Esther Kentish holds a Bachelor of Arts (2017) in English Literature and Language with a minor in Philosophy from the University of Texas at Arlington, a Master of Science (2018) in Technical Communication from North Carolina State University, and a Master of Science (2020) in Medical Humanities from King's College London. Esther matriculated at the University of Oxford in 2020 and spent two years in the Faculty of English. Esther worked with patients in a hospital as a Mental Health Technician in the geriatric in North Carolina, United States, and is currently working at the University of Leicester in Britain on COVID-19 research. Her PhD research focuses on scientific communication, medical humanities, poetry, life writing, autobiography, and biography. Authoring 6 books, one of which, The Emotional Healing Behind Words, is a poetic memoir featuring a critical, meta-data analysis of 47 poems written between 2009 and 2012. Esther is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and an Associate Member of the Royal Society of Medicine.
‘The Story of COVID-19: A Critical Investigation into Novels, Memoirs, Fiction, and Illness Narratives’.
COVID-19 altered the way that we view the future, particularly in terms of healthcare and dealing with a global pandemic. Alongside COVID-19’s transitory phases (initial stages, human transmission, ongoing experiences), the themes of life and death, community and isolation, health and illness, suddenness and preparedness dominate COVID-19 and pandemic literature. This research examines doctors’ autobiographical novels, biographical nursing memoirs, novels and illness narratives to explore how the pandemic was managed by NHS professionals and the significance of documenting the initial phases. Grounded in scholarly discourse focused on medical humanities and literary criticism, the paper also examines directives for handling pandemics in the future. I employ mixed-method approaches, including data-analysis techniques from Coding Streams of Language (Geisler and Swarts, 2019); corpus analysis techniques utilising Voyant Tools, an open-source application for performing textual analysis; and close-reading techniques interpolated by patient-narrative expert Rita Charon. I examined patients' narratives using the COVID-19 Recovery Collective, a web-based collection of 72 textual accounts, and Patient Voices, a first-person narrative collection. Different patient populations respond differently to COVID-19, particularly those in nursing homes. This raises questions about social ethics, power structures and vulnerability in care communities. Finally, the research implicates that literary, medical and digital humanities methodologies are effective for narrating the story of COVID-19 and addressing future global crises.
Keywords: COVID-19, healthcare, narratives, data analysis.
Tanya Hawkes is researching Gas, Pollution, and Heritage: Coal Gas and its Communities 1792 - 1981, as part of the Doctoral Training Alliance at Anglia Ruskin University. She has a BA Hons degree in History and Drama from King Alfred’s College 1992 - 1995, a DipHE in Environmental Policy from the Open University and an MSc in Climate Adaptation from the University of East London/Centre for Alternative Technology, 2021. Her MSc dissertation, a case study of the Skyline Project in The Rhondda, used semi-structured interviews with residents, thematically coded and informed by a Multi-Level Perspective and Just Transition framework. Alongside study she has twenty-five years’ experience in social care services and environmental NGOs, and she is a co-author of Zero Carbon Britain: Rising to the Climate Emergency (2019). Her early life was enmeshed with heavy, polluting industry and she felt first-hand the impacts of her dad's foundry abruptly closing and the economic impacts of this, on family and wider community. These experiences have helped shape her research into just transitions from the fossil fuel industry, and awareness of the contradictory meanings fossil fuels provide in people’s lives.
'Coal Gas and its Communities 1800 - 1960: The People's Story'
This presentation uses a range of literature and art to examine British working-class responses to the introduction of coal gas during the nineteenth- and early-twentieth-centuries. In piecing together evidence from art forms this paper aims to unravel the complexity of our continuing dependence upon fossil fuels and the meaning they create in our lives. Coal gas evoked contradictory responses, as it produced a trail of toxic substances, throughout its production process. It was a source of danger for gas workers, causing explosions, fires, illness, and injuries. However, it also opened up new worlds of entertainment, lighting, cooking, heating, education, semi-skilled work, and successful labour organising. Coal gas blurred the boundaries of night and day, powered balloon rides, and illuminated theatres. Its production was visually imposing: the gas holder, “a great grey lung suspended inside a rusty lace cage”, dominated the skylines of towns and cities. Its workers were visible, with the stokers "illuminated from all around by those dreadful sheets of fire”. Coal gas workers wrote their autobiographies, inspired by political organising, to record their work. Gas pollution was visible to residents as blue billy, which was transformed into dyes, and its smell lingered in the rivers and soil, serving as a warning of danger. “Can you smell gas?” became a safety slogan of the gas industry and a catchphrase among the population.
Keywords: fossil fuel, energy, art, working-class, environment, work.
Jo Shemmans is a post-graduate researcher at Birmingham City University, currently in the first year and with a specific interest in the Romantic period, focusing on the relationship between literature and moral and social debates. Their MA dissertation explored the relationship between William Wordsworth’s Salisbury Plain poems and the 1824 Vagrancy Act. Their doctoral research develops this theme, considering how Wordsworth’s presentation of vagrancy can inform our understanding of how language shapes legislation and public opinion today. The inspiration for this piece of work comes from my own, brief, lived experience of homelessness.
'Wordsworth and the Language of Vagrancy: Binary Opposition and Gender in Lyrical Ballads'
Language has often been used as a way of exerting power and authority over marginalised groups. In the eighteenth century, as Toby. R. Benis points out, the interviewing of women experiencing homelessness would often involve ‘a socially elevated, usually male, interrogator – a justice of the peace or a man of feeling – questioning a vagrant as to her or his origins or prospects.’ Inspired by my own brief, lived experience of homelessness, my presentation will focus on an analysis of Wordsworth’s Lyrical Ballads, asking what the existence of binary opposites (in this case, male and female) within the poems tells us about the gendered aspect of Wordsworth’s presentation of the itinerant poor, and how this reflects the power imbalance in the language surrounding homelessness. Benis suggests that homelessness ‘subverts the utility of binary thinking’ because individuals are ‘simultaneously cast by society into the opposing roles of criminal and victim.’ In order to explore this in relation to sexual difference I have employed the use of corpus linguistics, which involves the use of computer software to produce a probabilistic analysis of text, often focusing on aspects such as grammatical structure or concordance. Using this as my methodological basis, I explore how Wordworth’s presentation and interrogation of women experiencing homelessness might help us explore perceptions of women in such situations.
Keywords: vagrancy, homelessness, gender, poetry, Wordsworth, corpus linguistics, marginalised.