Dear all,

Please join us for two 20-minute research papers on Wednesday afternoon. 

University of Winchester
Faculty of Arts Research Seminar Series
Wed 24 Feb, 4.30pm, SAB003
All welcome!


Letting go of the ‘language of education’ – my journey to find new ways to articulate the intrinsic value of the arts within a specific educational context.
Jill Goodwin, University of Winchester

Schools are goal-oriented places, concerned with defining measurable outcomes and demonstrating progress.  When I was a class teacher, I found it difficult to take a creative approach to my work whilst fulfilling the onerous requirements of the job role.  After years of trying (in both mainstream and special schools), I eventually left the profession.  I have since returned to one school in a voluntary capacity which has given me the freedom to develop a creative practice of multi-sensory installation and performance, and to explore the arts more generally, without the constraints of curriculum and class responsibility. 
 As a research student, I set out to explore the meaning and value of this creative practice within school, but when I attempt to articulate it, I find that my thinking and my language are dominated by this belief in outcomes and progress as key criteria of worth.   This powerful framework pervades my mind, making alternative viewpoints seem weak, and I struggle to define myself and my work outside of it.  My ‘Practice as Research’ study then has become a quest to establish and articulate a different model, one that honours the intrinsic value of the arts and their important social role in this context. 
 In this presentation I describe my research context - a school for pupils with profound intellectual and physical disabilities, the challenges and joys of my work, and my journey to find alternative ways to view and value the arts and what I do.

&

“If I don’t input those numbers…it doesn’t make much of a difference”: Insulated Precarity and Gendered Labour in Friends 
Dr. Neil Ewen, University of Winchester
                
The implausibility of a group of twenty-somethings, who spend most of their time lounging around drinking coffee, being able to afford sizeable Manhattan apartments and enjoying relatively privileged lifestyles was often noted by fans and critics during the original run of Friends (NBC 1994-2004). Indeed, this is knowingly acknowledged at regular points throughout the series, not least in the very final scene, when all the characters are about to leave Monica and Chandler’s apartment for the last time, and Chandler says: “It was a happy place, filled with love and laughter, but more importantly because of rent control it was a friggin’ steal”. Viewed from the other side of the 2008 financial crisis, when politicians’ claims of economic recovery and rising employment are betrayed by a rising precariat, falling wages, and widespread anxieties about labour across the Global North, the “insulated precarity” of Friends’ multiple protagonists, and their seeming nonchalance about work, marks out the show as a prime example of a Clinton-era “boom” text that is relaxed and uncritical of “the Third Way”, and the characters as typically indifferent Generation Xers. After first charting the gendered nature of labour in Friends, this paper focuses specifically on the role of Chandler Bing, who quits his nondescript office job to follow his dreams, before realizing he doesn’t know what they are, and ends up in that quintessential capitalist endeavour: advertising. Making links with other contemporaneous Gen-X texts such as the novels of Douglas Coupland and films such as Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) this paper argues that while Friends’ self-reflexive comic mode facilitates sympathetic treatment of Chandler as a “New Man”, his perpetual crisis of masculinity (his infertility, his periodic reliance on his wife’s income, and the constant questioning of his sexuality) are all related to the lack of purpose in his career and thus the changing work culture that characterized the period.



Jill Goodwin is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Winchester.

Neil Ewen is a Lecturer in the School of Media and Film at the University of Winchester. He writes about the politics of sport, celebrity, and popular culture. He is co-editor of First Comes Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics (Bloomsbury 2015) and is the editor of the Cultural Report section of the journal Celebrity Studies (Routledge). 

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