Undergraduate Research Symposium 2024: Visual Encounters
On Thursday 16 and Friday 17 May 2024, the VCRG hosted Visual Encounters, UWE’s seventh annual Undergraduate Research Symposium. Taking place at Watershed, the two-day event saw students from a range of UWE Art & Design programmes presenting research from their final year Visual Culture projects.
The Undergraduate Research Symposium positions student research in a professional and supportive research environment, make research group and centre activity visible to students, and to put student and staff research into dialogue. It nurtures an inclusive and generous research culture in the School of Arts, unseating academic hierarchies and helping students to advance their research careers.
The symposium was organised into five panels over two days:
Panel 1: Challenging Assumptions, Interrogating Paradigms
Panel 2: Performance and Transformation
Panel 3: Humanisms, Metamorphosis and Evolution
Panel 4: Navigating Space, Place and Environment and Panel 5: Fashioned Bodies and Resistance.
UWE research group and centre leads also presented within each panel. Each panel closed with a Q&A panel discussion. The papers are available to watch below.
Commodifying the Orient: Navigating the ethics underlying consumption of Eastern Spirituality in the West.
A Song for Hybrid Man.
How do representations of folk mythology, femininity and lived domesticity, at Arnolfini’s ‘Threads: breathing stories into materials’ Exhibition, serve to reclaim the lived experience of the ‘feminine’ by opening popular and critical multi-voiced discourses that de-canonise the production of collective memory?
A Critical Analysis of Women’s Depiction in AI-Generated Imagery.
How does the portrayal of domestic and sexual abuse change across performances of Tennessee Williams ‘A Streetcar Named Desire?’.
Why is artwork by women devalued?
How has Queer Culture Changed the Female Gaze in Media?
An analysis of the reaction to David Beckham wearing the sarong. The impact it had, and what this tells us about attitudes to gender.
A Temple of Love’: Ritual Performance, Pilgrimage and Liminality in Joana Vasconcelos’ ‘The Wedding Cake’.
Crafting Excessive Bodies: Exploring Radical Decadence in the Art of Daisy Collingridge and Michaela Stark
Sharkey Elliot (Fine Art)
The Capacity of the Body in Queer Performance
Tara Dowling (Art and Writing)
At the Intersection of Art and Writing: An Exploration of Writing, Language, and Text in Art and Art Spaces