AHRC Connected Communities, D4D project. 

Why do I teach?

As a student I had some brilliant teachers whose classes made me think differently about what the study of literature was about. If it wasn’t for them I probably would not have carried on to do research at postgraduate level and beyond. Critical and Cultural Theory in particular made me understand literary criticism and its possibilities in new ways and it opened up a whole new set of problems and questions for me. It provided me with a new critical and conceptual language with which to engage with the material we studied. Teaching English at degree level is not simply about enabling people to pass an exam or a piece of coursework, it is about developing skills in critical thinking and analysis that can be used in a whole range of contexts and it is about encouraging students to have the confidence to make their own judgements about texts and arguments. I still think about seminars and tutorials that I had at university and suddenly think ‘oh, that’s what he/she meant’ — learning and thinking are processes that don’t stop at the end of a unit or a degree programme. I think that the best teachers foster a relationship to the subject that makes learning feel important, exhilarating and inclusive.

How I’ll teach you

I teach Critical and Cultural Theory at undergraduate level and a unit on bioethics and biopolitics at MA level. The units are designed around particular ‘problems’. For example, my third year unit, Critical and Cultural Theory II, introduces you to a range of theoretical, literary and cinematic texts that consider the definition and limits of human life, personhood and subjectivity in the historical and cultural conjuncture of late capitalist modernity. We focus upon key concepts in contemporary critical and cultural theory such as biopower and biopolitics, bare life, surplus humanity, personhood and the post-human. We explore these concepts in relation to current political and ethical debates around emergent scientific and medical technologies (organ donation, cloning, genetic selection, medical research on human subjects, artificial intelligence) and in relation to historical events such as the femicides in Ciudad Juarez (northern Mexico) and the buying and selling of human organs. The unit asks questions about the value of some lives over others and about the material effects of particular constructions of the human. The discussion of the theoretical material is coupled with a close analysis of literary and cinematic texts that focuses on the specific contribution of these cultural texts to our understanding of these debates and on the importance of form/genre and specific stylistic techniques in mediating these debates in particular ways. I try to design my teaching in a way which enables students to develop an increasingly sophisticated understanding of a particular concept and which demands close attention to the distinctive ways in which imaginative literature and cinema shape particular kinds of responses to the ‘problems’ they explore.

Why study…

Why study English? The history of English as a discipline is the history of different arguments and critical perspectives about what this ‘thing’ — literature — actually is, why it matters and how we might think about its social, ethical and political role. The fact that as a discipline it changes shape and direction has always fascinated me but fundamentally I think that literary texts (and films and TV drama etc) play an important role in shaping our perception of the world around us and our place within it. Learning to be suspicious of the uses and abuses of language and particular narrative and rhetorical devices is enormously important. Studying literature fosters an acute critical awareness and allows students to develop the ability to use language in creative and compelling ways themselves. It is also an opportunity to spend three years reading a range of texts that explore different worlds, different experiences and different problems. These are all things that carry on being relevant long after graduation.

Postgraduate teaching

I currently lead two MA units, BODY on MA Contemporary Literature, Film and Theory and MA English Studies and PRACTICES (for all MA pathways).  

Subject areas

English literature, critical and cultural theory, critical medical humanities, literary and cultural disability studies

I have acted as Director of Studies for a number of successfully completed PhD projects including:

Ana Miller, Under the Shadow of the Holocaust: Representing Violence and Complicity in Western modernity (AHRC funded, 2008)

Helen Pleasance (2010) The Spectral Memoir (AHRC funded, creative/critical project)

Aaron Jackson, Narrating England: Tolkien, the Twentieth Century, and English Cultural Self-Representation. (Completion, November 2015)

I have also been on the supervisory team (second or third supervisor) for eight other successfully completed projects on a range of topics 

Current PhD supervision

Director of studies (DoS) Spencer Meeks (University Scholarship), Corrective Lenses: Reading the Neuro-Turn

Acting DoS/joint supervision) Andreea Ros (University Scholarship), Gothic Contagion: Reproductive Themes in Gothic Representations of Infectious Disease

(DoS) Sumaira Naseem, ‘A Critical and Cultural Analysis of the Construction of a Disabled, Female, British Pakistani Identity’

(as first supervisor) Zoe Siobhan Bibbon, The Language of Menstruation

David Cane, Representations of disability in post-war British opera

Antonio Tilli, Pragmatics in Dementia Discourse. Linguistics, paralinguistic and extra linguistic cues in the communicative strategies of persons with Vascular Dementia (VaD)

My primary area of research investigates current critical, cultural and creative responses to dementia. I address this from two main perspectives. Firstly, how dementia is represented across a range of literary, filmic, televisual and auto/biographical texts, and secondly, how we might think about the role of the arts and humanities in relation to the lived experiences of dementia, ageing and the meanings of care. I am particularly interested in how we think about value in this context and what it means to try to measure and capture the value of the arts or creativity more generally. I am also interested in literary, televisual and cinematic representations of learning disability and I work closely with younger people with learning disabilities.  I also teach and write on current bioethical debates around personhood, citizenship and biosociality in the age of the genome.  I work closely with Dr Hannah Zeilig, a colleague at University of the Arts, London and alongside joint publications our aim is to develop an international network of Literary and Cultural Dementia Studies.

My research is intrinsically outward facing and underpinned by a commitment to working with groups of people outside academia. Over the last six years I have been involved in projects with a range of disability arts organisations and SMEs (Dash, Full Circle Arts and Disability Arts Online, Drake Music) and I am a leading academic partner on the research, development and commissioning process for Sick! Festival 2019 on the theme of inequalities. As organiser of the international conference, Present Difference: The Cultural Production of Disability, I worked with the BBC, ITV news, The British Diversity Forum, Full Circle Arts and Outside Centre (disability arts organisations) and the Cornerhouse cinema to produce an event that was open to disabled people and members of the general public. And as curator of the Manchester element of the first UK wide Disability Film Festival, I put together a programme and themed sessions which combined archival news footage, short films and animation to explore the themes of love, work and ordinariness.

My workstream (‘Now you see us’) on my current AHRC funded project, D4D: disability and community involves work with youth zones (Bolton Lads and Girls Club), a local school (Parrenthorn in Prestwich) and the New Vic Theatre in Stoke, the aim being to work together using arts-based approaches to explore questions of community, identity, equality and inclusion. D4D is shaped around stake-holder co-production and involves working with a range of organisations: ADWUK (Action on Disability and Work UK), DAO (Disability Arts Online), DadaFest, DRUK (Disability Rights UK), Graeae Theatre Company, Mencap, Stroke support groups (Bristol and Cornwall), MS Society UK, NDACA (National Disability Arts Collection and Archive) - SHAPE ARTS. I have also worked closely with the artist and film maker Liz Crow to bring her exhibition Resistance about the T4 project to the Zion Arts Centre in Hulme (February/March 2012) and I have recently published a co-produced piece with her about the use of new social media in arts-based disability activism based on an analysis of the twitter feed that was generated by her exhibition, ‘Bedding Out’. My research on dementia, ageing and disability has also developed through my engagement with creative enterprises such as the Manchester based Small Things. I was a named academic partner on the Arts Council England funding application for ‘The Island’, a project that used The Tempest in the production of a new piece of theatre with residents with dementia at Shore Green in Wythenshaw. This work is discussed in a forthcoming essay with my colleague Hannah Zeilig in John Keady et al, Social Research Methods in Dementia Studies: Inclusion and Innovation (forthcoming 2017).  I have also been invited to serve on the advisory board for a Scottish Film Education project on autism in film and engaging young people with a diagnosis of autism as learners, audience, film makers and actors. I curated Discovery Zone 11 (‘Brainy quotations’) for the Brain box event, Manchester Day (June 19th), and I convened the international Value, Creativity and Human Flourishing workshop here at Manchester Metropolitan University (July 27th-28th). This event that brought together academics, artists, care providers and service users in the exploration of the potential, limits and impact of the arts in relation to questions of human flourishing.