Keynote Lectures
Our first two keynote lectures will be livestreamed on...
- Thursday 18 June from 9am to 10.15am UTC+2 for Dr Delphine Grass ("When Listening Speaks: Translation Memoirs and the Politics of Attunement")
- Friday 19 June from 9.15am to 10.15am UTC+2 for Dr Sari Hokkanen ("How to Do Research Through First-Person Writing? Epistemology and Rigor in Autoethnographic Research")
Given its participatory nature, the experimental translation talk & workshop conducted by Dr Lily Robert-Foley will only be accessible onsite. Please go to our registration page if you wish to attend it on campus.
"When Listening Speaks: Translation Memoirs and the Politics of Attunement"
Western philosophy and culture have long privileged speech over listening. Translation, however, begins in a double act of listening: to another voice, and to oneself through another language. This talk argues that the translation memoir, as a hybrid genre at the intersection of life writing, autotheory, and critical practice, offers a sustained meditation on translation as a culturally and politically situated listening practice: one that critically and creatively examines the relations between voicing and hearing, practicing and theorising translation. Drawing on Mireille Gansel's Translation as Transhumance and others, the talk will explore how translator-memoirists make translation itself audible, foregrounding its shaping force in culture and opening space for the creation of listening counter-cultures. Lastly, the talk argues that reading the translation memoir through a biopolitical lens opens new questions for life writing and translation studies: about the politics of whose life is deemed worthy of translation, the ethics of speaking on another's behalf, and attunement to voices (human and more-than-human) eclipsed by dominant ones.
Bionote: Delphine Grass is Senior Lecturer in French and Comparative Literature at Lancaster University. She is the author of Translation as Creative-Critical Practice (Cambridge University Press, 2023) and co-edited, with Lily Robert-Foley, a special issue of Life Writing on The Translation Memoir (2024). She is Principal Investigator on the AHRC/BRAID-funded Animals in Translation: AI, Ethics and the Future of Interspecies Dialogue project. Her research spans translation studies, research-creation and the environmental studies.
"How to Do Research Through First-Person Writing? Epistemology and Rigor in Autoethnographic Research"
How do we create knowledge through first-person research, by writing about ourselves? What implications does first-person writing as both data and method bring to a research process? And how can we do such research in an epistemologically sound and rigorous manner? I will address these questions by drawing on my 15-year journey as an autoethnographic scholar. In this keynote speech, I will argue for the importance of understanding the methodological roots of autoethnography in ethnography and tease out their implications for knowledge production. These are related to situatedness, embodiment, and the relationships between the self and the social. Consequently, I will argue for the necessity of methodological reflexivity, which is heightened in research approaches explicitly drawing on the researcher’s self and experience. Thus, I suggest that the understanding of ‘rigor’ in autoethnography relies not on striving for ‘objectivity’, but on a systematic and transparent account of our subjectivity and its role in all parts of our research.
Bionote: Sari Hokkanen works as a University Lecturer at Tampere University, Finland. She holds a PhD in Translation Studies from Tampere University (2016) and a title of docent from the University of Eastern Finland (2024). Hokkanen’s doctoral research examined volunteer simultaneous interpreting in Finnish Pentecostalism, pioneering the use of large-scale autoethnography in Translation Studies. Her current research interests also include the sociology of translation, interepistemic translation, and qualitative research methodologies.
"Experimental Translation Talk & Workshop"
The monograph I have been promising, stuttering to write for the past year or so, tried and confounded by life, on err or, begins with exhaustion, épuisement, the impossibility of getting to totality (in (a) translation), and Antoine Berman’s l’épreuve de l’étranger caught between its translations as “trial” (Heyvaert) and “experience” (Venuti).
In Berman’s 1985 essay “La Traduction comme épreuve de l’étranger », he gives us a list of twelve « dé/eformations”, which I have taken as twelve invitations for procedures (experiments, algorithms, protocols, spells) for experiential translation which seek to enact translation as a part of life lived in the body, our bodies, our selves.
After a brief introduction and a few examples of videos I will have done of my own body carrying out some procedures, I will invite workshop participants to find their own configurations for the procedures (using any language(s)); a collection of source texts in different languages will be provided. The workshop will end with a performative sharing for those who wish.
Bionote: Lily Robert-Foley is Associate Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3. Her monograph, Experimental Translation: The Work of Translation in the Age of Algorithmic Production was published in 2024 by Goldsmiths Press. She is also the author of four books of hybrid writing, as well as some translations and is a member of Outranspo. Her current writing project is on error.