Chaired and Introduced Festival Screening of Don't Break Down: A Film about Jawbreaker in London
Nov 3, 2025
Description
I chaired and introduced a festival screening of Don't Break Down: A Film About Jawbreaker, at the London Hackney Film House as part of the Doc N Roll Festival
CAMC research talk: 'Creativity in Motion - Unfinishing Feminist Film and Literary History'
Apr 30, 2025
Location
Merchiston Campus E17
Description
Guest speaker Dr Alix Beeston (Cardiff University) will be speaking about women’s unfinished creative labour in the late-twentieth-century United States and its afterlives in the present, focussing on the work of Kathleen Collins.
This conference marks the culmination of a pilot led by ABC Creative Music and funded by the Creative Scotland's YMI Strengthening Scheme in bringing together academics and practitioners in the field to explore current provision and potential pathways for public engagement and knowledge exchange.
Guest Speaker - SoMa Summer School, Sofia Music Academy, Bulgaria
Jun 30, 2024
Location
Sofia Music Academy, Sofia, Bulgaria
Description
I am presenting a guest lecture on (self)-management in the music sector. The talk highlights the many and diverse skills at play in navigating a sustainable music career in increasingly challenging economic circumstances. In exploding myths around the industries of music, novel and dynamic approaches to creation and dissemination are proposed in which the individual is agent of their own destiny and empowered to engage ethically with the conditions of the sector.
Organised this training event for the Scottish Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities at the Moving Image Archive of the National Library of Scotland
Gender and Sexuality Research at Edinburgh Napier University
Mar 6, 2024
Location
Merchiston Campus, room: MER_H11
Description
Let’s get together and listen to colleagues working on gender and sexuality! And then let’s talk about their fascinating ideas, and how they relate to our own work and topics! This event is envisaged as informal and friendly gathering, following the success of similar gathering in 2023. We want to continue on this good tradition, and build new connections, learn about inspiring research we are doing across the university, feel inspired and nurtured.
Please send any queries to: Dr Roberto Kulpa (r.kulpa@napier.ac.uk)
SCHEDULE
14:00-14:10
Welcome (Roberto Kulpa)
14:10-15:00 TRANS LIVES
GUEST: Gina Gwenffrewi (University of Edinburgh) will start with an input about trans* people's cultural production online (i.e. YouTube, Twitter/X), framing the moral panic, and its impact on the trans* communities.
Rob Clucas (Law) will speak to the latest ‘gender critical’ challenge to the Gender Recognition Act 2004 in the appeal to the Supreme Court in the For Women Scotland case. He suggests that a solution to the current poisonous polemic around trans* rights can usefully be sought in the dialogic theory of Martin Buber (Buber 1958).
Toni Kania (Social Sciences) will introduce their PhD project about conceptualising bodily autonomy and sovereignty of trans* people – and from trans* peoples’ perspective – in Poland.
15:00-15:10 Coffee and pastries break
15:10-16:00 GENDERED VIOLENCE
Amy Beddows (Counselling) will speak about the potential of horror texts as tools for survivors processing the experiences of gendered violence.
Anne Schwan (English) will reflect on femicide, perpetrator narratives and the challenge of restorative justice, drawing from her analysis of Em Strang's novel “Quinn” (2023).
Fiona McQueen (Social Sciences) will conclude this section pondering on her project on Scottish young men’s attitudes towards prevention messages on violence against women, incl. queer & trans men’s accounts and insights.
16:00-16:10 Coffee and pastries break
16:10-17:00 REPRESENTATIONS
Yen Nee Wong (Social Sciences) will introduce us to queer cultures of ballroom dancing and the role of Strictly Come Dancing’s representations and mainstreaming.
David Bishop (Creative Writing) will speak about his creative writing PhD, instigation into the scarcity of queer sleuths in historical mystery fiction set before the Victorian era, and the politics of outing and authorship.
Phiona Stanley (Tourism) will talk about labels – ‘spinsters’, ‘crazy cat ladies’, ‘witches’. It is also, in theoretical terms, about queering queerness by negotiating the queer and deeply gendered queerness of spinsterhood.
17:00-17:10 Coffee and pastries break
17:10-17:45 POP!
Ashley Stein (Music) will introduce their PhD project on how hyperpop and other electronic music practices can be used to destabilise gender binaries.
Frederik Byrn Køhlert (English, Visual Cultures) will close this input section with a reflection on the representation of gender and sexuality in comics & graphic novels, incl. examples from work as editor of a Routledge series on Gender, Sexuality, and Comics.
17:45-onwards: Post-Event Drinks & Food at nearby The Golf Tavern
30-31 Wright's Houses, Bruntsfield, EH10 4HR
Event Organisation:
Dr Roberto Kulpa
School of Applied Sciences: Deputy Research Degrees Lead
Co-Director: MSc Applied Social Research
Co-Investigator: (2022-2026) ‘RESIST. Fostering Queer Feminist Intersectional Resistances against Transnational Anti-Gender Politics’ (EU Horizon Europe grant no. 101060749).
War Poets Collection lecture: Prof Alison Fell
Nov 13, 2023
Location
Craiglockhart campus
Description
Glorifying Women: Remembering Women’s Roles in the First World War
After the Armistice, the British nation in mourning was most often represented by a grieving widow or mother. War commemoration tended to set in stone a traditional understanding of women as the passive observers of war, crowning ‘distant ardours’ and mourning ‘laurelled memories’. Yet not only did thousands of women actively respond to and participate in the rites and rituals of commemoration, but they also instigated, planned, designed and sculpted memorials and ceremonies. Further, some women saw themselves as having been on ‘active service’, and therefore as members of a ‘war generation’ who had more in common with the bitter soldier persona of Sassoon’s poem than with other non-combatants. This talk will examine a broad range of war memorials and commemorative activities, arguing that while many adhered to a traditional gendered view of wartime sacrifice, others offered a very different interpretation of the war and its devastating losses.
Professor Alison Fell is Dean of the School of Histories, Languages and Cultures at the University of Liverpool. She has published widely on women and war, particularly the First World War, including edited books on the women’s movement and nurses, and two recent monographs published by Cambridge University Press: Women as Veterans in Britain and France after the First World War (2018) and Warrior Women: The Cultural Politics of Armed Women c.1850-1945 (2023).
Gender and Sexuality Research: Work-in-Progress Afternoon
Mar 8, 2023
Location
E17 Merchiston Campus
Description
Marking International Women's Day, this event is jointly hosted by the Centre for Arts, Media and Culture (CAMC) and the Centre for Creative Practice (CCP), with presentations from different disciplinary perspectives in the arts, humanities and social sciences. We will also be joined by an external collaborator (Dr Manuella Blackburn, Open University), with a short performance.
Catherine Walker Memorial Lecture: Dr Jane Potter
Nov 14, 2022
Location
Craiglockhart Campus.
Description
A lecture held at Craiglockhart in honour of the late Catherine Walker, formerly curator of the War Poets Collection.
Dr Jane Potter (Oxford Brookes University)
Strange Meeting(s): Wilfred Owen at Craiglockhart
The site of one of the most famous meetings in literary history, that of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Craiglockhart War Hospital is embedded in the cultural memory of the First World War. Crucial both in Owen's recovery from the trauma of his active service and his development as a poet, Craiglockhart also provided him with opportunities for many other significant meetings that were essential to his poetic and emotional maturity. This talk will highlight some of these 'strange meetings' and reflect on the lasting legacy of the place that Owen called 'this free-and-easy Oxford'.
Assessing the legacy and impact of feminist photographer Franki Raffles
Apr 25, 2017
Location
CCA (Centre for Contemporary Arts), Sauchiehall Street, Glasgow
Description
A public symposium in connection with the exhibition 'Observing Women at Work - Franki Raffles', The Reid Gallery, Glasgow School of Art, 4 March - 27 April 2017, produced in partnership with Edinburgh Napier University
