Claire’s research largely focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century Britain. She is particularly interested in the intersections between the social, the cultural and the emotional, and has tried to develop new ways of working across these categories using life writing, particularly that found within the Mass Observation Archive, and oral history. Her publications on women’s lives include studies of leisure, home and employment and a collaboration with Penny Tinkler and Stephanie Spencer on Women in Fifties Britain (2017). Her work on girls’ autobiographical writing has culminated in a trade book – Class of ’37, co-written with Hester Barron – which explores the lives of one particular class of twelve and thirteen-year-old Bolton schoolgirls who wrote essays for Mass Observation in 1937. The book uses both on their own writing and the memories of their descendants.

Brigid McLeer is an Irish artist based in London. She is interested in ideas around contingent subjectivity and the capacity of images to ‘act’ in the context of politicised art practices. She works in various media/modes including video, durational performance (live and to camera) photography, drawing and writing. Her work has been shown in galleries, public sites, as online projects and on the page. Recently, she has begun to produce more collective and participatory performance events and projects, sometimes underpinned by a written script. Brigid also produces and publishes critical and art writing

Dr. Dave Griffiths is a UK artist, curator and educator whose work investigates troubled places and material cultures using archival media and collaboration. He utilises a variety of modes, including video, film, photography, writing and print-making. His recent research explored the creative potential for microfiche as a device for remembrance and wording.

Oran’s work has explored various subjects including the transitory nature of media imagery (Drifters), the associated values and belief systems entwined within objects (Synthetic Grammar) and the playful morphing of cultural symbols into new forms and icons (Depositions). His practice embraces various media including drawing, printmaking, digital print and adhesive vinyl. Recently he has been exploring the use of metal powders in combination with hand drawn woodcut prints.

To be honest, temporalities/time as a subject is something I – like I imagine others have done – came to fairly recently but, on thinking more about them/it, realised was always at the back of my mind without the scaffolding in place to work through it. My main subject interest has always been the history of mobility (refugees, exiles, migrants, travellers/tourists) in the early modern period. I have, until recently, largely approached this through the lenses afforded by historical geography, mobility studies, material culture, etc. However, my most recent work on the English and Dutch East India Companies got me thinking more substantively about whether the ‘root spatial dilemma’ (as Philip Stern nicely put it) around these companies at the turn of ‘the global age’ was also one of time: the disruption of familiar temporal rhythms, encounters with unfamiliar temporalities, and the creative/destructive dynamics around them. With modern resonances in mind, I’ve thought about the variations between modern expectations of simultaneity and the experiences born in the early modern period of delay, disruption, and accommodation in global time. I’m just finished a draft chapter for ‘The Book’ (a broader cultural history of the English EIC in the early modern period) on these questions of time in Company life, but this was initially explored in the article linked in my signature. 

Kiraṇ Kumār (b. 1983) is an artist, researcher and writer whose practice lies at the intersection of dance, critical historiography and speculative computing. Drawing from embodied and conceptual inquiries into yogic & tāntrik practices, his work articulates the nexus (or lack thereof) between premodern and future worlds, through performance, writing and visual art. He develops interdisciplinary works across diverse formats through long-term research cycles inquiring into embodiment, temporality, spirituality and digitality.

Dr. Kristen Kreider is a writer and artist. Her work stems from an interest in the poetics of thought, its materialization as form, and a concern with how artworks relate to the world. Through her work as a writer, researcher and educator, Kristen works to promote an interdisciplinary, socially engaged approach to contemporary poetics, and to encourage a rigorous dialogue between creative and critical practice in contemporary art. Together with the architecht James O’Leary, they collaborate to make performance, installation and time-based media work in relation to sites of architectural and cultural interest.

My most recent/ongoing project is an attempt to write a ground-up, intersectional history of women’s “everyday health” (bodily, emotional, and psychological) in Britain, c. 1960-1990. The project draws heavily on life narratives of different kinds, including new oral history interviews with women born between 1940 and 1970,  re-use of existing oral history collections, and responses to Mass Observation Directives.

Working with ancient myths in the context of psychoanalytic theories of the unconscious and feminist theory, I am interested in the lived experience of non-linear time and how ancient sites and myths, as well as the unconscious, are characterised by a relation to time that goes against teleology and ideas of progress. I’m interested in time in dreams and how we are continually living and navigating the demands of linear time, yet our deep lived experience follows a different order of time and how we negotiate this creatively.

Music exists in time – yet its mystery is how it also shapes our perception of time. Do we feel that a work is short or long, do we feel that time is flowing quickly or slowly? If we hear a work for the first time, how much do we notice, how much do we remember, how much do we predict what will unfold? As a composer, I seek to entrance the audience, to find new sounds that can be unfolded, expanded, elaborated, to draw my listener into a different space and time…

Alongside the rich history held within our collections, we run a programme of contemporary art. Within this, we encourage artists to utilise The Whitaker’s collections providing an intersection of the past represented in the material artefacts we hold and the present in modern-day exhibitions. The artists’ processes allows for re-interpretation or a re-thinking of Rossendale’s history and also allows our collection to be in the ‘present,’ very much alive or living. We are interested in being critical within this process, being aware of the position of the Museum as an ‘institution’ and the responsibility the Museum holds in knowledge production of the past., and our active engagement with the temporal relationship between past, present and future.

Personally, working in collections, I have also recently been thinking about the idea in my day to day job of preserving objects for the future. What determines which objects are valued and preserved over others, is this representational and can our actions in the present in a public facing Museum institution affect future activity. In addition to this, with the world at such a tense point of history; politically, environmentally etc. are we preserving for an unknown future or unknown audience and what might future museum work look like?