WCCEH Symposium on the Built Environment and Health (online)

Timings:

10:45 - 11:15am BST Tea/Coffee & Registration

11.15-11.30am BST - Intro and welcome

11.30am-1.00pm BST - Panel 1: Urban greening, more-than human worlds and digitalised cities

Chair: Dr Cristian Montenegro

Panelists:

Dr Des Fitzgerald, Associate Professor of Sociology (WCCEH)

Dr Pip Thornton (University of Edinburgh)

Dr Rupert Griffith (University of Lancaster)

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1.00-3.00pm BST- Lunch in the WCCEH Library

Installations over Lunch

Dr Pip Thornton and Dr Rupert Griffiths will be displaying their artworks in the library of the WCCEH

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3.00-4.30pm BST - Panel 2: Race, housing and health – intersectionality and activism in the US and UK

Chair: Bojana Daw Srdanovic

Panelists:

Professor Rhonda Williams (Vanderbilt University)

Dr Katie Beswick (University of the Arts London)

Dr Michael J Flexer, Mignol ‘Nolly’ Gregory and ‘Winning’ Wendy Thuesday (Waiting Times Project)

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4.30-5.30pm BST - Drinks reception in WCCEH Library

This event will take place in person and online.

If you would like to attend in person, please register separately here.

Speaker profiles

Dr Des Fitzgerald, Associate Professor of Sociology

Des Fitzgerald, a sociologist of science and medicine, will also join us on 1st March 2020, as Associate Professor of Sociology, having been at Cardiff University since 2015. His work has focused on space, environment and mental health; he won the Philip Leverhulme Prize for sociology in 2017, and the research from this focuses on the use of psychological and neurobiological knowledge in architecture and city planning. His most recent publication was titled “Mental health, migration and the megacity” and examined ‘results and perspectives from an in-progress international and interdisciplinary collaboration investigating the mental health of rural–urban migrant communities in contemporary megacities’.

Dr Pip Thornton

Chancellor’s Fellow, School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh Dr Thornton’s theory and practice revolves around exploring the politics of existence in online spaces, and critiquing and making visible structures of power within the digital economy with creative methods. She gained her PhD in Geopolitics and Cybersecurity from Royal Holloway, University of London in 2019. Her thesis, Language in the Age of Algorithmic Reproduction: A Critique of Linguistic Capitalism, put forward a theoretical, political and creative critique of Google’s search and advertising platforms, and included an artistic intervention into Google’s monetisation of language called {poem}.py.

Dr Rupert Griffiths, Cities and Urban Design Research Lab, Lancaster University

Dr Griffiths is a cultural geographer, artist and designer with a background in architecture and microelectronic engineering. He is a Research Associate in the Cities and Urban Design Research Lab, Lancaster University. His research and practice are concerned with the cultural imaginaries of urban nature, particularly those that offer a hybrid view of nature and society. He also develops creative fieldwork methods that draw from phenology, soundscape ecology and geopoetics to augment the everyday and everynight experience of urban and human-altered landscapes.

Professor Rhonda Y Williams

Professor of History, John L. Seigenthaler Chair in American History, Vanderbilt

Professor Rhonda Y. Williams is a historian of low-income black women’s and marginalized people’s experiences, everyday lives, politics, and social struggles. Her research contributes to the rethinking of gender, political identity, citizenship, civil rights, black liberation struggles, and interactions with the U.S. state. She is the author of the award-winning The Politics of Public Housing: Black Women's Struggles against Urban Inequality (2004) and Concrete Demands: The Search for Black Power in the 20th Century (2015). She is the author of numerous articles and essays, including the forthcoming book chapter titled “Women, Gender, Race, and the Welfare State” in the Oxford Handbook for Women’s and Gender History, co-edited by Lisa Materson and Ellen Hartigan-O’Connor. Williams is also the co-editor of the book series Justice, Power, and Politics at the University of North Carolina Press and is co-editor of Teaching the American Civil Rights Movement.

At present, Williams is researching illicit narcotics economies in the post-1930s United States, and continues to examine the history of black power politics in the United States.

Dr Katie Beswick Acting and Performance Programme Director Wimbledon College of Arts

Katie Beswick is an award-winning author and academic, whose work spans journalism, creative writing and scholarship.

Her academic writing primarily concerns issues of class relations and class politics across a range of popular culture, art and performance practices. Beswick has published widely in books, journals, scholarly editions and online.

Her 2019 monograph, 'Social Housing in Performance: The English Council Estate on and Off Stage' (Methuen), explored the ways council estates appear in theatre, performance, art, film and television examples.

With Conrad Murray she is the author of 'Making Hip Hop Theatre: Beatbox and Elements' (Methuen 2022), a practical guide to using hip hop in theatre, which understands hip hop as always embedded in class politics. Her latest book, 'Slags on Stage', is due for publication with Routledge in 2023.

Dr Michael J Flexer, Mignol ‘Nolly’ Gregory and ‘Winning’ Wendy Thuesday

Waiting Times Project

Michael is the publicly engaged research fellow on the Waiting Times project and lecturer in the English Department at Exeter. His academic interests include semiotics and post-structuralist theory, particularly applied to questions of political power, social organisation and class, and how these determine access to health. He has recently written on the politics of Covid, the medical case report as a literary genre and the power relations of the medical encounter. He is currently preparing a monograph, based on his PhD thesis, on the semiotics of ‘schizophrenia’ for publication with Liverpool University Press, and developing a semiotic account of time, care and the life course from his work on Waiting Times.

Nolly was born in the West Indies and came to the UK aged 12. She loves most things crafty: knitting, painting, cross-stitch to name a few. She is a talented painter and made a quilt to represent her group’s stories on the project.

Wendy came to London when she was 17yrs old, from Trinidad and qualified as a  S.R.N, and R.M.N in the UK. She left nursing and worked as an International Telephone Operator with British Telecom. Returning to Trinidad, Wendy worked for Johnson and Johnson(J&J), as a School Educator, visiting Schools in the Caribbean where Johnson and Johnson sold feminine sanitary products. This involved talking to girls from 11yrs about hygiene and menstruation. She also spoke to people in ante and postnatal clinics in hospitals and health centres about the benefits and correct use of J&J Baby Range. She later worked as a Medical Representative for Novartis Pharmaceuticals, visiting hospitals and doctors’ offices, detailing the benefits of prescribing the Novartis product line she was responsible for.

Michael, Nolly and Wendy collaborated on several months of storytelling workshops throughout 2021, both online and offline.

The event will be recorded and published on the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health YouTube channel, so by attending you acknowledge you may be recorded. To maintain privacy, you are welcome to keep your video turned off and change your Zoom screen name.

If you have any questions, please contact wellcomecentre@exeter.ac.uk.