The New Speakers Blog

New Speakers has commissioned Deirdre MacKenna, Director of 'Cultural Documents' to produce a series of cultural 'tools' which mediate New Speakers' work in public situations.

Deirdre and I first met at one of the regular GRAMNet collaboration development meetings in Glasgow in November 2016 and our fluent dialogues began to map out ways which could bring valuable academic research to the attention and use of people in related contexts and situations, such as multi-cultural communities… 

New Speakers has commissioned Deirdre MacKenna, Director of 'Cultural Documents' to produce a series of cultural 'tools' which mediate New Speakers' work in public situations. Here, she tells us a bit more about her background:

I am one of the lucky few to have had great jobs in the glamourous, cutting-edge world of public art galleries… For over twenty years my role was to develop programmes and projects of unique and ambitious artistic vision within the rarefied ‘white cubes’ of the contemporary art gallery. But despite the successes and rewards of the work, I started to see the galleries as limited in their capacity to enable deep engagement, or attract people who were not already familiar, thus I became worried that we were only ‘preaching to the converted’ and that the good work was missing its target… One day I sat down in an attempt to put a name to what was bothering me and was shocked to find a much longer list than I had expected…

Sibo Kanobana visited London in April with another network member, Sara Nyssen, where they have completed a Short Term Scientific Mission (STSMs). 

Short Term Scientific Missions (STSMs) promote exchange and mobility within the scientific objectives of the Action, and allow Action members (especially early stage researchers) to visit universities and institutions of another Party of the COST Action to learn new techniques or methodologies, or to work on joint publications. 

Here is what Sibo had to say about his experience: