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Vital Signs: Paper Session 3a
Wednesday 10 September, 11.30-1pm, Cordingley Theatre
3a. Senses, evocation and histories
‘Picture me as a young woman: Making sense of young women’s photograph collections from the 1950’s and 1960’s’ – Dr Penny Tinkler (University of Manchester)
Many young women growing up in the 1950s and 1960s collected photographs. These included pictures they: took themselves, commissioned, bought and were given. These photograph collections have frequently been preserved, often in their original settings (such as albums, picture frames, lockets). Whilst there have been several historical studies of photographs of young people, especially children, there has been no attempt to research and analyse the photographs produced and consumed by young people in the past. Indeed, studies of domestic photography, both past and present, have privileged the perspectives and photographic practices of adults.
This paper reports on a pilot project that examines the photographs collected by young women (aged 12 to 25 years) in the 1950s and 1960s. Illustrated with practical examples and drawing on ideas about photo elicitation, oral history and the analysis of domestic photography, this paper outlines how photograph collections can contribute a youth-oriented perspective on girlhood and ‘growing up’ female in the post-war period.
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‘”Is that Escape you’re wearing miss?”: A synaesthetic approach to research into everyday prison life’ – Dr Anita Wilson (University of Lancaster)
Prison research is conventionally framed by quantitative methods and large-scale data-sets. While these provide an overview of generic prison populations, they are unable to give attention to the more intricate details of everyday prison life such as sound or smell. Equally, when attention is paid to the sensory nature of prison, it is generally through virtual (re)presentations offered by television and film, such as the monochrome interiors of 'Porridge', or the jangling of keys in 'The Green Mile'. A synaesthetic approach incorporated within an ethnographic methodology, however, shows that the senses offer a new lens through which to look at prison life. The paucity of sensory stimulation in prison, for example, heightens the effect and impact of those smells, textures, tastes, sights and sounds that do occur, and often draws the mind towards outside rather than inside experiences. The ability of a prisoner to identify 'Escape' - a perfume he remembered as that worn by his girlfriend - is one such example. Letters, too, are sniffed for traces of outside lives, and the texture and quality of paper determines its intended purpose - staying within or being sent beyond the prison. The proposal here, therefore, is to suggest that the senses play an important part in surviving the constraints of incarceration and that the incorporation of a synaesthetic approach can enrich method within, and indeed beyond, prison research.
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