Tag: School of Arts

As the world turns its attention to Glasgow and the 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties  – known as COP26 – we’re taking a look at some of the climate change-related research happening across the University of Bristol’s Faculty of Arts. For this first piece, we caught up with Dr Camilla Morelli, a Lecturer in Anthropology. Camilla specialises in the anthropology of childhood and youth, and the use of participatory visual methods in youth-centred research.

Hi Camilla! Thanks for joining Arts Matter. Can you tell us a little bit about yourself and what sparked your interest in your area of research? 

Hi! Thanks for inviting me. I have an absolute passion for my discipline – social anthropology – and specifically the anthropology of childhood and youth. My greatest inspiration is Margaret Mead, the first anthropologist to take children seriously as research respondents.

Most of my research has taken place in the Amazon rainforest, where I started working over ten years ago. I was interested in exploring Amazonian children’s relationships – physical and imagined – with the forest environment. When I got there, all the children would talk about was the city, and how much they love concrete! Through the years, I have become very close to the community in Peruvian Amazonia where I work, and I return every year to visit them and conduct further work. I haven’t been able to travel to Peru since the start of the pandemic, and it’s breaking my heart. I hope I’ll be able to go back there soon.

My current projects are co-designed with young people, and are based on collaborative approaches. The children I started working with ten years ago have now grown up, and two of them have become anthropologists themselves! They are now my key collaborators in a British Academy-funded project, ‘Animating the Future’, and will be co-authors in our published outputs. I’m sure in the future they will be leading their own projects and transforming the field of anthropology.

That’s great – how wonderful to hear that the future of anthropology is in such good hands! What insights have you gained from engaging with young people? 

I have learned so much working with children and young people! Something that I always find incredible is that children and youth have the capacity to radically transform the world through simple everyday actions, which are often unseen by adults. It astonishes me when I work with children to see how much their own parents don’t know about what happens in children’s daily worlds and imaginations. Then one day, all of a sudden, they realise that their children are substantially different from them, and they ask: “How did we get here?” They have no idea about the small, everyday actions through which children silently shape new futures. Once we appreciate that children and young people have this capacity and agency, we can give them more credit than we do, and perhaps work with them (rather than for them) so that we can build a sustainable future together.

Your latest research project, based in the UK, is called Waves of Change – can you tell us more about it? 

Sure! The project is based in Cornwall, where we are working with young people aged 15 to 18 to address the impact of climate change on coastal communities and their future. Cornwall is already feeling the effects of climate change hard – ocean acidification, plastic pollution (worsened by recent tourism) and warming are threatening the rich and unique marine ecosystems there, and sea levels are rising faster than average…meaning that Cornwall is sinking fast! Young people are at the forefront of these challenges and should have a key role in structuring debates around it. Yet, the young people we are working with often feel cut out of these debates. This sense of exclusion is heightened by the remote locations of their coastal communities, the limited access to public transport, and recent funding cuts to youth centres and activities.

Our project’s goal is to engage young people actively in a conversation on climate change and to help them share a message with the public and relevant policymakers. I have the privilege of working with two incredible women – the Co-Investigator Dani Schmidt, Professor of Earth Sciences at the University of Bristol, and Sophie Marsh, professional animator and the project’s artistic director. Dani is bringing her world-leading expertise in climate change to the project, and Sophie is teaching young people how to become animation producers. We are partnering with a local charity, Young People Cornwall, whose mission is to give young people enhanced opportunities and promote inclusion.

That sounds like such a brilliant project, with an important impact on those communities. Climate change is currently at the top of many people’s agendas, with COP26 now in full swing. Naturally, much of the talk centres around the science, but your latest research project combines climate science with anthropology and visual arts – what can this interdisciplinary approach bring to the table?

This is very much a collaborative effort! Our interdisciplinary approach can hopefully bridge the field of climate science with the knowledge of local communities, and specifically that of young people. While science can tell us much about the causes and effects of climate change (Dani’s expertise), we need an approach that is centred on young people’s own perspectives and can explore their worldviews – and this is brought in by anthropology and ethnography (my own field). But in order to engage young people actively in the process, we need participatory methods. This is where animation (Sophie’s world) comes in. Co-production of animation is a great method that allows young people to write and animate (literally ‘give life to’) their own stories, and to share them with others. We want this project to do all of this, while giving young people a new sense of hope and empowering them to realise that their voices matter and can be heard widely.

You can follow the project here:

https://twitter.com/EthnoAnimation

https://www.instagram.com/ethno_animation/

Camilla Morelli is a Lecturer in Anthropology at the University of Bristol. She specialises in the anthropology of childhood and youth, and the use of participatory visual methods in youth-centred research. Find out more about Camilla’s research.

Today, 9 August, marks the United Nations’ International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, raising awareness of the needs of indigenous people across the globe.

Dr Camilla Morelli, a lecturer in social anthropology here at the University of Bristol, has been working with indigenous communities in Amazonian Peru for over a decade. Here we learn more about her most recent piece of research.

Amazonimations – co-producing animated films with indigenous people in Amazonia

Amazonimations is a collection of three animated films produced collaboratively with the indigenous Matses people of the Amazon rainforest. The films are the outcome of a research project (funded by the British Academy) that brought together academic research, art and animation with the objective of using collaborative film production as a means through which people living at the margins of technological and economic inclusion can find forms of self-representation and gain a sense of wider recognition.

Like many other indigenous societies, Matses people had no contact with outsiders until fairly recently, and they are now dealing with the challenges of urbanisation, socioeconomic change, and the impact of globalised media and markets. Amidst the difficulties they face, a key issue is the feeling of being largely unheard and cut out from wider society; their goal, as they phrased it, is for the world to know who they are. In each animated short, a different generation of Matses tells a story: the elderly talk about the traditional ritual of ‘acate’, an intoxicating substance that is said to create a connection between people and the forest; Matses children tell a story about rainforest animals and spirits; and young Matses who migrated from the forest to the city discuss their experiences of adjusting to urban life.

This work is quintessentially collaborative – the films have been scripted, narrated and illustrated by Matses people themselves, and the overall goal of this is to disseminate the animations widely in order to raise awareness about threatened indigenous lives and their precarious futures. Learn more about the Matses people and their culture by watching Amazonimations on Vimeo.

We’d like to wish all members of the LGBT+ community a very Happy Pride Month! We caught up with Dr Jamie Lawson, a queer anthropologist whose major research interest is in sex and sexuality, to find out more about his research, Pride, and the path to equality for all.

What was it that first drew you into the exciting world of anthropology?

It was a lucky accident really – I got very bored at school, so come university application time I felt a strong urge to study something new. Archaeology and Anthropology was the first thing in the UCAS course book that fit the bill. I fell in love with anthropology quite quickly, though – I enjoy the freedom of the discipline, and felt a strong pull towards an intellectual tradition that resists being pinned down. It’s a big, sprawling subject with as many definitions and angles as there are practitioners, which is what you might expect from a discipline that’s focussed on understanding people; we’re complicated things, after all. There’s a very thin line between anthropology and activism as well – I think I always found the political engagement of the discipline really exciting.

What was it about sexual minorities and human sexuality in particular that led you to pursue a research career in this area?

I developed an interest in sex and sexuality towards the end of my undergraduate degree, and followed it through to master’s and eventually PhD level. Initially I adopted an evolutionary perspective on the topic, but found that a little too heteronormative for my tastes, and have drifted over the years towards a more phenomenological position, focussed on queer identities and subcultures. This led me to my recent work on the puppy play community. It’s no coincidence that over the same time, I became properly politically engaged with my identity as a gay man, and got involved with activist work, including organising the first Pride up in Durham, and eventually writing my book. I think it’s important to challenge the dominant structures of society which act to marginalise and oppress anyone who doesn’t fit in with the trans- and homophobic, racist and patriarchal norms.

You were involved in the Art of Relationships project at the Open University, which was designed to explore the power of art to engage members of the public with social science research – can you tell us more about that?

That was a lot of fun. The project involved screening a set of short films that had been made to communicate research findings from a large, nationwide project on love and relationships called ‘Enduring Love’. In order to evaluate the impact those films had, I ran a reflexive group exercise called a visual matrix (based on a social dreaming matrix, for anyone who has encountered one of those). The method is designed to tap into group-level, collective ideas and feelings rather than individual, to see what the audience collectively had taken from the films. A visual matrix is a wonderfully egalitarian method which breaks down the distinction, to some extent, between researcher and informants. We used it to see what sorts of ideas had made their way from the films to the audience, to see if it was possible to communicate research findings through art (in this case, films).

June is Pride month here in the UK – what does Pride mean to you?

This is a favourite question to ask queer people around Pride time – I’m never really sure how to answer it. Pride is about visibility, community and celebration, sure, but we should never forget that it was born out of anger. The rights that the LGBTQ+ community has fought for and gained, the space it carved out for itself – that was all the result of anger, focussed against oppression. Pride this year comes at a scary time – the world is in the grip of a pandemic, and the hard right have risen in political power. The protests that are currently sweeping the world as a result of systemic racism and anti-Black violence in the United States are also an expression of anger, deeply and collectively felt. My hope is that we can all come together around that anger and push back against those who want to strip minorities of their rights and turn us against each other. I am a very angry queer, and very proud of that anger.

Last year you released your first book – Rainbow Revolutions: Power, Pride and Protest in the Fight for Queer Rights – which is aimed at children aged 12 and over. What inspired you to write specifically for this age group?

The opportunity landed squarely in my lap. I was approached by the publisher off the back of some consulting work I had done for them on another project, and they asked if I would like to write a book on queer history for children. I said yes almost immediately. The mainstream, cishet world does everything it can to stop queer people feeling connected with each other, including dismissing the idea of there being such a thing as queer history. Being disconnected from your own history makes growing up queer a very isolating thing – you feel lost, untethered in a society that only begrudgingly makes space for you. Knowing that you have ancestors, traditions, that you belong to a group of people who learned lessons collectively and had an impact on the world, that’s empowering and important. I wrote the book for young queers, hoping I might help them feel a little bit less lost.

What is the key message you hope young people will take away from your book, and what impact do you hope it will have?

I wanted the readers of Rainbow Revolutions to understand that queer rights were fought for and won – not given – and that the community has a history of its own , and perhaps most importantly that Black and trans voices inside the LGBTQ+ community have been some of the most important and most powerful we’ve had. As trans people are having their rights stripped away and their lives endangered around the world, and as the Black Lives Matter protests sweep the globe, it’s hugely important that the readers of my book understand how connected we all are, and that none of us are free until all of us are free. I tried to reinforce an idea that collective action – that visibility en masse – is key to liberation and safety. Most of all I wanted them to know that they are not alone.

What societal changes do you think are required to get to a point where we can ensure young members of the LGBT+ community are fully supported, included, and safe from discrimination?

That’s a big question, and there are a lot of moving parts, but if I could wave a magic wand and make one big change (and if I knew there were others out there with their own magic wands) I would disconnect the idea of sex from the idea of reproduction. The idea that “sex is for making babies” is at the absolute core of the oppression of queer people, and the oppression of women (queer or not), around the world. It’s dangerous most of all because it feels like such a self-evident fact, and is so deeply embedded in Western cultures. Alongside that, I’d make white people around the world turn to face the evils of colonialism, and engage with our collective responsibility to dismantle the structures that supported it, of which trans- and homophobia are important components. Big aims, both, but I have to believe they’re possible.

What more do you think could be done as a Faculty – and more widely across the University – to support the LGBT+ community and ensure equality for all?

I think the higher education sector is starting to shift in really interesting and quite radical directions, and that’s what we need here: radical change. If we don’t make active decisions to disrupt colonialist, oppressive structures then they persist. I think the pandemic has forced us to start to think properly about what universities could and should be and how they could and should work, and to confront difficult facts about access and inclusion. Finding new ways to imagine the University will be key to equality for staff and students alike.