Current Postgraduate Students
Miss Elizabeth Richardson
Contact Miss Elizabeth Richardson (email at e.c.i.richardson@durham.ac.uk)
Biography
2010 - present PhD candidate.
Research
My PhD research takes a number of contemporary practices of storytelling in the city of Bristol in the UK to explore the relationship between creativity, memory and belonging. Drawing on ethnographic, interview and archival material on theatre, spoken word and carnival, the project broadly asks who can take part in performance and what enables or disables participation. It aims to examine the ways in which contemporary creative practices of narration take up, underplay or avoid Bristol's past. As a significant node in the eighteenth century slave trade and later a site of settlement for post-war migration from the West Indies, attempts to negotiate Bristol's ruptured and often disowned history speak to wider questions of the place of the past in any conception of British national identity. My suggestion is that creative practices which draw upon but rework such pasts offer one way of both understanding and constructing a more progressive contemporary belonging. Such a cultural politics involves rescuing the notion of creativity from the current (urban) neoliberal agenda in order to relocate it in a variety of vernacular practices that occur for more than economic reasons.
Is supervised by
Selected Publications
Books: reviews
- Richardson, L. (2013). Book Review Symposium - Geraldine Pratt's 'Families apart: migrant mothers and the conflicts of labour and love. AntipodeFoundation.org
Journal papers: academic
- Richardson, L. (Accepted). Working at the ambivalence of race: ethnomimesis and the cancellation of St Paul's Carnival. Social and Cultural Geography