This is a past event
The RIISS New Voices in Irish and Scottish Studies webinar series is returning for a fourth year. Join Dr Annie Webster for an online webinar.
The RIISS New Voices in Irish and Scottish Studies webinar series is returning for a fourth year. These sessions are aimed at staff and students interested in hearing more about emerging new work within Scottish and Irish Studies. As always the series is highly interdisciplinary with papers from early career scholars in a range of Arts and Humanities disciplines.
31st October: Dr Annie Webster (University of Edinburgh) 'Placemaking Practices in Stories of the Syrian New Scots'
Scotland’s landscapes have offered an unlikely source of hope for Syrian refugees fleeing their homeland after the Syrian civil war began in 2011, with locations such as the Isle of Bute becoming controversial but ultimately celebrated sites of refugee resettlement. This paper explores how Syrian refugees in Scotland engage with their resettled environments through ‘placemaking practices’ including theatre, art, and community writing projects. It considers how such creative initiatives have been facilitated through the landmark New Scots Refugee Integration Strategy, how they engage with evolving ideas of civic nationalism encapsulated by the term ‘New Scots’, and how they illuminate a new dispersed geography of refugee resettlement in Scotland which now includes rural and remote areas.
Annie Webster is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on contemporary Arabic literature and culture, particularly how cultural production in the Middle East engages with experiences of conflict and forced migration from the region. She completed her Wolfson-funded PhD at SOAS (University of London) in 2020, which looked at fiction written in the wake of the 2003 Iraq War. Her current project, Stories of the Syrian New Scots: Resettlement Geographies in Refugee Arts, looks at storytelling practices among Syrian refugees resettled in Scotland, particularly in rural and remote communities. Her work has been published in Comparative Critical Studies, Wasafiri, and Literature & Medicine. She has previously taught Arabic literature at the University of Cambridge, King’s College London, and SOAS.
- Speaker
- Dr Annie Webster
- Contact
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Seminars are entirely online and can be accessed via Microsoft Teams. If you'd like to receive a link to the event and are not a member of research staff or a research postgraduate student in the schools of Language, Literature, Music, and Visual Culture or Divinity, History, Philosophy, and Art History please contact Dr Sarah Sharp (sarah.sharp@abdn.ac.uk).