Chaired by Nalan Azak
Anne Klara Bom (Zoom): Time and timeliness in framings of The High School Song Book
The High School Song Book is a piece of material cultural heritage with an overall purpose to “reflect the contemporary culture of community singing” in Denmark. Since the book was first published in 1894, it has been subject to several political, educational, and mediated framings and debates related to Danish identity, values and ideas. In research, its lyrics and the use of them have been approached as sources to Danish cultural history on how singing is used to remind the Danes of a common past, of common traits and values in the present, and to express common aspirations for the future. Both in research and in debates, The High School Song Book is frequently situated in temporal contexts, but it has not been examined how the abstract units past, present, and future are constructed, expressed, and negotiated in debates about the book and the ways it is framed and used for community singing. By use of concepts from critical time studies and science and technology studies, my aim with this paper is to examine how and with what effects different configurations of time have played vital roles in media debates about revisions of the songbook, and in political framings of the book and songs from it. On a theoretical level, the paper seeks to explore “the distinctive contributions that time itself might make to work on community” (Bastian 2014) within the field of critical heritage studies. It is argued that the fields’ current focus on the discursive and affective dimensions of heritage practices can benefit from in-depth analysis of how time works as an actant in the entangled processes where heritage is connected to social contexts such as class, race, nation, and gender (Smith 2021; Smith, Wetherell & Campbell 2018).
Bio: Anne Klara Bom (PhD) is an associate professor and Head of Cultural Studies at The Department for Language, Culture, History and Communication at the University of Southern Denmark. Her fields of research are critical heritage studies and cultural studies, and she has worked with approaches to and uses of cultural heritage in many different contexts. Recent articles are published in International Journal of Cultural Policy (2021), Childhood & Philosophy (2021), and Journal for World Literature (2019), and she is author of the monography H.C. Andersen som kulturelt ikon [Hans Christian Andersen as a cultual icon] (2020). She is PI of the research project Samklang: Højskolesangbogens sociale fællesskaber [Harmony: The Social Communities of The High School Song Book] (2022-2024) funded by Danish Arts Foundation and Arts and Culture Norway.
Janne-Camilla Lyster: Resuscitating temporalities from timeless storage
Dancers and choreographers are confronted with past attempts to store movement through notation in the shape of systems for movement notation – such as Beauchamps-Feuillet notation, Laban notation and Eshkol-Wachman movement notation. Either approaching movement in a mimical way (“drawing” movement), such as Beauchamps-Feuillet, or through symbolic signs (“writing” movement), such as Eshkol-Wachman, the sensorial aspect of performing the movement, and in particular its temporal aspects, slips the notating and, in turn, the process of resuscitating it, i.e., recreating movement from scripture.
This paper addresses efforts to store time in timeless mediums, and to resuscitate these temporalities in the field of choreography. Moving beyond choreography, it asks how temporalities are created when sensorial experiences are recreated from timeless – in a literal sense – formats such as written or drawn material.
Bio: Janne-Camilla Lyster an associate professor in choreography at the Oslo National Academy of the arts. She is a choreographer, performer, researcher, and writer. In 2019 she completed her artistic doctoral project "Choreographic poetry: Creating literary scores for dance". She is working currently with internationally renowned choreographers such as Deborah Hay (US) and was recently commissioned to make and perform a choreographic work based on the archive of Noa Eshkol (IL), which was shown at the National Museum (NO) and Norrköping Konstmuseum (SE). Lyster has a special interest in prefigurative practices, notation systems and transdisciplinary artistic work.
Sarah Bro Trasmundi: Reading, breaks and living pauses
Education should enable individuals and societies to prepare for the future. European educational systems have a long tradition of assessing the quality of learning in terms of products and functional value (e.g., scores on a test of information retention). Currently, teachers train reading skills such as fluency, speed, vocabulary knowledge and word comprehension, and reading pedagogy is designed to avoid breaks during reading and only engage in imaginative processes post festum, e.g. by means of literary analysis. This focus leaves aside the function of breaks during reading, and at worst teachers train students to avoid them. While breaks can be detrimental for reading maintenance, as when a reader is interrupted, or when motivation and attention decline, they could also fuel imagination. This idea stems from a recent study that shows how readers continually initiate multiple micro-breaks to link texts to experiential and imaginative processes. The gallery below provides a few examples of such breaks in natural (i.e., non-experimental) reading situations. The few examples indicate that the readers do not disengage when they elicit breaks. In fact, the breaks do not seem to relate to decline in attention or task switching. Rather, the readers use gestures (such as pointing in the text), which allow them to resume the ocular scanning efficiently.
An important theoretical backbone that gives flesh to this work on breaks is the theory (and dramaturgy) of living pauses from the Japanese Noh theatre, established by Zeami in the 14-15th centuries. The Japanese concept for a living pause is ma. In the Noh theatre, such silent moments are performed as maintaining silence, and in experiencing the deepened chronotope. The concept gives weight to the idea that breaks are not just empty voids, but meaningful because of their transition potential, and breaks have been described as the most intriguing moments because they disturb anticipation, habitual thinking, and prediction. When flow is broken, the break constitutes a threshold for new beginnings. A break during reading can be an imaginative incubation phase where everything becomes possible. In sum, the breaks fuel imagination, they are cognitive-affectively saturated which provides memory with the best conditions. In this talk, I show how readers change the pace of rhythm when they encounter riddles, or they zoom out and ‘pause’ the symbolic scanning; that is, how they create temporal loopholes to integrate multiple thought processes over time. Currently, there is no systematic understanding of what prompts such breaks or how they relate to thought processes. Testing the function of breaks systematically and empirically will reveal the untapped potential of breaks for education by showing how temporal adaptivity matters for motivation and learning. Such results would radically alter expectations in reading and enrich the imagining power of readers by allowing them to engage more creatively with texts.
Bio: Sarah Bro Trasmundi is Associate Professor of Cognitive Ethnography at the University of Southern Denmark and Researcher at Oslo University in the research group ’Literature, Cognition and Emotions’. She focuses on the intersection between cognition, imagination, and language in domains such as literature, interaction, reading, and education.