Issue 49 Spring 2019
STORYTELLERS
It is fitting that the theme of this edition of Goldlink is ‘Storytellers’ as my chapter at the College draws to a close. My own Goldsmiths story began nine years ago when I became Warden. I could not have anticipated the unprecedented and continuing changes in higher education. It is no understatement to say that there has never been a dull moment. I will miss the vigour and passion of this unique institution and I will miss the stories, such as those shared by Education alumni who came back to campus in December to receive an honorary degree in recognition of their achievements in teaching. Storytelling at Goldsmiths takes many forms and cuts across all disciplines. As alumni, you are part of a remarkable group of people, including some of the world’s great thinkers, artists, musicians and writers. Whether you have reached the top of your profession or are still working out what your career might look like, you have a story to tell and we want to hear it. It’s important for the College to know what happens next in the lives of alumni, and to demonstrate the impact our campus in New Cross has across the world. In this issue, we showcase the Creative Writing alumni who came to Goldsmiths specifically to experiment and discover their own mode of storytelling. We also feature Forensic Architecture, who develops innovative and alternative methods of storytelling using images, videos, 3D models and animation to present the truths they uncover. I hope you enjoy reading the features in this edition and that you remember to keep in touch with the College — as I know I will. Thank you for all the memories! Patrick Loughrey, Warden Goldsmiths, University of London
Cover: Projecting thermal footage from a police helicopter establishes the spatial relationship of figures and vehicles, reflected in a photogrammetry 3D site model. Image: Forensic Architecture, 2018
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Contents
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News 02 Goldsmiths appoints a new Warden 02 QS World University Rankings 04 Lewisham Live 05 Addressing the BAME attainment gap 06 In conversation with Maisie Williams 07 Editors’ picks
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Forensic Architecture: Four Investigations Feature
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Golddream: 50 years on Showcase
18 Alumni achievements Spotlight
Alexandra Adey A day in the life
27 Goldsmiths Press Feature
30 Tell your story Opportunities
20 32 Contact Development & Alumni Office Goldsmiths, University of London New Cross, London SE14 6NW alumni@gold.ac.uk +44 (0)20 7896 2619 Update your contact preferences explore.gold/2019update Give to Goldsmiths gold.ac.uk/giving-to-goldsmiths
Storytellers Feature
Sophie Hassell-Richardson Giving to Goldsmiths
Facebook @GoldsmithsAlumni
Blog goldlink-online.com
Contributions may be submitted for consideration by email. We reserve the right to edit articles in the interest of brevity and clarity. The opinions expressed in the magazine are those of the writers concerned and not necessarily of Goldsmiths.
Editors Mary Davies, Minh Lam
Goldlink is printed on paper accredited by the Forestry Stewardship Council.
Twitter @GoldAlumni
Design Spy Studio
News
GOLDSMITHS APPOINTS A NEW WARDEN Professor Frances Corner OBE has been announced as the next Warden of Goldsmiths, University of London. Bringing more than 20 years’ experience leading educational institutions, Professor Corner joins Goldsmiths after serving as Head of London College of Fashion, part of University of the Arts London, where she has additionally served as Pro Vice-Chancellor for Digital. Professor Corner is the first woman to lead Goldsmiths and is the 13th Warden since the College was founded in 1891. She will be leading an academic community of more than 9,000 students and around 1,500 staff, with the College among the top 25 institutions in the UK for the quality of its research. Professor Corner said: “Goldsmiths is an institution which can shape society through radical thinking underpinned by a clear sense of purpose. “That distinctive ethos informs the College’s teaching and must also guide how we seek to meet students’ changing needs and expectations. “The College has the talents to inspire and inform different approaches to many changes and challenges confronting
society, including inequalities, climate change, and increasingly polarised communities. “These are issues which matter hugely to our students, staff and alumni — and to which politicians, businesses and local, national and international communities are demanding answers. “Together we can find these solutions and I am both honoured and excited to have the opportunity to lead Goldsmiths at this critical time.” Professor Corner is a campaigner whose championing of ethical fashion and the transformative power of fashion education has been globally recognised. In 2009, she was awarded an OBE for services to fashion Higher Education and widening participation in arts education. The new Warden will join Goldsmiths in August 2019. Outgoing Warden Patrick Loughrey, who has led Goldsmiths since April 2010, is due to leave at the end of May. The appointment was made following a full recruitment process, which included extensive consultation across the College, including alumni.
QS WORLD UNIVERSITY RANKINGS Goldsmiths is in the top 100 institutions worldwide for Arts and Humanities, according to a global university ranking released in February. The 2019 QS World University Rankings by Subject showed that the College is 93rd for Arts and Humanities — a rise of nine places on last year. Goldsmiths is in the top 50 worldwide for five of the academic subject areas as set out by the ranking. For example, the College is in the top 10 globally for Communication and Media Studies, ranked 11th for Art and Design and in the top 50 for Anthropology, Sociology and Performing Arts. The College has seen a rise in the rankings for five of the nine subject areas for which it qualifies. This put seven of our departments in the top 50. Professor Mark d’Inverno, Pro-Warden (International), said: “Despite the issues and vagaries of league table calculations,
these latest QS subject rankings are positive news for Goldsmiths and our ambitions as an international university with widely recognised reach and reputation. “It’s especially positive in the context of very significant investment in universities outside of the UK that has an impact on rising international rankings. “We should be proud of how Goldsmiths is viewed internationally. It supports us not only in sustaining our reputation as a leading international university but also in efforts to attract international staff and students to join the Goldsmiths community. It also helps to open up new international partnership opportunities with those institutions we most want to work with.” The full results can be found on the QS Top Universities website: explore.gold/world-rankings-2019
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Above: Professor Frances Corner OBE Š Michelle Marshall
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News
LEWISHAM LIVE
Teenagers working with Goldsmiths have released their first compilation album through NX Records, touching on themes of life, love, loss, relationships and the future in Lewisham. The Lewisham Live Mixtape — part of the Lewisham Live Festival — features original new music from emerging artists 19 years and under who live or study in the borough. The 50-minute recording covers a wide range of genres and is released by NX Records, a collaboration between the Department of Music at Goldsmiths and Matthew Herbert’s Accidental Records. Many of the tracks are from young artists who are members of the Alchemy Project, a collaboration between Goldsmiths’ Widening Participation team, the Department of Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies (STaCS) and the Department of Music, in partnership with three Lewisham schools. The Alchemy Project is led by the musical tastes and interests of the young vocalists, instrumentalists, songwriters and producers who meet every weekend to develop their work. The project is directed by Mikey Kirkpatrick, a Goldsmiths alumnus and associate lecturer in music and education who performs as a musician under the name Bird Radio.
Mikey works with a team of professionals such as King Vito (a science teacher from Addey and Stanhope School as well as a rapper, singer and producer), Tomáš Kaspar (musician and studio engineer at the Goldsmiths Music Studios), student ambassadors, STaCS youth work students, volunteer music students who offer instrumental tuition and Marlene Copeland (Widening Participation Coordinator at Goldsmiths). Mikey said: “One of the young artists who recently finished school is now selling his beats, another has been composing music for film. I see every new track, every new step, as a big success story, including this mixtape that we are all really proud of.” Listen to the Lewisham Live Mixtape: nxrecords.co.uk/ lewisham-live-mix
Above: Alchemy artists © Nhyira
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ADDRESSING THE BAME ATTAINMENT GAP
An award-winning academic who specialises in racial justice in education and the workplace is to lead a project to address the Black, Asian and Minority Ethnic (BAME) progression and attainment gap for students at Goldsmiths. Dr Nicola Rollock has been appointed BAME Attainment Academic Lead as part of the College’s response to the issue, which is a significant concern across UK higher education. Sector figures consistently show a difference between the proportion of white students and BAME students attaining a First or 2:1 degree. In 2016/17 the gap in UK domiciled students saw 79.5% of white qualifiers attain such good honours compared with 66.0% of BAME qualifiers. At Goldsmiths, the figures for 2017/18 were 89.6% of all white qualifiers receiving good honours compared to 71.7% of all BAME qualifiers. Dr Rollock has an extensive background in addressing and responding to BAME experiences in education and the workplace, including membership of the Wellcome Trust’s Diversity and Inclusion Steering Group, and is the lead author of, ‘The Colour of Class: The educational strategies of the Black middle class’.
The post will see her lead a working group that will collaborate with students and Academic and Professional Service departments to gain an understanding of the causes of the BAME attainment gap and to develop solutions to the issue. Dr Rollock said: “As an academic specialising in racial justice, the issue of the degree attainment gap has concerned me for some time. “I am pleased that Goldsmiths has taken this first important step in recognising that this warrants dedicated attention and look forward to working proactively with university leaders, students and academic colleagues to advance meaningful change in this area.”
Above: Dr Nicola Rollock, BAME Attainment Academic Lead at Goldsmiths
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News
IN CONVERSATION WITH MAISIE WILLIAMS
Left: Maisie Williams courtesy of Goldsmiths Communications team
In an event hosted by Goldsmiths Careers Service, Maisie Williams, best known as Arya Stark in ‘Game of Thrones’, talked about her career from being a dance-obsessed youngster to becoming the star of one of the biggest shows on television. The actor spoke to more than 300 students and urged them to ‘make change yourself’ by being rule breakers who are unafraid of taking risks. Maisie said young creatives can overcome the challenges of starting a career by believing in their talent and being bold. She called on students at Goldsmiths to use their abilities to help challenge issues like the lack of diversity and representation in the creative industries. “You can sit and wait for organisations to change or you can make change yourself.” She also stressed the importance of collaboration and networking when starting out — two factors that helped her develop a new creative collaborative digital platform and social network, daisie. She said: “There can be huge difficulties in the creative industries, it can be so hard to get a job. “That’s why we came up with the idea for a social network [daisie] that enables people to connect and work together on projects — to make it easier for those collaborations to take place.”
Maisie also said it was crucial that the creative arts are taken seriously and seen as being important career pathways. Speaking about the role of institutions like Goldsmiths, she added: “It’s so important that you can find places like here that celebrate these careers.” The interview was organised and conducted by Ashley Bheeroo, Employment Engagement Coordinator in the Careers Service at Goldsmiths. He said: “At the Careers Service we look to support our students in following their passions and helping them get the careers they want — we’re always available and here to help.” Goldsmiths Careers Service is a free resource available for the first three years after graduation and includes bespoke one-to-one coaching in person, by phone or via Skype. Find out more about careers support at Goldsmiths: gold.ac.uk/ careers. If you are able to support students through mentoring or offering of a placement or internship, please get in touch: alumni@gold.ac.uk
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EDITORS’ PICKS 1
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This summer, the Battle of Lewisham will be remembered with a mural depicting the demonstrators and community leaders who led the countermarch on 13 August 1977 against the farright National Front. Inspired by 1970s zines and punk and reggae culture, the provisional design draws heavily on the iconic images taken that day by some of the most prominent social documentary photographers of the time. The design was created by Ted Low (BA Design, 2015) in collaboration with a community advisory group.
Robin Robertson was announced as the winner of the Goldsmiths Prize — a £10,000 prize rewarding fiction at its most novel. He is an acclaimed poet; ‘The Long Take’ is his first novel, and the first verse novel to win the Goldsmiths Prize. In the book, free verse is mixed with typographical borrowings from street signs and text snatched from notebooks and journals, and interrupted by vivid prose flashbacks to the horrors of war.
2 The Conversation Booth is a mobile recording facility used as a tool for community engagement, capturing the voices of participants. Its first outing was an installation at 310 New Cross Road where locals were asked ‘Is Gentrification a Problem Here?’. It was recently used at the Honorary Degree Ceremony celebrating teaching alumni, where former students from the 1940s to 1980s shared their memories studying at Goldsmiths. Support from generous donations from alumni and friends helped Nicole Robson (MMus Sonic Arts, 2018) to build the physical booth. The booth has been donated to Goldsmiths so that current students interested in broadcasting and podcasting can benefit.
3 A project by artist and MA in Research Architecture student Naiza Khan has been selected to represent Pakistan in the 2019 Venice Biennale. This will be the first time the country has exhibited at the 134-year-old Biennale, which runs from 11 May to 24 November 2019. Naiza’s project ‘Manora Field Notes’ will immerse the viewer in life upon Manora, a small peninsula near Karachi, Pakistan.
4 A story recounting an estranged woman’s emotional journey home has won the Goldsmiths Young Writer Prize 2018. The work entitled ‘One Day’ was written by 17-year-old Sally Piper from West Sussex — who has wanted to be a writer since discovering it was ‘an actual job’. Judges praised the work as ‘original, mysterious and moving’. The competition, run by the Student Recruitment and Widening Participation team and the Department of English and Comparative Literature, is aimed at finding the next generation of writing talent.
Keep in touch by email to stay updated on alumni, student and staff news coming out of Goldsmiths throughout the year: gold.ac.uk/alumni
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Feature
FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE : FOUR INVESTIGATIONS
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Feature
WHAT IS FORENSIC ARCHITECTURE? Throughout our history, Goldsmiths staff, students and alumni have never been afraid to tread a controversial path or to question the status quo — this has been a hallmark of the College from the beginning. The very act of creating a place of learning for men and women from the ‘industrial and working classes’ of the New Cross area was itself a revolutionary act on the part of the Worshipful Company of Goldsmiths at the end of the nineteenth century. The YBAs (Young British Artists), who graduated from the College thirty years ago and threw out the art world’s proverbial rule book, are another example of Goldsmiths people setting their own path. Today, it’s Forensic Architecture — a multidisciplinary research agency based at Goldsmiths who are giving voice to oppressed people and uncovering truths through their advanced, investigative practices. Forensic Architecture, founded in 2010 by Professor Eyal Weizman, emerged from the Centre for Research Architecture, and continues to sit within the Department of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths. The agency brings together architects, artists, researchers, filmmakers, investigative journalists, software developers and archaeologists with NGOs and human rights lawyers to expose crimes and human rights abuses around the world. It is located at the intersection of multiple disciplines across Goldsmiths; from architecture and media to law and climate science. This interdisciplinary approach enables the team to pool expertise, giving rise to a different mode of practice that is creative and highly sophisticated. It also means the scope of their work is extensive and no investigation is similar: from homicide cases to urban warfare, to cases of ecocide. Forensic Architecture use advanced architectural and media techniques across their investigations, as well as to crossreference a variety of evidence sources, such as new media, remote sensing, material analysis and witness testimony. Every detail, angle and account is meticulously examined to help build a story — a story that is impartial, based on evidence and, most importantly, speaks the truth. Uncovering facts that confound the stories told by police, military, states and corporations hasn’t always made their work ‘easy’, and the question of whether it’s considered art or not is an added layer of controversy (they were nominated for the Turner Prize in 2018). The work of Forensic Architecture does not fall neatly into the category of ‘art’; rather, it occupies a unique space between many fields of research and aesthetic practice, utilising the tools of architecture and design to counter-investigate state crimes and to present this work in a way that is accessible and engaging to a wide audience. What is undeniable, through experimentation and activism incubated within the walls of Goldsmiths, is that Forensic Architecture is changing the way stories are told all around the world.
Forensic architecture is an emergent academic field developed at Goldsmiths. It refers to the production and presentation of architectural evidence — buildings and urban environments and their media representations. Background As contemporary conflicts increasingly take place within urban areas, homes and neighbourhoods have become targets, and most civilian casualties occur within cities and buildings. Urban battlefields have become dense data and media environments. War crimes and human rights violations, undertaken within cities and buildings, are increasingly caught on camera and often made available almost instantly. The premise of Forensic Architecture is that analysing violations of human rights and international humanitarian law in these urban, media-rich environments requires modelling dynamic events as they unfold in space and time, creating navigable 3D models of sites of conflict and animations and interactive cartographies on the urban or architectural scale. Aim These techniques allow Forensic Architecture to present information in a precise and accessible manner. The techniques of architectural analysis also enable Forensic Architecture to generate new insights into the context and conduct of urban conflict. Forensic Architecture have built a track record of decisive contributions to high-profile human rights investigations, sharing their work with the public via leading research and cultural institutes. Their main beneficiaries are always the victims of human rights violations, and communities in conflict zones or otherwise subject to state failure or violence.
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PROJECT 1: SAYDNAYA Scenario Since 2011, thousands have died in Syria’s prisons and detention facilities. With anyone perceived to be opposed to the Syrian government at risk, tens of thousands of people have been tortured and ill-treated in violation of international law. Many have been taken to Saydnaya Prison, near Damascus; a notorious and terrifying prison where detainees are incarcerated in horrific conditions and systematically and brutally tortured. Thousands are believed to have died in confinement there. What is claimed? According to Amnesty International, nearly 18,000 people have died in government prisons in Syria since the beginning of the uprising in 2011. The Syrian government has repeatedly denied such allegations. Inaccessible to journalists and independent monitoring groups, Saydnaya is a black hole of which no images exist. Until the investigation by Forensic Architecture, the world had no idea what happened within its walls. The investigation In April 2016, Forensic Architecture in partnership with Amnesty International travelled to Istanbul to meet five survivors from Saydnaya. In recent years, no journalists or monitoring groups that report publicly have been able to visit the prison or speak with prisoners. As there are no images of Saydnaya, Forensic Architecture were dependent on the memories of survivors to recreate what was happening inside. Using architectural and acoustic
Feature modelling, the team helped witnesses reconstruct the architecture of the prison and their experiences of detention, through their memories. The former detainees described the cells and other areas of the prison, including stairwells, corridors, moving doors and windows, to an architect working with 3D modelling software. The witnesses added objects they remembered, from torture tools to blankets and furniture, to areas where they recalled them being used. With next to no daylight, in particular in the solitary cells underground, the prisoners in Saydnaya developed an acute experience of sound. Detainees were made to cover their eyes with their hands whenever a guard entered the room and speaking was prohibited, so prisoners became attuned to the smallest noises. To capture these auditory memories, Forensic Architecture developed techniques to solicit ‘ear-witness testimony’ and reconstruct the prison’s architecture through sound. Witnesses listened to tones of different decibel levels, and were then asked to match them to the levels of specific incidents inside the prison. ‘Echo profiling’ helped to determine the size of spaces such as cells, stairwells and corridors (this involved playing different reverberations and asking witnesses to match them with sounds they remembered hearing in the prison) while ‘sound artefacts’ simulated the noise of doors, locks and footsteps, helping generate further acoustic memories. Result By building physical and acoustic models, Forensic Architecture were able to work with former detainees to uncover their memories to help build an image of Saydnaya, and the human rights violations that occur there. The Saydnaya project is part of a wider campaign with Amnesty International, calling on the Syrian government, and urging Russia and the USA to use their global influence, to allow independent monitors into Syrian detention centres.
PROJECT 2: 77SQM_9:26MIN Scenario On 6 April 2006, 21-year-old Halit Yozgat was shot and killed in his family-run internet café in Kassel, Germany. His was the ninth of ten racist murders committed in Germany between 2000 and 2007 by a neo-Nazi group known as the National Socialist Underground (NSU). At the time of the killing, Andreas Temme, an agent of the German domestic intelligence service, was present. Temme claimed not to have witnessed the murder, a seemingly absurd statement that was accepted during the murder trial. What is claimed? In November 2016, an alliance of civil society organisations known as ‘The People’s Tribunal: Unraveling the NSU Complex’ commissioned Forensic Architecture to investigate Temme’s testimony and determine whether it could be truthful or whether he had committed perjury.
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p8–9: Forensic Architecture located photographs and videos within a 3D model to tell the story of one of the heaviest days of bombardment in the 2014 Israel-Gaza war. The Image-Complex, Rafah: Black Friday, Forensic Architecture, 2015 p10: Forensic Architecture team members: Christina Varvia (Deputy Director), Samaneh Moafi (Researcher and Project Coordinator), Simone Rowat (Researcher and Filmmaker) and Sarah Nankivell (Manager) courtesy of Goldsmiths Communications team p11, top: Saydnaya prison, as reconstructed by Forensic Architecture using architectural and acoustic modelling. Image: Forensic Architecture, 2016 p11, bottom: Saydnaya prison is under a regime of silence; prisoners are not allowed to speak or scream when tortured. In these conditions, and since they are never allowed to leave their cells, prisoners develop an acute experience of sound and depend on their hearing in order to understand what happens outside their cell. Image: Forensic Architecture, 2016 p12–13: A composite of Forensic Architecture’s physical and virtual reconstructions of the internet cafe in which the murder of Halit Yozgat on 6 April 2006 occurred. Image: Forensic Architecture, 2017 p14, top: Forensic Architecture’s assessment of a US airstrike in Al-Jinah, Syria confirms that the targeted building was a functioning mosque. The pink circles indicate two large craters in the north part of the building, which munitions experts confirmed were consistent with two 500lb bombs. Image: Forensic Architecture, 2017 p14, middle: A reconstructed 3D model of the building by Forensic Architecture, overlaid on to a photograph of the mosque after two bombs hit the northern part of the building. Image: Forensic Architecture, 2017 p14, bottom: Forensic Architecture used available and sourced satellite photographs, survivor testimonies, images and videos such as the one pictured here from the YouTube channel of the al-Maara Media Center (MMC), an independent Syrian media organisation. Image: al-Maara Media Center and Forensic Architecture, 2017
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The investigation Forensic Architecture’s investigation became possible when hundreds of documents from the Hessen police investigation of the murder, including reports, witness depositions, photographs and computer and phone logs, were leaked at the end of 2015. Central to Forensic Architecture’s investigation was a leaked police re-enactment performed by Temme. Such re-enactments are often ritualistic events forming part of an admission or confession, denoting justice fulfilled. In Forensic Architecture’s investigation, the re-enactment was treated not only as a representation of an event, but an event in itself; a potential crime — of perjury and misrepresentation — in its own right. Using a reconstructed real-scale physical model of the internet café, Forensic Architecture re-enacted the original re-enactment in order to examine Temme’s testimony, while also carrying out further tests to analyse the threshold of sensory perception. The investigation undertook a series of experiments to uncover where Temme was located at the time of the murder, whether he could have heard or smelt the gun shots as they were fired, and whether he could have seen the body of the murdered Halit behind the front desk of the internet café as he got up to leave. Result Forensic Architecture’s investigation was presented to the state parliamentary inquiry into the NSU in Hessen on 25 August 2017. An exchange followed with members of the ruling Christian Democrat party (CDU), which was in charge of the security services at the time of the murder. The CDU produced a substantial critique of the investigation by Forensic Architecture, who responded in turn. As part of this exchange, new police files, classified before the investigation, were made public. The investigation established that Temme’s testimony was untruthful, opening up larger questions regarding the
involvement of German state agencies with radical rightwing groups. It was presented in 2017 at documenta 14, a contemporary art exhibition in Kassel, and was seen by over a million people — this enabled Forensic Architecture to open the case up to further public debate, demonstrating the power of cultural and artistic spaces. ‘The Murder of Halit Yozgat’ was shown as an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London in spring 2018.
PROJECT 3: ECOCIDE IN INDONESIA Scenario In 2015, fires in the Indonesian territories Kalimantan and Sumatra consumed over 21,000 square kilometres of forest and peat lands. In their undisturbed, swamped state, peat lands are fire-resistant, but decades of canal digging by large agribusiness operators had drained and dried the peat to prepare it for the monoculture plantation of palm oil — making it extremely flammable. Peat can smoulder underground for weeks, and creep in great depth many kilometres from the source of the fire. Fumes from about 130,000 local sources combined into a massive cloud, a few hundred kilometres long and a few kilometres thick. It contained more carbon, methane, ammonium and cyanide than those produced by the entire annual emissions of German, British or Japanese heavy industries. As the acrid cloud drifted north and westwards, it engulfed a zone that extended from Indonesia across Malaysia, Singapore, southern Thailand and Vietnam. Scientists estimate that this resulted in more than a 100,000 premature deaths, and that the fires might push the world beyond two-degree Celsius of global warming — and into the realm of potential and unpredictable calamities — faster than expected. The cloud can be understood as the harbinger of a new international crime of ecocide, one likely to become more relevant in the years to come.
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What is claimed? Some of the roots of the fires can be traced to the political repression and mass killings undertaken by the Indonesian government since 1965, when local and international companies collaborated with the armed forces to seize vast tracts of land from indigenous populations, and then employed those same populations in exploitative conditions. After the fire in 2015, President Joko Widodo of Indonesia instructed government agencies to revoke the permits of any palm oil companies involved in the burning of forests and urged the arrest of those responsible. The investigation This investigation into environmental crime demonstrates that, throughout the past century, states as well as intergovernmental and international organisations have conceptualised cases of mass casualties under a familiar framework of human-onhuman violence: political repression, violations of human rights, war crimes, sometimes even crimes against humanity and genocide. However, as the sources of contemporary calamities are increasingly likely to be a result of environmental destruction and climate change, a new set of categories and tools must be developed to describe forms of destruction that are indirect, diffused and distributed in time and space. The environment — whether built, natural or the entanglement of the two — is not a neutral background against which violence unfolds. Its destruction is also not always the unintended ‘collateral damage’ of attacks aimed at other things. Rather, environmental destruction or degradation over an extended timescale can often be the means by which belligerents pursue their aims. Though environmental violence is different from warfare, it is also entangled with it; it is often both the consequence of conflict and a contributing factor in the spread and aggravation of state violence. Result This work, undertaken in collaboration with Fibgar (Baltasar Garzón and Manuel Vergara), provides evidence on the burning of Indonesian forests and peatlands that annually generate more CO2 emissions than major industrialised countries do and has been related to the palm oil industry and the territorial cleansing of indigenous people.
PROJECT 4: AL-JINAH MOSQUE Scenario On the evening of 16 March 2017, a major unilateral US drone strike targeted Sayidina Omar Ibn Al-Khattab Mosque in Al-Jinah, in the province of Aleppo, Syria. According to witnesses, the strike took place when close to 300 people were in the building. Most were gathering for the Isha’a night prayer while 50 others remained in the smaller ‘winter prayer hall’ where a religious seminar had just finished. The Syrian Civil Defense, also known as the White Helmets, claimed to have recovered the bodies of 38 civilians, of whom five were children. The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported 42 dead, but the actual death toll could have been higher.
What is claimed? US Central Command claimed responsibility for the airstrike, stating US forces had conducted an airstrike on an Al-Qaeda meeting on 16 March, killing several terrorists. It identified the site as a partially constructed community meeting hall, and claimed that the mosque was not targeted, nor were there civilian casualties. The investigation Forensic Architecture undertook an architectural analysis of the 16 March 2017 US Airstrike in Al-Jinah, Syria. They conducted interviews with survivors, first responders and the building’s caretaker, and examined available and sourced videos and photographs in order to produce a model of the building both before and after the strike. For this investigation, Forensic Architecture focused on the architectural questions raised by the strike: what was the function of the building targeted? What can its architectural characteristics before the strike, and the state of the ruin afterwards, reveal about the incident? Were civilian casualties to be expected in such a building? Forensic Architecture constructed a detailed model of the building before and after the strike. They then cross-referenced and confirmed information from the remote interviews they had conducted against available photographs, videos and satellite imagery of the building, and further commissioned several photographic surveys on the ground. Their analysis revealed that, contrary to US statements, the building targeted was a functioning, recently built mosque containing a large prayer hall, several auxiliary functions, and the Imam’s residence. They believe that the civilian casualties caused by this strike were partially the result of the building’s misidentification. Result Following the investigation, US defense officials told CNN that the results of a US Central Command investigation found that a March US airstrike in northern Syria did, in fact, strike a building that was part of a ‘mosque complex’. Later at a press conference, the US Department of Defense told the New York Times that their investigation concluded that the strike was ‘legal and appropriate’ and that they were ‘confident this was a meeting of Al-Qaeda members and leaders; this was not a meeting of civilians’. A United Nations Syria Commission report in August 2017 concluded that US forces ‘lacked an understanding of the actual target’, ‘failed to take all feasible precautions to avoid or minimize incidental loss of civilian life’ and were ‘in violation of international humanitarian law’ ○ The selected projects have been re-published with permission from Forensic Architecture. You can find the original investigations, or any other investigation by Forensic Architecture, on their website: forensic-architecture.org
Showcase
GOLDDREAM: 50 YEARS ON Rediscovered 1960s and 1970s concert and club posters decorated the walls of Goldsmiths this March, taking visitors back to an era when the biggest names in rock and folk played London’s Students’ Unions. Many of the bands who performed across the city’s campuses went on to achieve global stardom, including Fleetwood Mac, Deep Purple, Procol Harum, Manfred Mann, John Martyn, King Crimson, Ambrose Slade and many more. Golddream, titled after a late-1960s campus music festival of the same name, also featured photographs by David Bracher (Teaching Certificate, 1970), who documented the College and surrounding area in a period of great social and cultural change. From strikes and protests to watching the sun come up on College Green, they paint a vivid picture of New Cross life and provided insights into the personal experiences and stories of Goldsmiths students. The posters were collected by David Riddle (PGTC, 1971), Goldsmiths Students’ Union Social Secretary from 1969–70, and have remained virtually unseen for 50 years. David says: “The images and production techniques, largely silk-screen printing, provide a unique insight into the trends and methods of a truly vibrant, and often less PC, pre-digital era.” With support from generous donations from alumni and friends, his collection has been curated for display by Will Cenci, Public Engagement Manager, and Dr John Price, Head of the Department of History. On 13 April 2019, alumni who left Goldsmiths in the 1960s and 1970s celebrated at a closing event for Golddream. The day was filled with activities that brought back the spirit of the Summer of Love, including ‘The Way We Were’, a panel discussion featuring David Riddle, David Bracher and College Historian, Professor Tim Crook, as well as an auction of framed reproduction gig posters and photographs, with the proceeds given to the Student Hardship Fund
Right: Golddream exhibition courtesy of Goldsmiths Communications team
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SPOT LIGHT Alumni achievements
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19 Goldsmiths’ alumni make a positive impact on society, inspiring passion and creativity. They include leaders in the creative industries, pioneers in teaching and social work, and renowned artists, musicians and filmmakers. They are recognised for their work in every imaginable field, and throughout the year win awards, receive nominations and are selected for prestigious positions. Here are some of their recent achievements: Art Charlotte Prodger BA Fine Art, 2001 Award: Turner Prize Yinka Shonibare MBE CBE MA Fine Art, 1991 Honour: CBE for services to art Gillian Wearing OBE CBE BA Fine Art, 1990 Honour: CBE for services to art Computing Hadeel Ayoub MA Computational Arts, 2015 Award: Santander Universities Entrepreneurship Award for the People’s Choice Vote Educational Studies Raymond Antrobus MA Writer/Teacher, 2014 Award: Ted Hughes Award for New Work in Poetry English and Comparative Literature Claire Adam MA Creative and Life Writing, 2012 Nomination: Desmond Elliott Prize Lisa Smith MA Creative and Life Writing, 2018 Award: Pat Kavanagh Prize
Above: Image courtesy of Ingrid Persaud
Media, Communications and Cultural Studies Gary Dollner BA Communication Studies and Sociology, 1990 Nomination: BAFTA Television Craft Award for Best Editing — Fiction Lindsey Dryden BA Media and Communications, 2003 Nomination: Webby Award for Video: Documentary: Longform Gabriela Sibilska BA Media and Communications, 2018 Award: Royal Television Society London Student Award for Craft Skills (Writing) Music James Blake BMus Popular Music, 2010 Award: Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance Shirley Thompson OBE MMus Music, 1984 Honour: OBE for services to music Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies Shirin Yaish MA Art Psychotherapy, 2012 Nomination: British Council Alumni Award for Social Impact Sociology Nazia Khatun BA Sociology, 2004 Award: Baton Award for Sportswoman of The Year Theatre and Performance Rebecca Frecknall BA Drama and Theatre Arts, 2009 Nomination: Olivier Award for Best Director
Ingrid Persaud BA Fine Art, 2002 Award: BBC National Short Story Award Ingrid Persaud is a Trinidadian writer and winner of the £15,000 BBC National Short Story Award 2018. She won for ‘The Sweet Sop’, her first short story, about a son reunited with his absent father through chocolate. The story also won the Commonwealth Short Story Prize in 2017. Ingrid came to writing following a career as a legal academic and then training as a visual artist at Goldsmiths and Central St Martins. Faber has just acquired her debut novel ‘Love After Love’ in a seven-way auction and Random House will publish it in North America.
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A WRITER’S COURSE
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From the Goldsmiths Press to the Goldsmiths Prize, the College nurtures innovation in written and spoken word. Our alumni have gone on to win some of the biggest awards in literature, including a Pulitzer Prize, and many have become successful authors, poets, journalists and more. In fact, storytelling in all of its forms underpins a lot of what we do at Goldsmiths. Creative Writing alumnae Claire Adam and Emma Darwin tell us more about their time at Goldsmiths, the writing process and their current projects.
CLAIRE ADAM Claire Adam (MA Creative and Life Writing, 2012) was born and grew up in Trinidad & Tobago. She left Trinidad at 18 and did a bachelor's degree in Physics at Brown University in Rhode Island, USA. Claire lived in Italy and Ireland for several years, and then came to London. She initially thought she’d stay for a year or two, but she's now more or less settled in south London, where she’s married (to a New Zealander), with two children. People often ask why I chose science at university, or they ask about the ‘switch’ from science to writing. The answer is simple: I liked both science and literature; in fact, there are many things I would have loved to study, if only there were enough time for them all. The ‘switch’, if it can be called a switch, came about simply because I realised that a life in science was not for me — I couldn’t bear to spend my twenties, thirties, forties in a windowless lab collecting data. I had always wanted to write — I had always kept notebooks and jotted down ideas, observations, fragments of stories — and when my first child was born, I had a sense of time running out, and I rolled my sleeves up and started writing seriously. I applied to the Goldsmiths MA with a degree of reluctance, to be honest. For a long time, I had subscribed to the view that it was not really possible to teach creative writing. I also felt that writers who had been to creative writing courses all tended to write in the same way, and I didn’t want to be a product of that system. But I had been working on my own for as long as I could, and while my writing had improved, I still wasn’t satisfied with what I was producing, and, crucially, I couldn’t see what I was doing wrong. I read some of the work produced by Goldsmiths tutors and graduates, and I thought it was good — interesting, moving, varied, daring — so I thought I would give it a go.
22 The MA gave me a number of things that I wouldn’t have been able to find on my own. Firstly, I realised I had been trying to write in a genre that didn’t suit me: the MA is where I gave myself permission to write literary fiction. I’d rejected the ‘literary’ genre previously because it sounded too pretentious, but once I realised that that’s where my interests lay — all the books I loved were literary books — then I could just get on with it, and my work immediately improved. Secondly, the feedback from the workshops was like gold dust: it was data about what worked and what didn’t. Fiction, for me, is something to do with showing respect for the characters I’m writing about. I know, of course, that the characters are not real — and my work is not autobiographical — and yet it feels important to me to think of the characters as if they were real. Human life is precious; each life, and each moment of that life is precious to its owner. I try to write fiction that pays attention to that fact. My novel ‘Golden Child’ has just been published by Faber & Faber, in the UK and Commonwealth, and SJP for Hogarth (Crown/PRH) in the US and Canada, with several foreign language translations under way. It’s the story of a decent, hardworking family living in a lawless society; the family is trying, against tremendous odds, to do the right thing for their twin sons, and the father finds himself faced with an impossible choice. I started it at Goldsmiths, and I was lucky to cross paths with excellent tutors — Ardu Vakil and Romesh Gunesekera, to name just two — who immediately understood the story I was trying to tell and gave me muchneeded encouragement.
HUMAN LIFE IS PRECIOUS; EACH LIFE, AND EACH MOMENT OF THAT LIFE, IS PRECIOUS TO ITS OWNER. I TRY TO WRITE FICTION THAT PAYS ATTENTION TO THAT FACT
p20, left: Claire Adam © Christian Sinibaldi p20, right: Emma Darwin © Christian Sinibaldi
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EMMA DARWIN Emma Darwin (PhD Creative Writing, 2010) was born and still lives in London. Throughout her career she has had various jobs, including selling violins and driving a sandwich van. Her debut novel ‘The Mathematics of Love’ was nominated for both the Commonwealth Writers’ Best First Book and the RNA’s Romantic Novel of the Year. She was the first writer to be awarded a PhD in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, for her second novel ‘A Secret Alchemy’. As well as keeping a blog, This Itch of Writing, Emma also mentors and teaches other writers. Her latest book ‘This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin’ was published in February 2019. Find out more about Emma’s work: www.emmadarwin.com My PhD in Creative Writing was based on the second novel of the two-book contract I’d just signed. I wanted a route into teaching, so it could be the ‘other job’ that virtually all writers need, and I enjoy using my brain in academic ways. I chose to do my PhD at Goldsmiths because here I wouldn’t have to fear pressure to abandon my naturally practice-led approach for a more literary-critical one. The research process of the discipline of Creative Writing is the act of writing creatively; the academic analysis — relating the work to its literary context, accounting critically for your creative ‘aims and outcomes, choices and changes’, as I tell my students — comes later. ‘Story is king’ say publishers, but you don’t have to be writing to satisfy the book industry to understand that storytelling — creating — must come first. That novel, ‘A Secret Alchemy’, is all about storytelling: it re-imagines the Wars of the Roses through the voices of Elizabeth Woodville and her brother Anthony, the mother and uncle of the Princes in the Tower. Anthony was Caxton’s first patron, and almost certainly responsible for seeing Thomas Malory’s ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’ through the press, and the third strand was voiced by a fictional, modern-day historian who starts by researching their books but [spoiler alert!] realises that to bring them alive she must write them as fiction.
My supervisor, Maura Dooley, wisely suggested that the critical commentary that accompanies a PhD should be focused on a topic that would be useful in the future, so I addressed the particular problems that arise when you write fiction about real historical characters, and the creative solutions that writers have found. It was largely because of my PhD and my teaching that I began blogging at This Itch of Writing and later was commissioned to write ‘Get Started in Writing Historical Fiction’. Then, after my agent and I agreed that the next novel I wrote just didn’t work, I set out to write a novel based on my family tree. The most famous twig of the tree is my great-great-grandfather, Charles Darwin, but there are many fascinating others, from his grandfather Erasmus Darwin, via Tom Wedgwood, the first photographer, and Julia Wedgwood, who was ranked as a woman intellectual with George Eliot, to Ralph Vaughan Williams, and poet and radical John Cornford, first Briton to be killed fighting in the Spanish Civil War. My understanding of how historical fiction works ought to have helped, but it didn’t: I spent three years struggling and failing, and ended by getting very ill. Eventually, I realised that the family tradition which had bred so many people worth writing about was making it impossible to write about them. There were dozens of biographies, memoirs and letters, all full of the facts, feelings, self-analysis and consequences which it is normally the novelist’s job to imagine. Worse still, in this tradition, one must give way to the person with the greatest authority and the best evidence on any topic. Where was the space for my storyteller’s mind to create freely, when on every page of every archive were people who had the authority to declare me ‘wrong’? Only when I gave up did I realise there was a different story here: the story of how I tried to write a novel, how it all went horribly wrong, and how I emerged with a much stronger understanding of creative failure and how stories are told. It’s that story that I tell in ‘This is Not a Book About Charles Darwin: A writer’s journey through my family’, which was published in February ○ Find out more about the MA: gold.ac.uk/pg/ma-creative-life-writing Find out more about the MPhil/PhD: gold.ac.uk/pg/mphil-phd-creative-writing
EVENTUALLY, I REALISED THAT THE FAMILY TRADITION WHICH HAD BRED SO MANY PEOPLE WORTH WRITING ABOUT WAS MAKING IT IMPOSSIBLE TO WRITE ABOUT THEM
ALEXANDRA
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ADEY
25 Ever wonder what kind of careers our alumni go into? Curious about the day-to-day of a fellow alumnus who works in a different industry? ‘A day in the life’ follows alumni during a typical working day and gives you a snapshot of the interesting and varied careers of those within the Goldsmiths alumni community. Alexandra Adey is the UK Partner Manager and Producer for Spotify, based in London. She graduated from the MA Radio course at Goldsmiths in 2012 with a distinction and went on to become an assistant producer at IMG, working on audio projects for sporting organisations including UEFA, the Premier League and the European Tour. She was also a digital content manager at podcast hosting company audioBoom from 2015–18, initially concentrating on sports content and then covering UK-based podcasts across all genres. Alexandra has worked at Spotify since March 2018.
A day in the life
07.00
My alarm goes off at seven and is promptly snoozed until about half seven/eight unless I’ve woken up with the wherewithal to drag myself to the gym. I’m loath to admit that I’ll spend a chunk of time checking my phone, usually Twitter and my work emails, before I get myself out of bed. I’m trying to be better at not being on screens when I don’t have to be — I even have a setting on my phone that switches off my notifications at 10pm each night. This has helped, but I’m still trying to wean myself off the morning phone browse! I live in Tooting and my team are currently working out of a temporary space in Waterloo before moving into a new permanent office, so my commute is a straightforward half-hour swoop up the Northern line.
10.00
I get to the office around 10am where I take some time in the kitchen area to have breakfast (and several coffees) and scan through my emails, answering anything I can clear out. I look after the UK podcast offering on Spotify but we do work collaboratively with teams in the US so time difference means things do come up overnight. It’s a really nice way to start the day because the rest of the day can be back-to-back meetings without much time to take stock of what’s going on, so I try and take this time whenever I can. A lot of my job involves making sure podcasters and production companies are happy so I get a lot of varying queries — no two days are the same!
Left: Alexandra Adey at Spotify HQ © Christian Sinibaldi
12.00
My days usually involve at least a couple of meetings or calls — I have a partnerships-based role and I also look after Spotify’s slate of original content out of the UK. I’m incredibly lucky because I get the best of both worlds in my current role compared to some of the roles I’ve had before. I used to assistant produce and coordinate content at IMG, and the role that followed was as a content manager managing relationships with podcast creators for audioBoom — my job at Spotify has me doing both. For the partnerships side, I have regular meetings with big podcast aggregators and producers like Acast, audioBoom and the BBC among many others to hear what they’re working on and how we can help position their content on our platform. I’m generally the first port of call for queries podcasters might have, be they technical or otherwise, and I’ll then pass on information to internal teams at Spotify accordingly.
A day in the life
14.00
The original content side of my role means I might be at a recording session for our LGBTQ+ original, David’s Out for a Good Time, checking in on what they’re working on and how it’s sounding. Or I could potentially be in a production meeting for the slate of sports content I’m currently overseeing, which will be launching in June, and I’m so excited about it. We’ll be working on some really interesting stuff around that and I can’t wait to hear the finished podcasts. I’m currently trying to get as many meetings in with producers and production companies as we craft our content for the rest of 2019 and beyond, and I’m really interested in developing ideas with voices that don’t usually surface in podcasts.
16.00
I set aside some time to listen to the productions we’re currently working on a couple of times a week, making sure they sound okay and keeping track of what we’re producing. At the moment, we have four originals live out of the UK and our slate will be steadily expanding across the year. I’ll use any spare time to catch up on emails and make sure there’s nothing I’ve missed. My job involves working cross-functionally with other departments like marketing and PR so I’ll also have internal meetings with these teams, as well as touching base with counterparts in other territories. I usually finish around 6pm, but one of the fab things about working at Spotify is that we have quite a lot of flexibility — we’re allowed to work from home, which is great.
19.00
I get invited to a lot of podcast recordings and launches so I might be at an audio event — there is loads of incredibly cool stuff happening in the UK podcast industry and it’s a small world, so it’s nice to catch up with others working in audio. If that’s not on the cards, I might be doing yoga, which I took up about a year ago: it has been a massive surprise to me that I absolutely love it. I don’t get a lot of time to listen to podcasts at work so I’ll catch up with some — I listen to mainly comedy and sports ones. My current favourite is Punch Up the Jam, a US podcast by comedians Miel Bredouw and Demi Adejuyigbe, that is absolutely hilarious and one of the few things I listen to religiously. I’m always eager to get an idea of the broader landscape of things being made in the UK and I’m trying to dig into that a bit more.
22.00
By this time I’m pretty much guaranteed to be at home if it’s a weekday. I do try and see as much comedy as possible — I love the Bill Murray in Islington, and the Amersham Arms in New Cross has a great comedy night (I spent a lot of time in that pub during my time at Goldsmiths!). I’ll probably put on a podcast to drift off to — I don’t have enough hours in the day to listen to everything I want to, so I have to get them in where I can! ○
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GOLDSMITHS S S E PR
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Taking advantage of digital technologies and experimenting with the many attractions of print, Goldsmiths Press seeks to revive and regenerate the traditions of academic publishing by Sarah Kember
28 p27: Book covers courtesy of Goldsmiths Press Left: Sarah Kember (Director of Goldsmiths Press) Below: Adriana Cloud (Editorial and Production Manager) and Guy Sewell (Publishing Assistant)
The launch of Goldsmiths Press in 2016 was much anticipated, according to the national publishing industry magazine ‘The Bookseller’. What would an institution long associated with arts and media, cutting-edge critical thinking and creative experimentation come out with? The short answer is a press that has begun to expand the possibilities of scholarship — what it is, who can do it and the impact it can have in the world — in a context in which those possibilities are increasingly constrained. Part of a new generation of scholar-led university presses that are online and open access (where certain content is made free to the reader), Goldsmiths Press stood out immediately by refusing simple divisions between, for example, print and digital publishing and trade versus academic books. This alone has made it possible for us to do something that other university publishers in the UK simply don’t do: publish poetry pamphlets and novels as well as apps and CDs. As a writer and academic, I was inspired to set up the press by my dissatisfaction with the conservatism of an audit culture driven by the national Research Excellence Framework (REF). This produces an imperative to publish, but to do so within narrowly defined forms and disciplines. It precludes experimentation and delimits interdisciplinarity. Commercial publishing also reinforces subject divisions and standardised forms such as the conventional journal article and scholarly monograph. Like many staff and students at Goldsmiths, my work cuts across the divisions of theory and practice and while it can find
expression in established forms, it also seeks out new forms or old ones, like the pamphlet and the manifesto, that are not easily accommodated by audits and markets. My aim with the press was to create a publishing space for what Goldsmiths does best and give the institution a platform to explore and expand scholarly knowledge and its modes of communication. ‘Why Publish?’ is the title of my manifesto for future publishing and one of its key strands concerns the role of digital technology as a context and set of affordances for publishing, but by no means a destination or endpoint. The look, feel and, yes, smell of print books remains important and if anything, we have sought to enhance the value of print by insisting on high quality production and design. Cover design is by our own in-house Design Agency and our titles are marketed and distributed globally by our partner, The MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) Press. Although there has been a digital revolution in the publishing process, and ways of distributing and reading books have opened up significantly, ebooks are very often digital copies of print books. The relation between theory, practice and publishing is dynamic and rather than looking at the digital as the final statement on where publishing is going after its earlier, analogue phase, we’re committed to seeing how it can enable publishing to continually evolve. Extended, enhanced and multi-media books are starting to evolve on digital publishing platforms. Such innovations are exciting if expensive and still need to work on issues around discoverability and preservation.
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Our first book, Les Back’s ‘Academic Diary’, started out as a beautifully designed, affordable artefact that was distributed to bookshops and quickly picked up as a brilliant piece of sociology as well as an individual account, written in the literary diary mode, of academic life and values. It is still available in that form and it also exists, open access, as a PDF file in our institutional repository (Goldsmiths Research Online or GRO) and as an enhanced, extended book on MIT’s digital publishing platform PubPub. The PubPub version, with additional materials, may become the basis of a second print edition. It was never a case of digital books replacing print books, and which of these was ever going to be the last word on what books can be. There are both government-led and grassroots open access movements, but the laudable values of making research more widely available and challenging pay walls put up by commercial, mostly journal publishers, are too easily obscured by the ideologies. This is especially the case in the UK where a whole set of new policies aims to shift the cost of publishing onto universities that, in most cases, will struggle to support it. The arts, humanities and social sciences are particularly vulnerable since the costs here are high (think how much it costs to publish an illustrated art history book, for example) while the funding is much lower than in science and engineering fields. Our policy is to extract the values of open access from the ideology. We implement and lobby for a route to open access that is ethical and sustainable, combining, wherever possible, free digital content with affordable prices for print books. We are the UK’s first green open access monograph publisher, pioneering open access for books by making them freely available, after an embargo period, in the institutional repository GRO. Breaking with a model that divides ‘green’ (accepted manuscript version) from ‘gold’ (final edited version), our books, following the trajectory of ‘Academic Diary’, migrate from GRO to PubPub, evolving and opening out from more limited and limiting open access agendas. It is still relatively early days for Goldsmiths Press and we have much more work to do, but the Design Agency employs graduate students to design the covers of our books and the Goldsmiths Shorts poetry and short fiction pamphlet series publishes undergraduate and postgraduate student work alongside that of established writers. One of our flagship series, Future Media, was launched by early career researcher Paolo Ruffino’s title, ‘Future Gaming’. What makes Goldsmiths Press particularly distinctive is our emphasis on scholarly writing. In an increasingly instrumental culture of audits, impact, metrics and so on, we are trying to re-energise and, to as great an extent as we can, liberate scholarly writing, enabling and encouraging our authors to find their voice and the mode of expression that most suits their project. Les Back speaks from the heart and the head in ‘Academic Diary’ and surely that enhances rather than detracts from what scholarship is and what it might be able to do? We know, again across many disciplines, that writing is not just words, sounds and codes, but rather a symbolic and material form of world making. In a world in which our public institutions are being undermined and we have Brexit, Trump, climate change and massive wealth inequality, writing arguably still has an important role to play.
Just as the conditions for scholarly writing get narrower and harder through funding cuts, regulation, reform and overwork, the space, we believe, should get wider and in some sense easier. The space of writing should be a space of permission to explore, experiment, create, make connections, invent and sometimes fail. Dare we even say that it could be a space of fun, of letting go, letting rip? At Goldsmiths Press we publish parodies and polemics alongside, and in the case of ‘The Death of Public Knowledge?’ and ‘Economic Science Fictions’, in the same volume as, more recognisable manifestations of knowledge. Writing should not be prescribed and limited but varied and sometimes surprising. Look out for our new series of Unidentified Fictional Objects (UFOs) later this year. Even I don’t know quite what they are! Among the highlights of 2019 are two UFO titles, Steve Beard’s ‘Six Concepts for the End of the World’ and Charlie Gere’s ‘I Hate the Lake District’, along with our first novel, Michael Green’s ‘The Ghosting of Anne Armstrong’, David Toop’s ‘Inflamed Invisible’, Bruce Bennett’s ‘Cycling and Cinema’, Miyarrka Media’s ‘Phone and Spear’ and Jenn Ashworth’s ‘Notes Made While Falling’. Notable successes of 2018 include Kat Jungnickel’s ‘Bikes and Bloomers’, Will Davies’s ‘Economic Science Fictions’, Brandon LaBelle’s ‘Sonic Agency’ and Carol Stabile’s ‘The Broadcast 41’. These have garnered more widespread national and international media coverage and fantastic reviews than we could have imagined, and yet the economics of the book publishing industry remain as tough as, if not tougher than ever before.
THE SPACE OF WRITING SHOULD BE A SPACE OF PERMISSION TO EXPLORE, EXPERIMENT, CREATE, MAKE CONNECTIONS, INVENT AND SOMETIMES FAIL With our exciting list, clear goals and ever-distinctive brand, Goldsmiths Press has made a great start and quite an impact — in the right way — in publishing. We are revising and adapting our business plan so that, with the continued support of the College and the wider Goldsmiths community we can make the transition from being a small start-up to an established publishing house. Philanthropic support will help this important work flourish — if you are interested in getting involved, please contact: Antoinette O’Loughlin, Deputy Director of Development, via development@gold.ac.uk ○ Sarah Kember is Professor of New Technologies of Communication and the Director of Goldsmiths Press.
Opportunities
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TELL YOUR STORY Every single one of our alumni has their own unique story to tell, and Goldsmiths would love to hear yours. We are looking for stories to share on our channels, including the newsletter, magazine, website, social media and blog. Goldsmiths is the sum of its people — you make us who we are today and, more than that, you are making a difference to society around the world. Your stories demonstrate the impact of a Goldsmiths education in 2019. It can inspire students who are the first in their family to go to university or help those who are considering a degree later in life to find out the difference it might make. We want to share the breadth of our alumni community to the wider world. The next issue will be the 50th edition of Goldlink and we will continue the tradition of showcasing alumni at all stages of their career. The only way we find out about your life today is if you tell us your story: explore.gold/tellyourstory
Illustration: Kaja Merle
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GIVING TO GOLDSMITHS Your regular donations and legacy gifts help students get the most out of their time at Goldsmiths. Thank you. Goldsmiths Hardship Fund is supported by alumni and friends. Further information at: gold.ac.uk/donate
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“As the first person in my family to go to university, lots of people advised me against studying in London. However, my parents were behind me and gave me lots of emotional support, but were not in a position to support me financially. I was not worried initially, as I’m resourceful and had balanced academia with volunteering and paid work since I was fourteen years old. “In my second year, however, I broke my elbow so could not manage to attend my various part-time jobs for two months — that’s when I applied to the Hardship Fund. Without this I would have been stuck and I am grateful that there was a safety net when I needed help.” Sophie Hassell-Richardson
Above: Sophie Hassell-Richardson courtesy of Goldsmiths Communications team
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