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Glocal Imaginaries: Writing / Migration / Place

9th - 12th September 2009
Lancaster University, and the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, UK

There is a slideshow of about a hundred Conference and Exhibition photos on flickr.

Hundreds of writers and researchers from over thirty countries came to Lancaster University and to Manchester on 9-12th September to share the results of a four-year project investigating the impact of migration on creative writing in Manchester. Changes in transportation, technology and the world economy mean we now live in a shrinking world. The conference held at Lancaster University - Glocal Imaginaries: Writing/Migration/Place – explored how this has impacted upon our sense of ‘home’ in the 21st Century.

The conference was one of a raft of events celebrating the end of the research project, ‘Moving Manchester /Mediating Marginalites’ based at Lancaster University and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The project was set up to promote and research the city’s wealth of multicultural writing from the 60s to the present.

Project director Professor Lynne Pearce of Lancaster University said: “In many ways Manchester is the definitive migrant city. Since the industrial revolution, the city has been populated with migrants drawn from other parts of the UK and beyond. And the increasingly complex relationship between the local and the global has emerged as one of the defining characteristics of contemporary Manchester writing…Listening to the voices of those who have moved between such different cultures on a regular basis over several decades can help us better understand the complex nature of migration in the modern world and how most of us are now migrants of some kind."

“Those of us working on the project strongly believe that writing and other art forms – be this poetry, fiction, films or music – have a vital role to play in helping us process and understand the challenges of living in an increasingly mobile world  -- and, at best, to help us imagine a better future.”

The programme of events celebrating the end of the ‘Moving Manchester’ included:

• A three-day international conference, ‘Glocal Imaginaries: Writing/Migration/Place’ at Lancaster University attended by around 200 delegates from Africa, South America, Asia, Australia and Europe. 9-11 September 2009.

• An evening performance at Lancaster University (11th Sept) which included the launch of an anthology of new Manchester writing called ‘Migration Stories’. This book is published by ‘Commonword’ – an organisation that has been developing and promoting writing in the city since the early 1980s.  Six authors read from their stories and there was also a performance by well-known Manchester poet, Shamshad Khan.

• A creative arts day on Saturday, September 12 at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester. This event featured readings, talks and performances by well-known writers and artists as well as an exhibition of the work of artists, photographers, writing groups and community arts organisations involved with issues of migration.

• An evening performance at the Whitworth Gallery on Saturday 12 September headlined by Jackie Kay. This also included the premiere of the Moving Manchester conference commission, won by John Siddique. Music was be provided by the Congolese band Les Elus.
• Newly commissioned work: A sequence of new poems by John Siddique: ‘From a Seed to a Flower: five poems from real lives.’  Based on interviews with migrants in and around Manchester’s Piccadilly, the poems are accompanied by his own photographic images of his subjects;  also, an Anthology of new Manchester writing, Migration Stories (Commonword Publishers), launched at Lancaster on Friday 11th September along with the performance of a new poem by Shamshad Khan.

• Writing Manchester, an exhibition of Manchester writers showcasing  fifty years of writing in Greater Manchester, 7 September - 17 October 2009 Manchester Central Library. See the Moving Manchester site and follow the links to Exhibitions for further details.
• The launch of an online Writers' Gallery featuring the work of selected Manchester writers from Maya Chowdhry and SuAndi  to  John Lyons and Pete Kalu.
  
• The launch of a digital catalogue of over 200 Manchester migrant writers presently available on the ‘Moving Manchester’ website which will eventually be linked to the Manchester Central Library Catalogue.

The AHRC-funded project ‘Moving Manchester’ is based at Lancaster University, where the team comprises Prof Lynne Pearce (English), Dr Robert Crawshaw (European Languages and Cultures), Dr Graham Mort (Creative Writing), Dr Corinne Fowler (project researcher) and Mrs Jo McVicker (project administrator). The Creative Arts Day at the Whitworth Gallery was organized by Dr Darien Rozentals, and the Writing Manchester Exhibition at Manchester Central Library was curated by Dr Kate Horsley and Dr Corinne Fowler. The project team would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of Arts Council England for artistic spending on the conference and the Central Library Exhibition.