English and Creative Arts research

Summer 2026

April: ‘Inspiring Climate Action: Immersive Methods to Engagement’

Yu Sun (Glasgow), ‘Cultivating a green culture via capturing carbon emissions in China: grassroots visual data as alternative climate knowledge infrastructure’

This project explores how the crowdsourced visual data from citizens serves as a means of “material participation” (Ryghaug et al., 2018) and opens up alternative ways to generate climate knowledge and low carbon culture in the specific sociopolitical and sociocultural context of China. ENGOs and public sectors have been developing green campaigns to engage ordinary citizens as alternative actors in the production of carbon knowledge, cultivating everyday low-carbon culture and driving community-centred climate action in China. The study explores how the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs (IPE), an ENGO based in Beijing designs climate data initiatives to crowdsource citizen data through visual tools to open up alternative ways to generate climate knowledge and inform the public about the causes and impact of the climate crisis. This campaign mobilizes the general public to take photos of daily products such as cars, household electrical appliance, clothes and other goods and track the carbon emission of manufacturers and its associated impact on people’s everyday life through using the climate data provided by IPE’s database Bluemap.

By combining both ethnographical data, social media content and relevant documents as empirical materials, this paper analyses how the visual representation of carbon emissions and their climate impact in daily life engages the public in climate knowledge production, green lifestyle choices and thus cultivates a green civic culture. I argue that the community-orientated climate action grounded in the everyday sphere opens up opportunities for citizens to practice “lifeworld environmentalism” (Zhang et al., 2026) and “energy citizenship” (Ryghaug et al., 2018). Furthermore, the project reveals the potential of visual data as climate knowledge infrastructure and the transformative power to pressure enterprises to improve their ESG performance. Taking indigenous perspectives, it contributes to enriching the discussion on the diverse forms of digital ecologies in the global south.

Lena Šimić (EHU), ‘“A Kind of Contemplation”: Collective Listening and Practices of Care’

ERIN (sobbing). Oh, Olivia, where … where has it all gone to? Where is it? I’m forgetting everything … there’s nothing but mush in my head … I can’t even seem to remember life in London before all the Chaos began… what was it like then? How did we live then? Before the storms, the fires and the wars. Every day I’m forgetting more and more, and it will never, never come back. … We will never go … and we will lose even the memory of it.

(character in Three Sisters: A Story from the Climate Future audio play)

In 2022–2024, as part of the research project “Imagining Climate Futures Narratives”, art activist and author James Marriott (Platform) and I organised five collective listening sessions in arts and community centres across the North of England and Scotland. Groups of 6–16 participants listened together, through individual headphones, to an extract from Three Sisters: A Story from the Climate Future. One participant described the shared listening experience as “a kind of contemplation”.

While earlier analysis explored the broader impact of projected climate futures across particular locations, this presentation focuses on what audiences themselves revealed through qualitative responses following the sessions. Specifically, I ask: what kinds of cultural, emotional and philosophical insights emerge through collective listening as an immersive climate-engagement method?

Drawing on participant reflections, I note four provocative responses:

• climate change experienced as a spiritual crisis (see Panu Pihkala, 2024)
• the reinforcement of imaginaries towards ecological communal living,
• moments of seeing oneself inside climate presents and futures rather than outside them, echoing Isabelle Stenger’s account of living within “catastrophic times” (2015)
• the importance of intergenerational exchange

Rather than treating audiences as passive recipients of climate future narratives, I argue that participatory listening encounters position them as co-interpreters of climate presents. Whilst the character of Erin laments forgetting the past and fears memory loss (resonating with experiences of environmental loss described by Glenn Albrecht as solastalgia (2005; 2019), audience responses are, whilst provoked by fictional climate reflection, situated firmly in communal connection and present action. What emerges across the responses are practices of care, for place, for others, and across generations.

Elke Weissmann, ‘Community Activism and Local TV’

Local Television in the UK was rolled out in the 2010 as commercial licences and has since proven to be a bit of an issue for Ofcom in that it is regularly reviewing and not entirely able to deliver on it in terms of regulation. Consultations have highlighted the role of local television to communities as a key space to give local communities a voice, suggesting the need for open access approaches which exists in other places such as Canada and Germany. In this paper, I will report back from the research project that worked with Love Wavertree CIC and other community groups to find ways of communicating climate action in ways that were louder than the mainstream media often provides.

We found very knowledgeable community groups who had their own ways of communicating their action which inspired others to become more involved, pointing to the need to shift towards what Raymond Williams (1956) has called democratic forms of broadcasting. It points to the ability of local TV to provide a key gap in terms of communicating the urgency to act on climate change and also the little things we can all do in our daily lives to support this.

May: ‘New Work in Brontë Studies’

Andrew McInnes (EHU), ‘Poetic Justice and Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell‘

This paper thinks about the Brontë sisters’ first collaborative publication, Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell (1846), and its place in the Brontë Myth: the narrative begun by Charlotte and promulgated by legions of biographers and fans ever afterward that the famous novelists were innocent rustics unaware of the impact their strange and subversive writing would have on a Victorian reading audience at once attracted and repelled by them. I argue, against Charlotte’s later embarrassment about the volume, and subsequent critics’ agreement with her that Poems bombed, that the book was a success at the time and remains key to understanding the sisters’ shared fascination with the concept of poetic justice: the idea that a character’s fate somehow rhymes with their just deserts.

Liam Pope (EHU), ‘The Brontës After Life’

This paper explores the legacies of death in Poems by Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, and outlines the varied and fascinating ways in which the sisters negotiate death and the afterlife in their early work. In examining the sisters’ unique poetic styles, I will demonstrate how Poems presents death under the following thematic umbrellas: atheistic; traditionally religious; supernatural; spiritualistic.

June: ‘Culture, Feeling and History’

Laura Cadwell (EHU), ‘Confined Laughter: Situating History in 1970s British Sitcoms’

This paper comes out of my PhD research, which reconsiders confinement within British sitcoms as a productive rather than merely restrictive device through which historical experience is organised and made visible. While existing scholarship tends to treat confinement primarily as a structuring and narrative device, my research reconceptualises it as a mechanism that mediates between television sitcom and its historical context. Focusing on Dad’s Army (BBC, 1968-1977), Porridge (BBC, 1974-1977) and Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads? (BBC, 1973-1974), I examine how confined settings – prisons, military units, domestic suburbia and relationships – produce sitcoms that function as archives of feeling that register the complexities of a 1970s society transitioning from pre-war tradition to post-war modernity. As such the decade was one of tension and progress; while there was shifting social identities, industrial unrest and a decline in authoritative institutions, there was also the emergence of the affluent society. Therefore, rather than treating sitcoms as purely comedic artifacts, I consider them as historically situated forms that interrogate life and present different facets of the same historical world.

Niall Gildea (EHU), ‘Raymond Williams’s Structures of Feeling: Prototypes and Recursions’

Raymond Williams coined the term ‘structures of feeling’ very early in his career as a means of gesturing to a sediment of immediate historical experience which may be found in literary works but not abstracted from them. Specifically, for Williams, the structure of feeling in a given society amounts to a valuable record of how its members felt about one another at a given time, and how emergent kinds of feeling were coming to displace established ones. Structures of feeling, epistemologically speaking, is somewhere between a placeholder and a concept: there is a sense, across Williams’s oeuvre, that its meaning is in the process of being worked out—and in this regard, the term comes to look rather like the things it tries to describe. In this paper, I’ll sketch some genealogies (of varying magnitudes) for Williams’s most famous term—if not better to comprehend its meaning, then better to apprehend its processual dimension.