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

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

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

‘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.

Ray Burnett delivers on ‘Pelle the Conqueror: Reflections on History, the Arts and Small Islands’

Ray Burnett, SCIS Hon. Research Fellow,  will deliver a plenary session paper at the ISISA 2010 conference at the Bornholm Art Museum. The paper entitled “Commemorating Pelle the Conqueror: Reflections on History, the Arts and Small Islands” is part of the wider programme of delivery of this years conference. For details of all papers and sessions click here: http://www.conferencemanager.dk/ISISA/program.html

The abstract for Ray’s paper can be read here:

Commemorating Pelle the Conqueror: Reflections on History, the Arts and Small Islands

Ray Burnett

Isle of Benbecula, Outer Hebrides, Scotland

Scottish Centre for Island Studies, University of the West of Scotland

ray@diis.ac.uk

The life and times of the writer Martin Andersen Nexø is most often presented and discussed either in the context of his literary career as a major Scandinavian novelist of the twentieth century or his political career as a prominent cultural figure in Europe’s anti-fascist struggles, a committed member of the Danish Communist Party and a resolute defender of the Soviet Union. In each of these overlapping contexts his significance for Danish, Scandinavian and European literature, culture and politics is enduringly associated with his classic novel, Pelle the Conqueror. Published over 1906-1910, it vividly drew on Martin Andersen Nexø’s deep memories of his childhood and formative years on Bornholm and the island town of Nexø which he later took as his adopted name. This paper commemorates the centenary of the publication of the final volume of Pelle the Conqueror by approaching Martin Andersen Nexø from a specifically island studies perspective to raise the question: in what way might his portrayal of island life be of relevance to issues of culture, history and the arts in small islands beyond Bornholm, the Baltic and Scandinavia?

It offers some tentative reflections on this question by identifying some of the themes in Nexo’s portrayal of Baltic island life and tracing their applicability to comparable themes and issues in the small island communities of Scotland through a specific focus on history and the arts, reality and representations, in the Hebrides. The paper seeks to confirm the importance of Martin Andersen Nexø as a writer and observer of small island life and to raise awareness of the wider comparative significance of other writers and artists from within Scotland’s small island communities. It concludes with the reflection that there are several aspects of comparative small island research in relation to history and the arts, both within a specific Scottish-Nordic-Baltic arc and beyond, that would benefit from further collaborative engagement.

From the Hebrides to Herm

SCIRI 2010 ART AND ISLANDS ISLOMANIA CONFERENCE

See images here of the trip to the island of Herm during the conference.  Compton MacKenzie lived on the island of  Herm from 1920-1923. See here for some additional images and details of his time on the island and neighbouring Jethou. http://www.ciss1950.org.uk/herm_postcards.html or  for some information on the tenants of Jethou, including MacKenzie, see this link http://www.faed.net/cfaed/jethou/jethou.htm

A co-authored paper (Ray Burnett and Kathryn A Burnett)  on  the legacy and influence Compton MacKenzie and other writers and film makers have had on the  iconography and representation of  Scotland’s Hebrides was delivered by Ray Burnett, Hon. Research Fellow, School of Creative and Cultural Industries,  to the SICRI 2010 ART AND ISLANDS ISLOMANIA CONFERENCE  conference in Guernsey.