SILK Seminar Series
Landscape in Pain - art, community and place
- 29 February 2024
- Roxane Permar
- 1pm-2pm
Contemporary societal threats, such as the climate crisis, nuclear disaster and the coronavirus pandemic are global in proportion, crossing political and geographic borders. Communities in the Highlands and Islands, such as Shetland, are connected through shared experience of these threats.
How do we achieve balance between sustainable development and care for the communities rich in resources, such as wind and tidal power, being mined by multi-national corporations across the northern region? How can the arts make visible the extractivist principles and practices which threaten to destabilise communities such as Shetland in the global quest to tackle the climate crisis?
Roxane Permar - Centre for Island Creativity, UHI Shetland
Roxane Permar is Professor in Art and Social Practice in the Centre for Island Creativity, UHI Shetland, where she is a Research Fellow. Her arts-based research practice explores societal threats, specifically nuclear disaster and climate crisis, including the impact and fears these can cause. She is Programme Leader for the MA Art and Social Practice and supervises postgraduate researchers in creative practice.
Environmental conflicts and riverine cosmopolitics: the Case of the São Francisco River as a living being
- 24 January 2024
- Mauro Toledo
Focusing on the construction project of the Formoso Hydroelectric Plant and its impacts on local communities and indigenous peoples along the middle course of the São Francisco River. In this context, riverside people belonging to local communities demand the Brazilian State's attention to the "health" of the river, identifying the HPP project as a "death project", being a threat to the river, to the territories and all human beings and more than human beings who co-inhabit this environment.
Thus, the research identifies the emergence of the São Francisco River as a subject of rights, through the relationship that riverside communities establish with the river and investigates what lessons are learned with the riverside world and more-than-human beings in the ruins of the Anthropocene.
Mauro Toledo - Institute of Development Studies
Mauro Toledo identifies himself as a "riverside" Brazilian, born on the banks of the same river that he researches today. He has a bachelor's degree in social sciences from the State University of Montes Claros (Unimontes), a master's degree in social sciences with an emphasis on rural anthropology from the Federal Rural University of Rio de Janeiro and is currently a doctoral student at Unimontes in the postgraduate program in Social Development.
In his research and professional career, he has been involved with indigenous peoples and local communities in the North region of the State of Minas Gerais, Brazil. His main research focuses have been on environmental conflicts, large development projects, "traditional territories" and local knowledge as an interface with ecology.
Home, Hearth and Heritage – exploring inter-disciplinary approaches for documenting Uist’s taigh-tughaidh.
- 12 October 2023
- Dr Rebecca Rennell and Dr Iain Robertson
- 1pm-1.50pm
The research explores methods for documenting tangible and intangible heritage relating to Uist’s Taighean Tughaidh – traditional thatched houses. The remains of these buildings are found widely across the island landscape, most at stages of ruin and disrepair, a few renovated for the tourist market. Use of these buildings and the lives associated with them is just about within living memory. But within a generation both the physical remains of these buildings and the related cultural heritage will have largely disappeared. This research seeks to establish a community-based, interdisciplinary methodology, that combines archaeology, specifically digital recording techniques, social history and oral history practices, for documenting fragile, living heritage.
Iain Robertson, Centre for History; UHI
Iain is a historian by training but a historical geographer by inclination. Consequently, almost everything he does has landscape(s) either at or close to its heart; with a particular focus on the twentieth-century Highlands and Islands. These interests have led Iain down two main, interlinked research paths. His journey began with a close and ongoing passionate interest in the historical geography of land disturbances in the Highlands and Islands between the two World Wars, but an interest in their memorialisation subsequently led him to develop an interest in critical heritage studies. This led directly to the formulation of the concept of “heritage from below” which has had a global impact and to a wide range of publications including ‘Hardscrabble Heritage: The Ruined Blackhouse and Crofting Landscape as Heritage from below’ (2015). His most recent work focuses on ‘The phantasmagorical heritage of fences’ (forthcoming 2024).
Rebecca Rennell, UHI North, West and Hebrides
Becky is based at the UHI NWH campus at Cnoc Soilleir in South Uist. She has worked with the UHI Archaeology Institute since 2015. Becky was originally brought into the institute to develop teaching material with the UHI Educational Development Unit, creating a series of innovative virtual field trips that enabled archaeology students to remotely engage with archaeological sites and landscapes across the Highlands and Islands. Following on from this, she developed the Digital Heritage and Digital Analysis modules for undergraduate and post-graduate archaeology programmes. Becky now teaches on a number of postgraduate modules including the Archaeology of the Highlands and Islands, Digital Analysis and Art and Archaeology and on undergraduate modules Prehistory of the Highlands and Islands, Digital Heritage and Archaeology Project. Becky also manages the Uist Virtual Archaeology Project and coordinates SIRFA – Scotland’s Island Research Framework for Archaeology.
Beyond ethics: Developing a sustainable approach to community research
- 7 December 2023
- Dr Bobby Macaulay
- 1-2pm
There is increasing academic interest in understanding more about the lives and work of individuals and communities in the Highlands and Islands. While such intellectual curiosity about the people and culture of the region is to be welcomed, there is increasing evidence of the negative impacts of misdirected research and irresponsible researcher behaviour, while deriving little benefit for respondents.
One of the areas which has attracted significant research attention is community landownership, with trustees and volunteers becoming inundated by unsustainable research requests. While each of these researchers may be well-meaning and abide by ethical standards, the volume and lack of coordination may lead some communities to refuse to participate in any future studies. In this way, the unsustainable exploitation of a researcher’s primary resource – data – could ultimately lead to its exhaustion.
This seminar will present the work of the Community Landownership Academic Network (CLAN) in seeking to find a practical alternative to such unsustainable and extractive practices. CLAN’s recently developed Knowledge Exchange Strategy (co-produced with community landowners and other stakeholders) outlines recommendations for strategic research coordination, standards for ‘best practice’ in community engagement, and an accessible resource to ensure that research is relevant and addressing a specific gap in knowledge. Through these and other measures, CLAN seeks to make a positive case for community-based research going ‘beyond ethics’- not simply avoiding harm but deriving tangible benefit to respondents while delivering robust and impactful academic outputs. It is hoped that this approach may be applicable to other areas of community-based research at UHI and beyond.
Dr Bobby Macaulay, Research Fellow at the Centre for Mountain Studies at UHI Perth
Originally from Shetland, his academic background has focused on the role and impact of community organisations in rural and island settings, with a particular interest in the field of land reform. He is the Coordinator of the Community Landownership Academic Network (CLAN) and sits on the Committee of the Scottish Land Fund.