Past Projects
De-Localising Dialect
With Professor Maria Fusco (PI, Dundee), I ran an AHRC Research Network on ‘De-Localising Dialect’ in 2019-20. This project cut across literature, performance, theory and linguistics, to explore practices and possibilities of ‘dialect’ which go beyond the verbal embodiment of roots and origins. Instead, we conceived dialect as style, method and creative practice.
Three events (in Glasgow, Newcastle, London) featured work by and with Raman Mundair, Harry Josephine Giles, Lisa Robertson and Denise Riley. These events explored ways of viewing — and ‘doing’ — dialect against its own deep associations with locality and social rootedness, and attending to its qualities of disruption, mobility, experiment and autonomy.
Some further details of the project are here.
In October 2017 I gave a related talk on ‘Dialect and/as Stylisation: Recovering Vernacular Aesthetics’ for Maria’s DIALECTY project. Audio of that talk is below (starts at 2.35), and here are the slides.
Narrating Scottish Devolution
Supported by the British Academy, Narrating Scottish Devolution was a research project exploring the different ways in which devolution has been explained, understood and made culturally meaningful in Scotland.
Workshop discussions in 2014-15 among writers, critics, politicians and historians were particularly focused in the idea of ‘cultural devolution’ — the notion that Scottish writers and artists paved the way for the politicians, — and its influence in post-1999 governance and literary culture.
Our main findings were published in a journal article for C21 Literature.
The workshop sessions were also recorded. In the player below you can hear a 30m podcast based on these recordings (and additional archival material), entitled ‘Nobody’s Dream: Stories of Scottish Devolution’ (with production help from Peter Geoghegan). This podcast was featured in the Guardian's Scotland blog in February 2016.
If Scotland: Posting 2014
A few weeks before the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, we held a two-day conference to imagine how the referendum might be remembered by future historians.
Highlights (fully archived here, including video) include commissioned youth theatre with the BBC’s Generation 2014, and debates between writers, journalists, historians and constitutional experts.
Conference proceedings were published in 2016 as a special number of the Journal of Scottish Thought (co-edited with Adrian Hunter).
Unstated: Writers on Scottish Independence
Published in late 2012, this anthology invited 27 writers based in Scotland to explore the question of independence, noting the commonplace view that writers and artists had made devolution (and thus the referendum) possible.
A range of media controversies ensued, with writers from the book contributing to a number of highly engaging events throughout 2013-14.
In September 2019, I organised an event reflecting on Indyref: Culture and Politics Five Years On.
In September 2024, I uploaded the book’s introduction here (PDF).