Kuldip Powar is the Director ‘Unravelling’-a journey into war, memory & loss, in collaboration with Nitin Sawhney and Goldmiths University and funded by the ARHC. He will be presenting the film at the workshop, followed by a Q&A.

'Unravelling’ recently won the Best Short Film Competition Award at the 13th London Asian Film Festival,2011. This film was also selected for : The Re-Orient festival in Stockholm; The Spinning Wheel Sikh Film Festival 2008 in Hollywood and Bombay Mix Film Festival 2010(Cine Lumiere). ’Unravelling’ also won the Best Short Film at the 2009 Sikh International Film Festival-New York as well as being screened at the Imperial War Museum, National Army Museum, RIBA, V&A & Tate Britain, The Southbank, Museum of London and most recently at The Black International Film Festival, Berlin.

Kuldip has also worked on various film projects that explore the lives of Asian people in Britain. Completed a short film piece Remembrance (2005) funded by the BFI ‘Screen Rootz’ Initiative, poetically exploring post-colonial memory of WWII vis-à-vis personal testimony and narrative. Co-Directed the film, Kabhi Ritz Kabhie Palladium (2003) about the social cinema scenes amongst the South Asian diaspora communities of Coventry, for an Herbert Art Gallery & Museum exhibition. Has experience in conducting oral and visual ethnographies across Britain. Created an oral history archive and directed a documentary (funded by the MLA) titled For the Record: the social life of Indian vinyl in Southall (2008), which was screened at The British Library (2009). Kuldip has also been a member of the  ‘Music In Museums’ meeting group (programmed by the MLA) and has given presentations at The Horniman Museum and The Royal College of Music. He has worked with The Royal Geographical Society as a Volunteer Community Consultant for the ‘Hidden Histories’ and ‘Moving Journeys’ projects. He has worked for the Sorrell Foundation on the ‘Building Schools for the Future’ programme as a Project Facilitator.

He is currently working as an ‘Associate Artist’ for Tamasha Theatre Company, co-leading ‘Small Lives Global Ties' Writers Group.

I am a social geographer engaged in interdisciplinary research and based at the University of Aberdeen. Currently I am based in the dot.rural digital economy research hub, which reflects my interest in rural and peripheral areas, and in July I move to the Gaelic department at the University to pursue my interest in the social geographies of the Celtic languages. I gained a PhD (geography) from the university of Aberdeen in 2009. My doctoral research examined the social identities of Gaelic speakers employed in the Gaelic language industries in scotland. In the course of exploring issues of community, identity and difference with Gaelic speakers in Scotland, I have observed a temporal dimension at work. The increasing hybridity of the 'Gaelic speech community', itself connected to processes of de- and re-territorialisation, is disrupting previously taken-for-granted notions of Gaelic speakers sharing a common past or shared future. This workshop topic challenges me to better conceptualise and attend to the role of temporality in negotiations of belonging within the Gaelic speech community. It raises questions over how memory, inheritance, inter-generationality and tradition are worked to legitimise some Gaelic-speaking identities, but disavow others. As well as provoking new ways of understanding identity formation/ascription, this also raises questions over how differential histories of places are reproduced to support particular claims for Gaelic language promotion and government support. I think the workshop represents an opportunity for me to start grappling with non-linear notions of time and community in this minority language context.

I am a PhD candidate at the University of Exeter and a lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. My field of research is interactivity in interdisciplinary artistic practices. More specifically, I focus on durational performative scores, such as Wolf Vostell’s Yellow Pages, or Alison Knowles Identical Lunch. E.g. Yellow Pages presents the performer with a page from the New York Yellow Pages and suggests that during one month they buy the quantities of groceries indicated in the World War II lebensmittelkarte at the designated grocers. Identical Lunch instructs the performer to have the same lunch at the designated restaurant for up to a year. My investigation focuses on two aspects of performance: the body’s cycles of construction and destruction and the creation of a community on the periphery of sociality. I seek to articulate the ways in which actional, interoceptive and psychogeographic schemes generated by eating and walking intertwine to create complex patterns of individual-communal remembering-forgetting

I work at the Countryside and Community Research Institute in an ESRC research project on flood memories and community resilience to floods. I completed my doctoral studies in anthropology at the University of Aberdeen in 2010. I am fascinated with the discursive power of the idea of community, as well as with the transformative potential of this concept. I am interested in temporality from several angles. During my doctoral fieldwork along a river in Lapland, I was struck by the stark seasonality of social and ecological life, and the manifold other rhythmical dynamics in which the seasons are embedded. More recently, I have tried to come to grips with the dynamics of memory and remembering, where a past (that is remembered), a present (that sees the remembering) and a future (informed by this memory) are constantly mixed and matched. I am curious to explore the relationships between temporality and community, for instance in collective memory practices, or in the common experience of recurring episodic events, both of which may illustrate ways in which flood memory and community resilience are linked.

I have been based in Archaeology at the University of Manchester since 1997. My research has crosscut disciplinary and period boundaries, drawing on archaeology, social anthropology, history, and cultural geography, whilst ranging from the Neolithic to the present-day. The main enduring theme is the relationship between material culture, time, and various forms of identity (community, ethnic, national and diasporic identities). My recent projects have focused on: heritage, modernity and the nation-state; the production of social memory; the experience of authenticity; and the theory and practice of conservation. A new research project, jointly led with Melanie Giles, focuses on the urban public park as an arena in which class, ethnicity, taste, citizenship, health, leisure, memory and place have been produced and negotiated in the past and present.

The workshop is an exciting opportunity to explore approaches to the interconnections between time and community. I am interested in how communities are constituted in time and space through material culture and practice. I hope to offer insights into the ways in which community connectivities and time intersect in the form of memory-work. My presentation will focus on how historic objects, monuments and places facilitate forms of community connectivity across time and space, producing a tangible sense of immediate connection to the past and allowing people to negotiate networks of belonging. This will complement the presentation by Melanie Giles on temporalities of practice and the production of community connectivity, which is another important strand in our joint project.

I am a Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies at Loughborough University. I joined the Department of Social Sciences on completion of my PhD in the summer of 2007 and have recently been appointed as Assistant Editor of the journal Media, Culture and Society. My research interests include the mediation of time and memory but extend more generally into cultural consumption, media reception and the politics of representation in everyday life. My concern with time and community emerges from the ongoing research project Media of Remembering (conducted with Professor Michael Pickering and Dr Nicola Allett) funded by the Leverhulme trust, which explores how people belonging to different social and cultural groups within local communities develop remembering practices using commonplace media technologies. This work has developed our thinking about time and community in a number of ways. Firstly, communication and representation seem to us to be at the heart of community’s construction and negotiation of time and their experiences of it. Secondly, in working with different ethnic minority and local communities, spatial and temporal disruptions and dislocations have frequently been central to their collective experience. Social remembering practices and cultural memory resources have emerged as crucial in navigating these experiences. Thirdly, even in what may seem to be the most personal of memories, the marks of social experience and notions of community seem to be in play. In this sense we have been thinking about the time of individuals and time of communities as mutually constitutive.

I am an independent researcher whose academic training has primarily been in the area of Literary Studies and Critical Theory. In 2007 I began volunteering at a people’s history museum in Cardiff called the Butetown History & Arts Centre, where I learnt about life stories, oral history and the possibility of using museums as a vehicle for social change. Since then I have pursued an interest in public history and have recently curated an exhibition about feminism in Bristol called Sistershow Revisited. At present I am very interested in creating on and offline spaces where people and historical information can collide. My approach to this workshop will draw on these concerns, specifically exploring the issue of time within researching, documenting and disseminating vulnerable forms of material culture. As a case study I will draw on the Women’s Liberation Music Archive, a recently launched web archive of music from the UK feminist movements of the 1970s and 1980s. I shall be exploring how the creative actions produced by women in these communities, when digitised, has the capacity to transform the temporality of contemporary cultural memory.

I am a social historian based at CRESC with interests in the British working class, memory studies and the history of social research. I am particularly interested in the intersections between class, gender, life-cycle and individual socio-spatial trajectories, and wider cultural representations of place in understanding the ways in which memories of particular communities are articulated. In recent work I have been looking at the roles of slum clearance, residualisation and stigmatization in popular understandings of ‘community’ and social change in working class neighbourhoods in England. I have argued that assertions that social and spatial dislocations produced by slum clearance and social mobility produced nostalgia for the old communities are insufficiently nuanced. I have argued that such narratives may be more fruitfully understood as the product of a radical attempt to recover working class experience, which contested dominant representations of the working class as deficient. However, I’m now wondering if this is sufficient. I’ve recently been reading around ‘transactive’ remembering and thinking about how particular audiences shape what gets told. This is perhaps a key missing element in my analysis of community publishing. The relationship between time and community is another important element in shaping social scientific readings/social policy in the post-war period. I am thinking particularly about assertions of ‘traditional’ patterns of working class family life and understandings of lifestyles or environments which seem ‘out-moded.’ Particular (mis)understandings of time and community also seem to have informed area-based regeneration initiatives such as the New Deal for Communities.