I am a member of Space Place Practice, an artists’ research collective which comes together to create dialogues and to develop projects informed by a shared interest in notions of space, place and creative practice. I am also part of the International network Mapping Spectral Traces, a trans-disciplinary, international group of scholars, practitioners, community leaders and artists who work with and in traumatized communities, contested lands and diverse environments.
I am an associate member of LAND2, a national network of artist/lecturers and research students with an interest in landscape/place-oriented art practice and one of the “colleagues & collaborators” of HATCH drawing group which is part of the Place International consortium.
I have been a member of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) since 2009, joining its Place Wisdom Working Group in 2010. I am an Associate Member of the Intercultural Research Centre at Heriot-Watt University, which addresses key intercultural issues arising from the changing global context.
I have convened sessions, undertaken research and contributed writing or visual practice as part of my work with these largely interdisciplinary networks.
Mapping Spectral Traces Network
Conference paper ‘Working in the Opposite Direction’: Joseph Beuys in the Field (panel session one ʻTherapeutic Landscapes and Places of Healingʼ, Mapping Spectral Traces V, Body - Space - Memory, Maynooth University, 2011
Two conference papers at Mapping Spectral Traces VI, Shadows Traces Undercurrents, University of Minnesota.
LAND2
Panel chair, LAND2 Symposium Uncertain Exchanges (in conjunction with exhibition Landscape, Art and Uncertainty, Southampton City Art Gallery, October 2013 • Contribution to Moving Between the Lines project and publication, 2011 (see writing)
SIEF
Paper on panel Experimenting with Methods in Critical Affective Research, SIEF Congress, Göttingen, 2017
Led workshop on home (including performance action) and gave paper on panel Translating Cultural Imaginaries of Home: near-homes and far-homes, SIEF Congress, Tartu, 2013
Panel convenor and co-presented paper for Dis-/re-placements: creative engagements with people and place session, SIEF Congress, Lisbon, 2011
Convenor for panel on Art and Anthropology, SIEF Congress, Verbal Arts Centre, Derry/Londonderry, 2009
Scales of Home Working Group
Research contribution to workshop Home: theories and approaches, University of Mannheim, 2014.
Part of interdisciplinary working group Scales of Home in Today’s Europe (scaho), focusing on how scales of home have been imagined and socially constructed in Europe since the 1990s.
Intercultural Research Centre
Creative Ethnology Studio, first collaborative workshop - Who is Precarious Now? An Exploration of Homing Through Art, 2017. Studio series organised by Heriot-Watt University and Edinburgh University
PLaCE International (UK)
Member from 2009 - 2019. In 2013, the Research Centre became part of a consortium of four centres.
Contributed to publication emerging from Invisible Scotland Conference, University of Dundee, 2013 (see art work for full reference)