizen Journalism Work – Dimitra L. Milioni: Neither ‘Community’ Nor ‘Media’? The Transformation of Community Media on the Internet.

Ainmeil Thar Cheudan: A Centenary Celebration of Sorley MacLean (1911-2011)

Ainmeal Thar Cheudan

A Centenary Celebration of Sorley MacLean (1911-2011) Thursday 16 – Saturday 18 June 2011 Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Isle of Skye In commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Sorley MacLean (1911 – 1996) Sabhal Mòr Ostaig and the Scottish Centre for Island Studies, Faculty of Business and Creative Industries, University of the West of Scotland invite you to join in a celebration of his life, work and legacy. It is anticipated that this event will offer a range of academic and creative responses to Sorley’s cultural and political legacy with particular attention to his deep roots and referencing of island culture, history and experience. Furthermore, this proposed event will explore, with both established and more recently introduced scholars and artists, the significance and importance of Sorley MacLean within the wider context of the national culture of Scotland, the cultural terrain of the Highlands and Islands, and the cultural engagement of the 20th century Scottish left. The academic focus will be a two day event structured around a selection of papers and discussion panels, as well as performance and creative practice activity detailing both Sorley’s own work and his inspiration to others. In keeping with the internationalist perspectives that permeate Sorley’s own work, the event will be framed as an opportunity to offer an appreciation of what experiences and understanding of island life and culture, and of an island sense of place and dwelling, specifically but not exclusively in reference to Scotland, informed Sorley in his creative work and commentary. Online Booking: Access  event website at http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/A-Cholaiste/Naidheachdan/somhairle/index_en.html

SCIS research teaching linkages: SCIS research projects presented to UWS MA Creative Media Practice students, 17th March 2011

Ethnographic Approaches to Creative Media Practice Research

As part of the MA Creative Media Practice core module Research: Critical Development ( Module Co-ordinator Dr Kathryn A Burnett) both Kathryn Burnett and Kirsten MacLeod delivered to the year 2 students on this postgraduate course as part of a thematic week exploring ethnographic approaches to community media research and practice. Kathryn presented some examples from SCIS historical and archive projects informed by an ethnographic approach  in the island communities of  both the Outer Hebrides and  Tristan da Cunha .

Kirsten’s presentation featuring her work on community media with particular reference to the Govan Banner’s film. Kirsten spoke to the students about her background in Visual Anthropology and offered some insights on taking an ‘ethnographic’ position in relation to community media practice in both urban and rural/island settings.

SCIS Research Seminar,CCA March 11th 2011

Research Seminar on Creative Media Practice

Friday 11th March 2011

CCA, UWS Space, Sauchiehall Street Glasgow

14:30 – 16:00.

SCIS doctoral research student Rachael Flynn will present her paper “Using the written letter as a fine-art source to inform and stimulate a creative practice-led enquiry.”

All welcome.

SCIS Research-Teaching linkages: SCIS research projects presented to UWS MA Creative Media Practice students, 3rd March 2011

Narrative Approaches to Creative Media Practice Research

As part of the MA Creative Media Practice core module Research: Critical Development ( Module Co-ordinator Dr Kathryn A Burnett) both film lecturer Tony Grace and SCIS doctoral student Rachael Flynn delivered to the year 2 students on this postgraduate course as part of a thematic week exploring narrative approaches to community media research and practice.

Ainmeal Thar Cheudan Sorley MacLean Centenary Research Event 2011

The Scottish Centre for Island Studies, at University of the West of Scotland will hold a centenary celebration research event in partnership with Sabhal Mòr Ostaig UHI and the Sorley MacLean Trust.  http://www.uws.ac.uk/schoolsdepts/mlm/sorley-maclean/index.asp 

Ainmeal Thar Cheudan

A Centenary Celebration of Sorley MacLean (1911-2011) Thursday 16 – Saturday 18 June 2011 Sabhal Mòr Ostaig, Isle of Skye In commemoration of the centenary of the birth of Sorley MacLean (1911 – 1996) Sabhal Mòr Ostaig and the Scottish Centre for Island Studies, Faculty of Business and Creative Industries, University of the West of Scotland invite you to join in a celebration of his life, work and legacy. It is anticipated that this event will offer a range of academic and creative responses to Sorley’s cultural and political legacy with particular attention to his deep roots and referencing of island culture, history and experience. Furthermore, this proposed event will explore, with both established and more recently introduced scholars and artists, the significance and importance of Sorley MacLean within the wider context of the national culture of Scotland, the cultural terrain of the Highlands and Islands, and the cultural engagement of the 20th century Scottish left. The academic focus will be a two day event structured around a selection of papers and discussion panels, as well as performance and creative practice activity detailing both Sorley’s own work and his inspiration to others. In keeping with the internationalist perspectives that permeate Sorley’s own work, the event will be framed as an opportunity to offer an appreciation of what experiences and understanding of island life and culture, and of an island sense of place and dwelling, specifically but not exclusively in reference to Scotland, informed Sorley in his creative work and commentary.

Please  contact either Kathryn A. Burnett ( kathryn.burnett@uws.ac.uk)  or Ray Burnett (ray.burnett@uws.ac.uk)  for information on SCIS’s partnership in this key event. For link  to download call for papers, event details and further booking information connect to: http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/A-Cholaiste/Naidheachdan/somhairle/index_en.html

SCIS PhD student Kirsten MacLeod presents at !Documentary Now! 2011

¡Documentary Now!

A Conference on the Contemporary Contexts and Possibilities of the Documentary, University of Westminster,  January 2011

AVPhd Panel presentation by SCIS PhD student Kirsten MacLeod, “I film therefore I am: Process, Practice and Participation in Community based Filmmaking”.

Kirsten MacLeod (University of the West of Scotland)

This paper will explore examples of community-based media in Scotland, focusing on participation in the production process and the construction of identity and knowledge. Using a visual practice based methodology, the research focuses on fieldwork examples of community based, collaborative video production, in urban and rural areas of Scotland.
The paper is concerned with exploring community media as a transformative social process, a catalyst for new relationships, experience and knowledge about the world. It presents community documentary projects as a lens through which to explore issues of participation, representation, identity and knowledge within communities.
Taking a fluid approach to community as meaningful and symbolically constructed (Cohen), and to community media as covering a spectrum of media which serves, reflects or involves communities, geographically bounded, or of interest (Atton, Jankowski), this paper presents participation as part of an ongoing process of production, which lives on beyond the end product of the actual media itself, in the situated social experiences of its participants.
By examining the process of production, the research deconstructs the filmmaking process, exploring how people engage in filmmaking as participants, but also as members of the audience community. How meaningful is community media to communities who produce it, as a process and in the longer term once the end product is “out there”?
Through examples from Glasgow and islands on the West coast of Scotland, as well as broader trends in Scottish community media, the paper describes how community media channels the situated-ness of knowledge and identity.
The paper advocates a practice led methodology, where the research engages directly with the process of filming and draws reflexively and practically on the researcher and participants’ experiences.

‘The Furthest Hebrides’: Critical reach from contested shores: Kathryn Burnett and Ray Burnett deliver to IGU 2010 Conference, island of Ven, Sweden

Finding Their Place: Islands in Social Theory

The Island of Ven, Sweden, 27–30 August, 2010

ABSTRACTS PARALLEL PAPER SESSION B1: Identity, culture, tradition and knowledge

 

 

 ‘The Furthest Hebrides’ : Critical reach from contested shores

Kathryn A Burnett & Ray Burnett

University of the West of Scotland, UK

 

Scotland’s islands are paradoxically peripheral yet conceptually central to an

understanding of the layered complexity of issues relating to land and identity in

contemporary 21 st  century Scotland. Through a specific focus on Scotland’s

western isles, this paper traces the authoring of the layered constructions and

reconstructions of space and place that has produced a dense and variegated

palimpsest; the process of the ‘making’ of the Hebrides. It examines visual and

documentary representations to draw out some of the issues of ‘belonging’ and

ownership, appropriation and dissemination, in the context of the nationalidentitarian

functions of culture, that are embedded in the complimentary and

contradictory ‘ways of seeing’ the contested terrain of island cultural landscape(s).

Through a grounded multi-disciplinary approach to the issues raised and the

exemplars elaborated on, the paper opens up several overlapping and inter-related

issues of concentric and conflicting identities, delineation of the field of cultural

discourse, the inscription of meaning and value and the production of cultural

landscapes, and the deeper processes of complicity, self colonialism and

subalternity.

The paper concludes by advocating that a detailed study of how these processes

of ‘making’ are mediated at local (island), national (Scottish) and supra-national

(UK) level opens up new channels for further research in the intricate waters of

the cultural dynamics of authorship, ownership, ‘belonging’ and power in the

politics of land and identity.

SCIS @ CCA research event on Rockets Galore! (1957) and recent Gaelic documentaries relating to the Uist ‘Rocket Range’

Scottish Centre for Island Studies

Screening and Research Event

Venue: CCA, Sauchiehall Street Glasgow

Thursday 9^th September 2010

The Scottish Centre for Island Studies in association with the Small Islands Film Trust is hosting a small research focussed event of film screenings and related discussions on the 9^th September 2010 in the UWS space at the CCA, Glasgow. For full programme see  details under ‘Our Events’.

Geopolitics: Political Spaces – Cultural Spaces

Screening(s):        Trusadh Series Deserting Uist (2010) MacTV  and  Na Rocaidean (2008)    MNE TV

Two different documentaries providing accounts of the history and communities affected by the establishment of the ‘Rocket range’ – RA Hebrides on ‘Uist’ in 1957. Extracts will be shown from both.

Iconography and Identity: Place and Non-place

Screening: Rockets Galore! (1957) Dir: Michael Relph

For information contact Kathryn A Burnett (kathryn.burnett@uws.ac.uk) or Ray Burnett (ray.burnett@uws.ac.uk).

Am Politician (1998): behind the ‘mystical romance’ of Whisky Galore!

Scottish Centre for Island Studies

Screening and Research Event

Venue: CCA, Sauchiehall Street Glasgow

Thursday 9^th September 2010

The Scottish Centre for Island Studies in association with the Small Islands Film Trust is hosting a small research focussed event of film screenings and related discussions on the 9^th September 2010 in the UWS space at the CCA, Glasgow. For full programme see  details under ‘Our Events’.

Creative and Critical Practice: History, Media and Representation

Screening: Am Politician (1991) – 2 parts MNE TV

This two part documentary chronicles the real story behind the mystical romance surrounding the sinking of the SS Politician on February the 5th 1941 off the island of Eriskay in the Western Isles of Scotland. Part 1 tells the story of the sinking and salvage of the ship and part 2 focuses on the Jamaican currency on board.