Category Archives: Juliet Conway

LLC Blethers Video Presentations 2017: You Oughta Know

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LLC Blethers is a night of academic storytelling talking about any and everything students in the school of Literatures, Languages, and Cultures want to have a blether on about (in case you don’t know, at it’s simplest definition, blether is a Scots word for a chat). To help give the event a little something extra, all the presentations are given in the PechaKucha style, that is, they are done using slides that contain only (or at least predominantly) one image each. There are 20 slides allowed, and each slide is on screen for 20 seconds. We have collected together the videos from the 2017 Blethers event so you can watch them all!

Titles and presenters are:
– Amateur Psychopathy 101, or: How to Tell if your President is a Psychopath (Vicki Madden)
– Field Work: From Crooks to Books (Angus Sutherland)
– How Not to Organize a Conference: A 6-Minute Masterclass (Harriet MacMillan and Anahit Behrooz)
– I Was a Teenage Film Geek (Heather Thomson)
– My Personal Trial: A Night at the Theatre (Gina Maya)
– Picture Books for Grown-Ups: A History of Illustration in Four Books (Tess Goodman)
– Project Myopia: Crowdsourcing a Diverse Curriculum (Rianna Walcott)
– The Merits of Weird PhD Topics (Juliet Conway)
– Who Let the Vlogs Out? (Aran Ward Sell)

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Academia and the Bingo Card

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Juliet Conway | 20 March 2017

While in a group of 8 PhD students recently, I discovered just how bad we all are at summarising our research. Our topics, on which each of us could wax lyrical for hours, cannot fit into a succinct summary, not at least without using several 5-syllable words. I am equally guilty of this. I try to get around the issue with a one-word answer. ‘What do I study?’: ‘Flirting’. It works, and usually gets a laugh or a politely bemused look. But if you ask me to extrapolate you’ll probably regret it. My arguments, which would (hopefully) sound eloquent and comprehensive in 100,000 words, become jumbled, convoluted and frankly indecipherable when squeezed into a few sentences. The questioner’s eyes start to glaze at the word ‘dichotomy’ and as I try falteringly to explain how flirts use intentional ambiguity to undermine notions of authority, I know I’ve already lost them.

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Who Owns Bridget Jones? The Contemporary Canonicity Conundrum

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14 November 2016 ¦ Juliet Conway.

Recently a child showed me his favourite book; a written version of The Angry Birds Movie, which is already a film based, of course, on the popular App. When asked what he thought of the book, his reply was ‘it was good’, but ‘the birds weren’t the same as the game’. As a literature student I should probably balk at the idea that his favourite literature is the account of a pixelated bird, but instead he got me thinking. In a world where fiction is communicated in so many forms, which one is given precedence when contradictions occur?

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