DAY 3: Saturday 8 June 2024 – Intangible Sounds (Daytime Events)

Researchers from the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at Manchester Met present a day of public talks and workshops on music and sound heritages, followed by a night-time music and performance event.

Both the daytime activities and the evening gig will explore how music, sound and sonic experiences constantly interweave with both time and place: creating emotions, evoking memories and bonding us into different kinds of community. 

Booking is advised for daytime workshops and sessions: BOOK HERE.

10.00am – 11.30am – Session One: Alternative Voices (Round Table Discussion)

Presented by the Contemporary Intimacies, Genders and Sexualities (CIGS) Research Group:

Hosted by Karen Gabay (broadcaster, TV producer, podcast host & producer, film maker)

Speakers : Prof Kirsty Fairclough • Dr Katie Milestone • Dr Susan O’Shea • Dr Kirsty Fife • Maria Ruban and John Lloyd

Topics discussed will include,

• Intersectional approaches to telling the underrepresented stories of minority gender and women’s contributions to Manchester music and their global impact,
• Gender and Northern Soul,
• Popular music and DIY archives.
• Overlaps between music, film and fashion.

11.45am – 1.15pm – Session Two: 40 Years of the Manchester Studies Oral History Collection

Manchester Studies was initiated by Bill Williams, the renowned historian of Jewish Manchester, and developed by a team of other talented individuals. Between the 1970s and 80s hundreds of interviews with working-class people were undertaken, many of them born in the late nineteenth century, detailing their lives and their experiences working in Manchester’s now lost industries. This remarkable piece of research would develop into what is now known as the Manchester Studies Oral History Collection. This panel brings together those who worked on the creation of the archive, have used it, and who now care for it, in order to stimulate new conversations and research directions around this remarkable resource. We will also be providing a workshop by current oral history practitioners on best practice in oral history research.

Speakers :

• Prof Melanie Tebbutt
• Rob Hillman, Tameside Archivist
• Dave Govier
• Suzie Cloves, PhD Student

2.00pm – 3.00pm – Session Three: Paranormal Manchester: 

Presented by DⱯRK Research Group

Speakers:

• Dominique Tessier (Manchester Historian)
• Mark P. Henderson (Professional storyteller and folklore expert)
• Dr. Morag Rose (Psychogeographer and expert on strange Manchester)
• Emily Oldfield (Poet and writer)

Ghosts, earth mysteries, UFOs, cryptids, occult energies, and their kin are, by definition, intangible – absent presences that cannot always be fully known, touched, and rationally explained. Evidence, where it exists, is often elusive and indefinable, and always contested.  Manchester’s strange heritage encompasses many strands of the paranormal from hauntings to occult practitioners, hairy cryptids to canal monsters. This session seeks to explore these phenomena and allow members of the public to experience this hidden and strange side to Manchester.

3.45pm – 5.15pm – Session Four: Intangible Heritage in Place

Presented by the Heritage Impact Network (HIN)

In addition to members of the Heritage Impact Network, confirmed guest speakers are as follows:

• Jenna Johnston, Senior Heritage Consultant, Buttress
• Bernadette Bone – Conservation Architect and Tutor at the Manchester School of Architecture, Owner BB Heritage Studio
• Katie Wray, Director, Deloitte

The Manchester School of Architecture’s Dr Johnathan Djabarouti will host a ‘Long Table’ panel of invited industry guests and members of the newly created Heritage Impact Network (HIN), with encouragement for public participation from the audience.

The newly formed ‘Heritage Impact Network’ at Manchester Met brings together contemporary heritage researchers who have a specific interest in understanding ephemeral, intangible, social, and non-physical manifestations of heritage and culture. At this Long Table event, the network’s interests will respond to the UK’s recent ratification of the UNESCO (2003) Convention for the Safeguarding of the Intangible Cultural Heritage, by shifting their attention to historic places. How do immaterial manifestations of culture – such as cultural practices, storytelling, memories, rituals, and events – relate to physical heritage buildings, sites, and places? Experienced industry heritage practitioners from various disciplinary perspectives and heritage remits will join network members, along with empty chairs at the table for audience participation in the conversation.