‘(Re)Imagining Value’:

An Interdisciplinary Symposium

Organised by the Economic Humanities Network  
Funded by the Pioneer Awards Competition,
Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute (NUHRI)

 

Friday 26 May 2023, Newcastle University

 

         

https://www.ncl.ac.uk/nuhri/research/current-projects/

                                        

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Overview of the Day

9-9.30am: Registration

9:30-9:40am: Welcome!

9:40-10:40am: Keynote paper (Professor Nicky Marsh, University of Southampton)

10.40-11am: Tea and Coffee

11am-12.30pm: Parallel Panel 1

12.30-1.30pm: Lunch

1.30-3pm: Parallel Panel 2

3-3.30pm: Tea and Coffee

3.30pm-5pm: Parallel Panel 3

5-5.10pm: Break

5.10-6.10pm: Keynote paper (Professor Paul Crosthwaite, University of Edinburgh)

6.30pm: Conference Dinner

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Programme of Events

9-9.30am: Registration (main foyer, Devonshire Building)

9:30 -9:40am: Welcome

                     Dr Leanne Stokoe (Newcastle University)

                     (Room G21/G22, Devonshire Building)

9.40-10.40am: Keynote Paper: 

‘Performing Value: Metrics and Imagination in the Economic Humanities’

Professor Nicky Marsh (University of Southampton) 

(Room G21/G22, Devonshire Building)

10.40 -11am: Tea and Coffee (main foyer, Devonshire Building)

11am-12.30pm – Parallel Panel 1

Parallel Panel A (Room G21/G22, Devonshire Building)

Chair: Dr Leanne Stokoe (Newcastle University)

‘Allegorising Value: Justice, Property, and the Postlapsarian State in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, Book V’

Dr Daniel Cadman (University of Sheffield)

‘Protecting the sacred organization through valuing the worker too much? Silencing practices in religious organizations’

Dr Victoria Pagan (Newcastle University)

‘Portraiture and Social Value: Revaluing Identities during the Reign of Terror’

Professor Kamilla Elliott (Lancaster University)

Parallel Panel B (Room G.05, Percy Building)

Chair: Dr Sadek Kessous (Newcastle University)

‘How Discipline Shapes the Meaning of Value Creation in Higher Education’

Dr Lucy Hatt, Dr Jane Nolan and Dr Carys Watts (Newcastle University)

‘Rethinking Value Beyond Productivity: A Literary Exploration of the Meaning of Value’

Elena Trayanova (Creative Content Manager, Education Technology)

‘Re-Evaluating Love: Capitalism’s Borrowed Value’

Orlaith Darling (PhD candidate, Trinity College Dublin)

12.30 – 1.30pm: Lunch (main foyer, Devonshire Building)

1.30pm – 3pm: Parallel Panel 2

Parallel Panel C (Room G21/G22, Devonshire Building)

Chair: Dr Robbie McLaughlan (Newcastle University)

‘A Crisis of Credibility: Aesthetic “Value” and the Edwardian Socially-Marginalised Author’

Deborah Giggle (PhD candidate, University of East Anglia)

‘Forging an Economic Future? Female Victorian Travellers on the Industrialisation of the Antiquities Trade in Egypt and Japan, 1848-1880’

Margaret Gray (PhD candidate, Newcastle University)

‘Valuing Taxidermy and Taxidermizing Value in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend’

Angel Perazzetta (PhD candidate, Leiden University)

Parallel Panel D (Room G.05, Percy Building)

Chair: Professor Peter Knight (University of Manchester)

‘Why climst thou not the Mount Delectable’: The value of literature in theories of value’

Dr Dominic Walker (University of Cambridge)

‘Thinking about equality: evaluating numbers, evaluating manners’

Dr Simon Grimble (University of Durham) 

‘Re-Imagining the Value of History: Academic Historiography and the Active Life of Critical Understanding’

Dr David Manning (University of Leicester)

Parallel Panel E (Room G.13, Percy Building)

Chair: Dr Leanne Stokoe (Newcastle University)

‘Value for the Nation, Value for the North: Nationalism and the Shaping of British Museum’s Collection of Medieval Manuscripts, 1900-1939’

Olivia Baskerville (PhD candidate, University of London)

‘Value at the margins: the representation and conservation and vision of value in the institution- the case ofThe Sarah Rose Collection at London South Bank University’

Dr Nicola Baird (London South Bank University)

‘Conserving value: museum and heritage studies – Preserving aircraft collections at the risk of losing their value’

Haidy Elmesiry (PhD candidate, Newcastle University)

3pm-3.30pm: Tea and Coffee (main foyer, Devonshire Building)

3.30pm – 5pm: Parallel Panel 3

Parallel Panel F (Room G21/G22, Devonshire Building)

Chair: Dr Rob Hawkes (Teeside University)

‘From Provincial to Place-Making: The Spatial Economy of the Black British Novel’

Dr Chloe Ashbridge (Newcastle University)

‘Two Ballerinas, or What’s the Value of an Occupation?’

Dr Sadek Kessous (Newcastle University)

‘The Evaluative Logic of Meritocracy’

Owain Burrell (PhD candidate, University of Warwick)

Parallel Panel G (Room G.05, Percy Building)

Chair: Dr Cristina Neesham (Newcastle University)

‘Understanding Value in Context of Desire Towards Mundane Objects Amongst Men in India’

Devika Bahadur (PhD candidate, De Montfort University)

‘The Neoliberal Entrepreneur in the Fictional South Asian Megalopolis’

Samia Majid (PhD candidate, The University of Northampton)

‘Bees and Bonbibi: exploring multiple values in the culture of honey gathering towards a sustainable future for humans and nonhumans within the Sundarbans Delta, India and Bangladesh’

Dr Niki Black and Professor Maggie Roe (Newcastle University)

Parallel Panel H (Room G.13, Percy Building)

Chair: Dr Leanne Stokoe (Newcastle University)

‘System Gallery: What’s the Point?’

Daniel Goodman (PhD candidate, Newcastle University)

‘Articulations of ‘value’ in construction and urban development in the North East of England’

Dr Sarah Winkler-Reid (Newcastle University)

5 –5.10pm: Break (main foyer, Devonshire Building)

5.10pm-6.10pm: Keynote Paper:
‘“Absorbing, Mysterious, of Infinite Richness”: Bloomsbury’s Values’.

Professor Paul Crosthwaite (University of Edinburgh)

(Room G21/G22, Devonshire Building)

6.30pm: Conference Dinner

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

'(Re)Imagining Value: An Interdisciplinary Symposium': Call for Papers

26 May 2023, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne.

Keynote speakers: Professor Nicky Marsh (University of Southampton) and Professor Paul Crosthwaite (University of Edinburgh)

The Economic Humanities Network for the Newcastle University Humanities Research Institute (NUHRI) invites proposals for a one-day interdisciplinary symposium to be held on 26 May 2023.

The theme of the symposium investigates the role of value within the emerging field of economic humanities, which brings together researchers who identify a reciprocal relationship between the arts and social sciences. Recent scholarship within this field has interrogated the cultural metamorphosis through which economics was divested of the humanitarian concerns that were crucial to its Enlightenment origins, and became aligned with the ‘dismal’ pursuit of profit. By forging dialogues between literature, history, business studies, law, philosophy, politics and beyond, our network explores how economics shares with the humanities a view that individuals are motivated by desire, imagination and creativity, as well as considers how this perspective transforms how we understand value today. The symposium opens up discussions about what value means in an era driven by capitalism and post-pandemic recovery. We are particularly interested in the way that value measures what is ‘useful’, yet remains an enigma that evolves with the spirit of its age.

Ranging across the higher education and public sectors in their areas of specialisation, our keynote and guest speakers will address how the theme of value not only informs their work, but is also shaped by the disciplinary or critical lens through which it is studied. This methodology will provide delegates with an opportunity to reflect upon the benefits and challenges of defining value in their own research. Accordingly, we invite proposals for papers which broadly consider how value is imagined and reimagined across a range of scholarly fields and historical periods.
Possible topics could include, but are not limited to:

•      Imagining value then and now: shifting linguistic or historical terms
•      The public arena: visions of value in institutions and/or government
•      Depictions of value in music, the visual arts, film, theatre, and performance
•      The representation of value through literary forms: prose, poetry,
       periodical, and pamphlet
•      Value in the market: finance, economics, and trade
•      Demonetising value: morality, relationships, and wellbeing
•      The evolution of value: scientific discovery and medical advances
•      Value at the margins: gender, class, race, and sexuality
•      Conserving value: museum and heritage studies
•      Religious values: faith, fanaticism, and revelation
•      Reading in new ways: approaching value across disciplinary lines
•      Dialogues of value: collaborations with industry, education
       and policy makers

Abstracts of 250 words for 20-minute papers should be submitted to reimaginingvalue@gmail.com by 1 April 2023. Informal queries may be sent to the Economic Humanities Project Lead, Dr Leanne Stokoe (leanne.stokoe@ncl.ac.uk)

The symposium is generously supported by a NUHRI Pioneer Award, and will therefore be free to attend. We are delighted to be able to offer a number of travel bursaries for postgraduates and unwaged speakers. Please indicate in your abstract if you would like to be considered for a bursary.
For more information please visit the NUHRI website: https://www.ncl.ac.uk/nuhri/research/current-projects/

Public Lecture: Newcastle Corn Riots Project

       'The Bard may die, the Thresher Survive':
         The Poetry of Stephen Duck and Mary Collier

         
       Dr Leanne Stokoe (Newcastle University)
                Wednesday 26 May 2021, 7.30pm.

Public lecture presented to the Newcastle Corn Riots Project (Heaton History Group), funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund, the Joicey Trust and Newcastle City Council.

This lecture will focus upon two texts that respond directly to one another: Stephen Duck’s ‘The Thresher’s Labour’ (1730), and its witty riposte by Mary Collier, ‘The Woman’s Labour’ (1739). The son of a Wiltshire farm worker, Duck educated himself by studying the poetry of Milton, Dryden, and Addison, and rose to fame as the favourite ‘Bard’ of Queen Caroline. Having received no formal education as a washerwoman from Hampshire, Collier was inspired to reply to what she saw as Duck’s severity ‘on the Female Sex’ in his defence of the male labourer. What is most significant about both authors is the way that they appropriated the conventions, style, and metre of ‘highbrow’ poetry to criticise (or reinforce) contemporary attitudes towards agricultural workers. Writing during an era in which the literary elite sought to imitate the forms of the Roman ‘golden age’ for political purposes, this lecture will consider the extent to which Duck and Collier complicate popular assumptions about the racial, class and gender identity of eighteenth-century poets. By contextualising both authors within a period of harsh lawgiving, food shortages, and an expanding commercial economy, it will also question whether their reliance upon patronage ensured that labouring-class voice was romanticised, distorted and ultimately silenced.

March Reading Group Session

                      ‘Combination and Confederacy’:
Radical Protest and Chartism on Tyneside, 1819-1839

Neil Harrison, Senior Lecturer in Law (Northumbria University)

Tuesday 23 March 2021, 4-6pm

On 25 July 1839, the Mayor of Newcastle, John Fife, issued a warning to ‘certain Persons calling themselves Members, and acting as Members, of a Society or Societies of an illegal Character’. He declared that all such persons are ‘Guilty of a COMBINATION and CONFEDERACY’,  and warned that they would suffer severe fines or a possible prison sentence of up to three months.

When scholars consider the impact of the Chartist movement, they tend to focus upon the movements in Lancashire and West Yorkshire. Yet in its early years Chartism in Northumberland and Durham attained a vehemence which was rarely matched elsewhere. Activity in the North East took on a striking militancy in the years following the Peterloo Massacre. On 11 October 1819, a crowd of protesters gathered on the Town Moor calling themselves the Great Reform Meeting, and this inspired a group of leaders who rose to prominence in the following decades. One of the most influential Chartist newspapers originated in Newcastle, which promoted the Charter’s Six Points of Parliamentary reform. As time went on, the movement assumed a greater ascendancy, and its language took on a more pronounced tone of violence. By February 1839 Newcastle was one of three areas in the country attracting attention from the Home Office because of suspicion that arms were being assembled. In the Spring, outdoor meetings drew increasingly large numbers to hear speeches by local and national leaders.

During Summer 1839, the movement was inflamed by Parliament’s refusal to consider the National Petition. The magistrates of the North East were ill prepared to deal with disorderly action, and remained passive while the Chartists grew steadily in strength and more reckless in language. However, in July two incidents in Newcastle alarmed the law enforcers. In conjunction with the military, they hastened to take steps which deterred most workers from answering the call for a general strike in August, and thus enabled them to cope with the few who did. These events in the North East present a striking illustration of how masses of people were swept up in the turbulence of early Chartism, and how rapidly Chartist strength dissipated when it encountered robust police resistance.

In our reading group meeting, we are going to examine a range of texts that provide an historical record of radical protest and Chartist activity in Newcastle upon Tyne. These include banners, extracts from newspapers such as the Morning Post, Newcastle Courant and Northern Liberator, and examples of Chartist poetry. In particular, we are going to focus upon the intersections between radical politics and print culture, and consider how Chartist activity in Newcastle became transformed into a rhetorical weapon by its supporters and critics alike. 

Please email northeastcommerce2019@gmail.com for the reading materials and Zoom link.

Reading Group Session: Lord Byron, 'Darkness' (1816), 26 November 2020

 'All hearts were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light': The Byronic Hero and Cultural Apocalypse: Reading Group Session

Between June and November 1816, the Romantic poet Lord Byron hired a mansion, the Villa Diodati, on the shores of Lake Geneva. 1816 became known as the ‘year without a summer’, due to the eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Parts of Europe were cloaked with ash and debris, which transformed the environment into a sombre landscape. This natural disaster prompted a prophecy by an anonymous Italian astronomer that the world would end on 18 July, and caused widespread panic and loss of religious faith. During this turbulent summer, Byron was joined in Geneva by his physician, John William Polidori, his fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Shelley’s companions Claire Clairmont and Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, who was soon to be Shelley’s wife. Their stay in the villa is most remembered for the ‘ghost story competition’, in which Mary famously suffered the ‘waking dream’ that would inspire her novel Frankenstein (1818). However, it was during this period that Byron wrote one of his most haunting and apocalyptic poems: ‘Darkness’. In this poem, Byron does not merely imagine the effects of armageddon upon the Earth, but also draws striking parallels between the desolate landscape and the deterioration of the human psyche. In this reading group session, we will consider the relationship between Byron’s dark vision and the state of humanity following successive periods of political, as well as natural disasters. Can we interpret this poem as a comment upon the past horrors of the French Revolution, the present socio-economic crisis following the Napoleonic Wars, or even the future of an increasingly industrialised world? Finally, we will address whether there is any hope implicit within the empty ‘universe’ that both terrifies and captivates the Byronic speaker.

We welcome participation from staff and postgraduate students from all disciplines, institutions and historical eras, particularly those with research interests in the reciprocal relationship between commerce and culture.

For reading materials and the Zoom link, please email: northeastcommerce2019@gmail.com

North East Research Group for Commerce and Culture: First Meeting 21 January 2020

The first meeting of the North East Research Group for Commerce and Culture will take place on Tuesday 21 January 2020 between 3-5pm in Room G. 10, Ground Floor, Percy Building, Newcastle University.

The purpose of this meeting is for members to introduce themselves, and to discuss our research aims with a view to organising future reading groups, speakers' series and conferences. We are keen to frame these events around our topic of the reciprocal influence of commerce and culture across a range of disciplines and historical periods, but any additional ideas or suggestions for the purpose of our group are all very welcome.

There will, of course, be food and refreshments!

If you cannot make this initial meeting, but would like to contribute your thoughts via email, or be added to the group mailing list, please contact:
northeastcommerce2019@gmail.com.

Our group website and Twitter account are available here:
https://northeastcommerce.blogspot.com/
https://twitter.com/neccresearch

We look forward to meeting you all.

Representing the Industrial North: Call for Members

'Newcastle-on-Tyne', by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1823)

The North East of England has a strong culture of innovation in commerce, industry and trade, from its maritime heritage in seafaring stretching back to the medieval and early modern periods, to its renown as a centre for coal mining, shipbuilding and railway invention during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The North East has been home to pioneers of commercial discovery, including George and Robert Stephenson who designed the miner’s safety lamp and the first locomotives, William Armstrong who invented the hydraulic crane, and Joseph Swan who demonstrated the first electric light bulb. Not only did the region produce some of the greatest minds in engineering, trade and industry, but it also inspired a rich history of literature, art and music that both celebrated and reacted against such developments in its culture. 

In 1739, the poet and physician Mark Akenside celebrated the ‘number’s, figure’s, motion’s, laws’ that had contributed to his birthplace’s fame in his ‘Hymn to Science’. By 1775, the Newcastle radical Thomas Spence was inspired by his anger towards proposals to enclose the Town Moor to promote his ‘Land Plan’ – a call for the equalisation of property that revived the agrarian ideals of the Diggers during the English Civil War. As a centre for print culture, the Literary and Philosophical Society became a meeting place for the region’s scientists, industrialists and men of letters, but the North East was also home to some of the country’s first female engineers, such as Rachel Parsons who trained women in the factories of Wallsend during the First World War. 

With the dawn of the twenty-first century, much of the region’s industry has experienced a decline, with widespread closures of the shipyards and coalmines that compelled the writers of the North East to commemorate and scrutinise the commercial advances of their age. Yet growing scholarly interest in its recent industrial past, such as the ‘Writing the Strike’ project that focuses on poetry written by local miners during the 1980s, ensures that both the commercial culture of the North East, as well as its many representations, continues to live on.

The North East Research Group for Commerce and Culture intends to bring together scholars from across the region who are interested in the impact of commercial growth upon literature and other cultural forms, as well as the influence of literature and culture upon such developments in industry. Relevant research interests might include but are not limited to:

v  Prominent innovators in North East commerce, industry and technology.
v  Social, political or religious responses to the growth of trade in the region.
v  The portrayal of commerce in the works of Northern writers and artists.
v  Literary influences in the works of industrialists, scientists or engineers from
    the North East.
v  Responses or contributions to commercial growth in the North by minority or
    marginalised groups.
vThe impact of North East industry upon literature and the arts on a national or
    international level.

We welcome scholars from North East institutions who work more broadly upon themes of commerce or economics, and plan to arrange a first event in November 2019 to discuss our aims, scope and plans for public engagement. All disciplines and historical periods are welcome, as are postgraduates, early career researchers, and academic staff. If you would like to be added to the mailing list, or have any queries, please contact us at northeastcommerce2019@gmail.com.