Monthly Archives: May 2017

Women and careers in STEMM: challenges, barriers and achievements of pioneers and today’s professionals

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This post was contributed by Viviana Meschitti, a member of the Birkbeck TRIGGER team

trigger-pisa-event2On May 22 2017, the two TRIGGER teams from Birkbeck, University of London and the University of Pisa came together to organise an event to discuss the career pathways of women in STEMM disciplines: Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics and Medicine. The focus of the event was to discuss challenges and barriers to women in STEMM areas, in which they are significantly underrepresented, but also to foreground vital breakthroughs and achievements. The international collaboration of the TRIGGER project serves to show that the importance of gender equality is recognised worldwide, and was emphasised by the commitment expressed by the three male senior executives of the University of Pisa, who welcomed the participants and the audience of more than 30 people to this workshop.

There are nuances within each working environment and within each discipline, but whether it is biology, computer science or the arts and humanities, there are still many problems to overcome on the road to achieving gender equality in the workplace – from unconscious bias and career breaks, to flexible working and promotional opportunities. As many previous TRIGGER workshops have highlighted, the most important point made at this event was that one cannot place a high enough value on collecting data, which can be used as evidence of problems and solutions.

Rita Biancheri, Professor of Sociology at the University of Pisa, kicked off proceedings by providing an overview of the European data that clearly demonstrates an underrepresentation of women in STEMM disciplines. She also focused on the phenomenon of the “leaky pipeline”, an image used to illustrate the number of women decreasing along the academic career path from PhD to Professor. Disciplinary culture plays a pivotal role; Professor Biancheri presented the work that the TRIGGER team conducted at Pisa with a particular focus on engineering and medicine. In engineering, there is already a clear underrepresentation of women at undergraduate level, but the phenomenon of the leaky pipeline is not as significant later on. In the case of medicine, the number of women undergraduates has started to equal and even overcome those of men for many years, but then the leaky pipeline is particularly strong, meaning that a small minority of women occupy positions at the top of the academic sphere.

Representing the Birkbeck TRIGGER team, I shifted the focus to the situation at Birkbeck, and highlighted two points: first, that there is an increased pressure on more junior scholars to succeed in obtaining grants or publishing; and secondly that, independent of their familial situation, women are still the ones expected to “take care”, both within their family and their respective department. She highlighted the case of the Department of Biological Sciences at Birkbeck, which has been recognised historically as an especially good environment for research and for women researchers. The importance of having role models (like Rosalind Franklin, for example), and of the willingness to bring in women, has been reiterated by staff members participating in the TRIGGER research.

Ania Lopez, a mechanical engineer, works for the Italian National Council of Engineers to promote women’s careers and contribution in the engineering sector. She highlighted the achievements of recent years: an increase in women joining the Register of Engineers and the launch of “Ingenio al femminile” – an initiative to promote women’s contribution. An annual event is organised within the framework of this initiative, to discuss research on issues affecting women’s careers, such as the gender pay gap. Last year’s event was attended by equal numbers of men and women, which she considered a great achievement.

Caterina Franchini and Emilia Garda, researchers at the Polytechnic of Turin, presented the European project MoMoWo, focused on promoting women’s contributions in Architecture and Design. They discussed the issue of women not being represented in books about the History of Architecture, and have created a database to collect the history of almost 200 hundred women architects active in the last century, to underline their ground-breaking work. They also stressed the importance of raising awareness of the profession in younger generations; in collaboration with several architects, they have organised open days for people interested in visiting ateliers.

A panel discussion followed these presentations to shed light on a number of associated topics. Ania Lopez described women’s feeling of marginalisation, and that their avoidance to voice concern might be difficult if they are in a minority. It is vital to provide women academics with transferable skills to boost their confidence, but also, at a grassroots level, to train parents to educate their children as equals and avoid gender segregating activity. Caterina Franchini and Emilia Garda also focused on the family issue – how can women with small children be seen as able to focus solely on their career, when they are always placed in a position requiring challenging negotiation? This prompted discussion on the issue of quotas and meritocracy: Ania Lopez underlined that quotas do not help to promote women’s professional image, while Caterina Franchini suggested the problem must be reframed and seen in the wider context of underrepresentation of some specific groups.

The learned outcomes can be summarised as follows:

  • In different disciplines, the problems in relation to women’s underrepresentation are different: it is important to regularly collect and monitor data and design tailored initiatives
  • Women’s historical contribution within disciplines should be foregrounded
  • It is vital to increase young people’s awareness of the opportunities offered within the professions
  • Both women and men must be educated to consider and discuss the challenges related to gender equality.

The TRIGGER team would like to thank Birkbeck School of Business, Economics and Informatics, which provided a funding grant for this event.

You can find out more about the TRIGGER project on our website or follow us on Twitter @TRIGGERbbk

Arts Week 2017: “Doing and thinking: methods in practice-based research”

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Dr Maria Kukhareva, Educational Developer at the University of Bedfordshire reflects on the interaction of creativity and academia following a workshop as part of Birkbeck Arts Week 2017.creativity-academiaAs an interdisciplinarian (both by background and by own curiosity) I seek opportunities to be amazed by the way different disciplines and approaches interact, the conflict and tension borne out of this process, and the turbulent energy and questions it has potential to generate.

I recently participated in the ‘Doing and Thinking’ workshop during Arts Week, which gathered an exciting and diverse crowd of practicing artists, researchers, and artist-researches – both Birkbeck’s own and external enthusiasts, like me.

Here, I broaden the focus of the workshop and turn to the discourse around creativity, rigour and scholarship in higher education – and what it means for the creative practitioners and researchers, as well as the wider academic community.

“Is it alive or is it ref-able?”

What the workshop discussion demonstrated very quickly and relatively clearly, is that there seems to be a vast and deep ocean between the mysterious continent inhabited by the creative practitioners, and the equally mysterious land of “this is how things are done in academia”.

The ocean was represented by a heap of colourful cards with research (and life?) related words on our tables. As we were shuffling through them, we realised we could not agree on the meanings, values and emotions of some seemingly common words, for example:

impact (think: theatre performance versus academic publication)
serendipity and intuition as a driving force (think: visual arts versus systematic research)
discomfort and doubt (think: open creative process versus evaluation outcomes)

In fact, words and language in general continued to be the cause of frustration, namely the incompatibility of creative output (a painting, a book, a film) and the academic language accompaniment (a thesis).

One could almost imagine how creativity and its magic, so necessary for any artist’s existence, breaks into pieces on encountering the academic expectation. As if to become an academic scholar, an artist needs to give up a part of their soul in exchange for the gifts of rigour, systematic inquiry and strictly formatted self-expression and self-representation. As if the fruits of your labour can either be ‘alive’ or ‘ref-able.’

But… is this really the only way to cross the ocean?

“Follow your nose”

Let’s view creative practice – whether you are a professional artist, early researcher or an educator in any given field – as something you NEED. Whether it’s where you experiment, or where your intuition, or some other undefined drive pushes you to create news things. It’s where a part of your soul lives; it’s something that fuels your daily activity. It’s what inspires your signature pedagogy, your authorial voice and what gives it life – as demonstrated effectively by Emma Bennett, Katherine Angel and Catherine Grant.

If this is what your creative practice does, then not only does it not go against the ‘traditional’ academic activity, with its rigour, systematic approach, structure, format and language – rather, creative practice makes the academic activity possible and interesting, from teaching to publishing.

The messy, unstructured creativity with a mind of its own, should be preserved and nurtured, rather than ‘re-trained’ when entering the world of traditional academic boundaries and standards. As Thomas Fisher has pointed out, creativity can be a rigorous process.

In other words – ‘it’ needs to be alive to be ref-able.

I would like to invite the reader to consider the following questions:

  • How and where do your practice and research activity co-exist?How disparate or how close are these two preoccupations? Do they fuel or hinder each other?
  • Which one of these (research or practice activity) offers more scope for creativity?
  • How does your creative and experimental activity drive your signature approach?
  • And lastly, how can we preserve and nurture our creativity, while we are developing our academic identities and careers?

On that note, I am off to read Katherine Angel’s book!

Contact Maria Kukhareva:
@maria_kukhareva
University of Bedfordshire profile

 

Arts Week 2017: Landscape and Power

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Memory Wound by Jonas Dahlberg

Memory Wound by Jonas Dahlberg

Those of us who signed up to the Landscape and Power lecture during Birkbeck Arts Week 2017 would have seen an arresting image posted on the event flyer. In the talk in Room BO3 of 43 Gordon Square we learn that this image is computer generated. It is of a proposed memorial, entitled ‘Memory Wound’, to the victims of the mass murder by Anders Breivik on the island of Utoya, Norway which formed part of a discussion by Joel McKim (Birbeck) on memorials and landscape. Swati Chattopadhyay (University of California Santa Barbara) also spoke on the cultural landscape of British Colonialism in Bengal, India. David Haney (University of Kent) discussed architecture and German landscape history.

We see how humans have shaped their cultural and political identity by way of landscape in a journey that  took us around the globe and through time. Chattopadhyay’s presentation focused on architecture in Lucknow in the 1850s, in particular Dilkusha Palace. Dilkusha was built in the 1800s as a hunting lodge in an English Baroque style. In 1857 it was the scene of an Indian uprising against the British, a battle which is now considered a precursor in the campaign for Indian independence. The building was damaged in the siege and later abandoned by the British and left to decay. Later on though, the gardens were replanted and nurtured, and visited by British residents and tourists. Lucknow is known as the city of gardens. It’s well documented by Victorian novelist Edith Cuthell in her book ‘My garden in the City of Gardens’.

David Haney’s presentation looked at the Nazi cultural landscape, strengthening territory through earth–rooted monuments. Haney discussed Hitler’s decentralization of Nazi power away from Nuremberg by building Order Castles, such as Ordensburg Vogelsang built in 1936 in Eifel (North Rhine-Westphalia). Ordensburg Vogelsang was primarily a training ground for Hitler youth but was also visited by working people at the weekend for moral edification. This masculine composition, based on a medieval fortress, appeared to meld into the landscape, as if it was hewn from a rock face, emerging from the soil. In truth, a great deal of state of the art Nazi technology was used during its construction. The building has since been erased and is referred to as a Third Reich ruin.

Birbeck’s Joel McKim observed that, overall, contemporary memorial design has shifted from objects to memory spaces in the landscape. This shift has come with a secularisation of memorials, away from monuments stretching towards the heavens with celestial themes. He cited the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC, designed by architect Maya Lin which has an edge to the earth, an open side.

Fresh Kills (kills is the Dutch word for stream) on Staten Island, formerly a landfill site visible from outerspace, is being restored as a public park in memory of 9/11.  The attack on the World Trade Centre on 9/11 represented a direct attack on home soil, a violation of the national body. In this case this memorial must have a direct relationship to the landscape. The memorial at Fresh Kills is underway, but it’s expected to take at least 30 years before completion. Matters have been further complicated because Fresh Kills is where forensic teams are sorting through remains, including human debris, from 9/11.

In 2014, Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg’s artwork ‘Memory Wound’ was selected as the  memorial to the Utoya massacre, whereby a 3.5 metre slit is cleaved into the Sørbråten Peninsula, pointing towards Utoya . Memory Wound signifies a wound in the landscape, within nature itself in memory of the 77 people that were killed.  The memorial is sanctioned by the Norwegian government but has given rise to serious objections from the local artistic community and residents of Utoya because of its extreme nature. Survivors of the massacre and family members have mixed views towards the memorial.

The panel members were questioned about the growth of ‘trauma tourism’ and the ethics behind it during the Q and A that followed. They agreed these memorials should invoke a sense of respect for the deceased and for their suffering. At the end of this informative discussion it was highlighted that taking selfies around these memorials is entirely inappropriate.

Sonali Jayetileke is an alumna of Birkbeck’s Certificate of  Journalism, 2012 (www.fifthplinthwriters.co.uk)

Arts Week 2017: Underground Films from the Barrelstout Archive (1968-2016)

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Bev Zalcock and Sara Chambers have been making underground films together performing as themselves and/or with their friends since the early 1990s.  Under the name Barrelstout Productions (formally known as Pitbull Productions), their super 8 films fashion what they like to call a ‘home-made aesthetic’. With two new films to show in the Arts Week film programme, their present count of 27 short films (or ‘quickies’, if you like) is no mean feat.  Bev (who is an Associate Lecturer in Film Studies at Birkbeck) and her partner and collaborator Sara came to the Birkbeck Cinema on the first Monday of Birkbeck Arts Week 2017 to show a cornucopia of queer feminist experimental films from their extensive archive.

As is usual with Barrelstout screenings, on arrival we were given a brightly coloured (this time pink) hand out that carefully listed the evening’s running order of films with brief synopses, as well as information on Bev Zalcock/Pitbull Productions/Barrelstout’s complete filmography dating back to Zalcock’s suitably titled first film Untitled, from 1968.

In the programme notes, they write: “Our film influences are various, ranging from Early Cinema, Soviet Montage, The American Underground and the best elements of Exploitation Cinema. We like to think that our films try to pay tribute to key moments and movements in cinema’s history, as well as our own lives. They are, we hope, experimental, comical and maybe political”.

Bev & Sara whipped through nine films with pithy intros in just over 60 minutes, so instead of reviewing each film shown, here are a few personal highlights from the evening.

The programme started with Rose Tinted (2007) a tender homage to American artist Joseph Cornell’s experimental collage film Rose Hobart (1936). A delightful, theatrical, found footage piece that merges avant-garde and feminist film theory where Anita Ekberg is re-worked into the narrative to create a feminist consciousness and, arguably, a feminist aesthetic.

The Deep Purple Film (2012). Courtesy of Barrelstout

The Deep Purple Film (2012). Courtesy of Barrelstout

Following on was a film from Bev’s teenage years The Deep Purple Film (2012), described as ‘autobiographical moments in Bev’s adolescence’.  Set to Nino Tempo and April Stevens 1962 hit tune ‘The Deep Purple Song’, this poignant film that plays with abstraction explores feelings of isolation, family and identity through an archive of family photographs. “It is what academics would call the transience of memory”, Bev postscripts with a wink at the film’s introduction.

At a running time of 9 minutes, The Psycho-Delic Trilogy was the longest film of the evening, consisting of three wonderful shorts (two which were world premieres) that deftly focused on the experimental tropes of colour, light and rhythm. Southwark Spring (2016), a psychedelic landscape film shot in Bermondsey, burst pink and white blossom out of the frame. Shot on slide and transferred to super 8, this nature ‘quickie’ is a celebration and memento to the glorious primary colours only captured on analogue.  Sara Gets Carried Away (2017) is a remake of Sara Gets Carried Away (2007), a structural film of sorts, in which the film’s medium is explored. Real ITV footage of Sara being dragged away by the police at an NUJ demonstration is repeated on a loop with music from Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (1951), evoking a semi-meditative yet strange atmosphere. The final film in the trilogy Liz – Moments in Transfigured Time (2017) was a moving portrait of one of Bev’s oldest friends Liz. With a nod to Maya Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time (1946), the film is a tender study of long-term female friendship. Lovingly captured through a simple shot of Liz sitting on a sofa drinking red wine, the film evokes early memories of their time spent together “when we were young, listening to Beefheart music”, Bev adds.

The evening’s screening was a delight. The cinema was full of Bev and Sara’s long-term friends and collaborators (Carol Morley, Cairo Cannon, Val Phoenix), as well as new audiences. The specialness of a Barrelstout screening is that due to copyright infringements none of their films are available on line. “We can’t show stuff online” Sara says, “as we would be dragged to the clink”, so they need to be watched collectively in a cinema. Regardless of the heated debates about the future of cinema coming out of Cannes right now regarding Netflix, to come together to experience Barrelstout’s particular aesthetic of queer feminist punk cinema feels radical, resistant and restorative, every time.

“We want our films to be enjoyed and we want to convey the enjoyment we experience in making them. To misquote Marilyn Tweedie “We require filmic pleasure!”

Some Barrelstout films are available through Cinenova, otherwise contact them directly.

Selina Robertson is a film PhD candidate in FMACS,  School of Arts at Birkbeck.