̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - experience

Stirbitch: mapping the unmappable

amb206 — Fri, 16 Jan 2015 13:00:00 +0000

̽��ֱ��traffic pouring into Cambridge from the east along Newmarket Road passes a tiny flint and stone building that squats on a scrap of meadow. Built around 1125, the Leper Chapel was part of a hospital which took in those afflicted by a disfiguring disease that resulted in stigma and rejection. In his 1954 guide to the historic buildings of Cambridgeshire, Nikolaus Pevsner described the chapel – St Mary Magdalene – as standing “desperately alone”.

This gem of a building, once given to the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge but now owned by a trust, sits in the centre of an area known as Barnwell. With its sprawling retail park, poor air quality and scattering of sandwich shops, it has an aesthetic that contrasts sharply with the carefully conserved city centre just half a mile away. But it was precisely this mishmash of unplanned cityscape that prompted Dr Michael Hrebeniak to stop his car one day and walk towards the chapel.

At a seminar on Monday 19 January, Hrebeniak will talk about his journey into the historic and modern narratives that exist on the edge of the city, an in-between place with a rich but largely unrecorded working class past. In what promises to be a presentation full of surprises, he will move from a description of the smells and sights of mediaeval life to a discourse on ‘culture without archive’ and the ‘ontological terminality of neo-liberalism’ – the way in which late-capitalism commodifies space and experience.

In particular, Hrebeniak will explain how his investigation of a liminal zone inspired him to create what he calls ‘a deep map’ that dramatises the immense variety of human transactions within the social and ecological realms. ̽��ֱ��points of reference for this metaphorical map are the human impulses to create and consume, expend and express. Its contours are created by the layered exploitation of the landscape to forge channels of communication – both actual (road, rail and river) and imagined (myth and memory).

His research takes place within broader concerns about the loss of vulnerable culture worldwide. In 2003, UNESCO adopted a series of points agreed at the Convention for Safeguarding Intangible Cultural Heritage which drew attention to the importance of this strand of heritage "as a mainspring of cultural diversity and a guarantee of sustainable development".

Hrebeniak is a lecturer in English at Wolfson College, and a former jazz musician and journalist. He’s been interested in places and atmospheres ever since he was a boy. “I grew up in an area of suburban north-west London striking for its lack of character – a nowhere kind of place where 20th century development wiped out the past,” he says. “I suppose I’ve always been attentive to traces of cultural memory. As a child, I lacked the language to frame it as such but I'm interested in the habitat and signatures of place and how they’re encoded within the material forms of the commonplace. I remain inveterately curious – a kind of urban Thoreau.”

In 2014 Hrebeniak wrote several papers in which he explored – using Barnwell as his case study – the readability of landscape as a ‘palimpsest’ of surfaces that has been repeatedly created and erased over time. His arguments reference work by other authors and artists exploring themes of transience – including performance artist Bruce Lacey, film-maker Patrick Keiller and social anthropologist Tim Ingold. Hrebeniak's first book, Action Writing, concerned the American writer Jack Kerouac, who was similarly preoccupied with registering how the past mediates the present within his experimental prose.

To capture the permeability of layers of human and ecological stories, Hrebeniak has also used film as a way of expressing the ways in which people and places intersect in a ritualistic cycle of loss and renewal. Filmed over a two-year period, Hrebeniak’s Stirbitch will be screened sometime in the summer, possibly at St Peter’s, a Norman church even smaller than the Leper Chapel, standing on a rise just above Kettle’s Yard.

At Monday’s seminar, Hrebeniak will show brief clips of the film and talk about his creative collaboration with friends at Cambridge ̽��ֱ��: Robin Kirkpatrick (Modern and Medieval Languages) is narrator and Jeremy Thurlow (Music Faculty) has written the music. Together they have produced what Hrebeniak describes as a cinematic interpretation of a prose poem, written to celebrate the vegetable, animal and mineral connections locked into a messy patch on the fringes of a historic city.

Stirbitch is a variant of the older name Steersbrigge, a place where steers (cattle) could cross the river north of Barnwell. Today the name Stourbridge is confined to Stourbridge Common, a fragment of what was once a much larger parcel of common land. Here, for several centuries, an annual fair played a central role in the economic and cultural history of the east of England. ̽��ֱ��story of Stourbridge Fair is embedded with that of the Leper Chapel which, along with a small number of street names (Oyster Row, Garlic Row, Mercers Row, Cheddars Lane), represents the only surviving evidence of the physicality of an event that attracted people from all over the country.

In 1199, the monks who ran the leper hospital were given permission from King John to hold an annual three-day fair to raise funds. ̽��ֱ��fair flourished and soon outgrew its original purpose. By the turn of the 14th century, Stourbridge Fair had established itself as one of medieval England’s most important marketplaces – a trading post linked by road and river where all kinds of goods and services changed hands.

It was at Stourbridge Fair that Isaac Newton bought the glass prisms he needed to prove that light splits into a spectrum of colours. ̽��ֱ��bear that Lord Byron kept as a pet at Trinity College (students were not allowed dogs) is likely to have been purchased there too. An 18th century map of the fair, which took place on land that stretches down to the River Cam, shows it divided into a series of smaller fairs, selling horses, coal, hops and oysters.

In his Tour Throughout the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724), Daniel Defoe wrote that “Sturbridge Fair is not only the greatest in the whole nation, but in the world”. He described it as “a well-fortified city [with] the least disorder and confusion … that can be seen anywhere … with coffee-houses, taverns, brandy-shops, and eating houses, innumerable”. But the gathering had a darker side too: prostitutes, peep shows, menageries of exotic animals and displays of ‘freaks’ (giants, dwarves, ‘faeries’) drew the crowds.

̽��ֱ��allure of the fair lies in its fleeting nature which creates a transgressive space on the margins of everyday life where rules are temporarily suspended – a zone of earthy Saturnalia connecting people, place and performance. Cambridge Corporation and the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge asserted their control on activities at Stourbridge, prohibiting ‘idle games and diversions’. But ̽��ֱ�� men – most famously Dr Richard Farmer, Master of Emmanuel – flouted the rules and cavorted with the other revellers.

Hrebeniak’s encounters with Barnwell led him to research the (frustratingly slim) archival material, explore the wildlife of Stourbridge Common (the hops that ramble over the hedgerows are thought to have been introduced by traders) and engage in conversations with the groundsmen at Cambridge United football club (where the bones of lepers are said to lie under the pitch).

In 2009, Hrebeniak became a Cambridge United fan, after receiving a free ticket to an Oxford and Cambridge game held to mark the 800th anniversary of Cambridge ̽��ֱ��. He’s a member of a supporters’ group, the 100 Years of Coconuts, that runs a virtual museum and collates oral histories, and takes its name from the Billy Cotton hit. It was the first piece of music played when the club’s public address system went live in the 1950s and it’s played as the final whistle blows every time that Cambridge United has a home win.

“ ̽��ֱ��club really got under my skin and last summer my eldest son Louis trained as a goal-keeper with the club’s youth scheme. ̽��ֱ��stadium is named after Barnwell Abbey. It’s what the French theorist Michel Foucault would call a ‘heterotopia’ – a contested space, surrounded by the ruins of a lemonade bottling plant and cows grazing on the common,” he says.

“Northern soul and ska are played over the terrible sound system. Decades of suffering and ecstasy are etched on the subsiding terraces. It’s a proper working-class football club, a place of generational continuity, and nothing to do with the corporate mercenaries that have corrupted the game higher up the pyramid. Our retired players drive taxis, put out fires, and deliver the post. And the ground really gets rocking. There's a hell of a racket. I haven't enjoyed myself this much in 20 years.”

̽��ֱ��development of permanent shops brought an end to fairs as trading places. Stourbridge Fair took place for the last time in 1933. Money now changes hands in the giant stores that cluster on Newmarket Road, built on the site of a quarry that supplied the gault clay used in Cambridgeshire brick. With its car parks and loud signage, it’s a retail park like many others up and down the country. Yet something of the fairground persists in the defiant spontaneity of people and places.

Each time a new retail unit is constructed, items of debris from the past turn up. While Hrebeniak was filming one day, a workman involved in a recent project explained that one of his colleagues had found a pair of nylon stockings. They dated from the 1940s and, still in their packaging, had almost certainly been brought over by American GIs in the Second World War. “Did he keep them?” asked Hrebeniak. “No,” replied the builder. “He put them on over his overalls and danced.”

Michael Hrebeniak will talk about Stourbridge Fair: Performance, Memory and the Vanished Polis for 15 minutes at a work-in-progress seminar at CRASSH on 19 January 2015, 12.30pm to 2pm. Anyone wishing to attend should email Michelle Maciejewska mm405@cam.ac.uk

Inset images: Leper Chapel (James Myatt via Flickr Creative Commons), map of Stourbridge Fair (Cambridgeshire Collection), murals in Newmarket Road underpass (Martin Pettit via Flickr Creative Commons), Abbey Stadium (stadiumbd.com) Further reading: Cambridge and Stourbridge Fair by Honor Ridout is published by Blue Ocean Publishing.

Dr Michael Hrebeniak describes himself as inveterately curious about people and places. His fascination for a messy patch of Cambridge, best known for its traffic jams and retail park, has led him to create with words and film ‘a deep map’ of the layers of human experience on the fringes of the city.

I’ve always been attentive to traces of cultural memory. I'm interested in the habitat and signatures of place and how they’re encoded within the material forms of the commonplace.

Michael Hrebeniak

AO'D (Flickr Creative Commons)

Stourbridge Common

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Feeling powerless increases the weight of the world… literally

fpjl2 — Tue, 04 Feb 2014 09:27:16 +0000

Scientists have found that people who feel powerless actually see the world differently, and find a task to be more physically challenging than those with a greater sense of personal and social power.

Eun Hee Lee - a researcher working with Dr Simone Schnall at Cambridge’s Department of Psychology - carried out a series of tests in which volunteers were surreptitiously surveyed about their own social power, then asked to lift boxes of varying weights and guess how heavy they were. Those who felt powerless consistently perceived the weight of the boxes as much heavier than those who felt more powerful.

̽��ֱ��study is the first demonstration that power – a ‘psychosocial’ construct relating to the control of resources – changes peoples’ perception of objects; that how you feel about your social standing in a situation can influence how you see the physical environment.

̽��ֱ��researchers say this overestimation of weight may be an adaptive strategy when faced with a lack of resources: when in a position of powerlessness, it would be ‘advantageous’ to have an overly cautious approach to the world in order to preserve your existing limited resources.

Experiencing perceptual attributes of the world – such as the weight of objects - in an “exaggerated fashion” when feeling powerless might be symptomatic of this instinctive resource conservation.

̽��ֱ��study is published this week in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

“Although many psychological studies have been conducted on power not much was known about how power influences actual perceptual experiences in everyday life,” said lead researcher Eun Hee Lee.

“This research demonstrates that people’s social role, as indicated by a sense of social power, or a lack thereof, can change the way they see the physical environment.”

To measure a person’s sense of their own social power, Lee and Schnall conducted three separate studies – all disguised by cover stories so that participants were unaware of what was being tested.

In the first, 145 participants were asked to rank how strongly they felt a series of statements applied to them – such as “I can get people to listen to what I say” – to measure beliefs about their power in social relationships. They were then tasked with lifting a number of boxes and guessing the weight, before taking a final test to gauge their mood. Researchers found that the lower a person’s feelings of social power, the more they thought the boxes weighed.

In the second test, the researchers manipulated the sense of power by asking 41 participants to sit in either an expansive, domineering position – with one elbow on the arm of their chair and the other on the desk next to them – or a more constricting one, with hands tucked under thighs and shoulders dropped.

Prior to manipulation, most participants overestimated the weight; after manipulation, those who sat in the more powerful pose gave more accurate estimates, while those in the submissive condition continued to imagine heavier weight.

In the final test, 68 participants were asked to recall an experience in which they had felt either powerful or powerless, and then repeatedly estimate the weights of various boxes - under the guise of studying the effect of exercise on autobiographical memory. Those who focused on the powerful incident became more accurate at guessing the weight, while those recalling a powerless situation continually overestimated the heaviness of the boxes.

While previous research has shown that various physical and emotional states can influence perception of the environment – such as perceiving a hill slant to be steeper when wearing a heavy backpack, or threatening objects, such as a tarantula, appearing to be further from your face when feeling good about yourself – this is the first study to show that a sense of power can now be added to that list.

Giulio Andreotti, the former Italian Prime Minister who was nicknamed ‘Il Divo’ after the epithet for Julius Caesar, famously once said that “power tires only those who do not have it”. Lee and Schnall write that this comment is “no longer an unsubstantiated conjecture”, and that their data suggests the world of the powerless “is indeed full of heavy burdens”.

Added Lee: “Power plays a role when it is present in a given moment, but also when it comes to people’s personality. We find that personality, which determines how people interact with the social world, also shapes how people interact with the physical world.”

New research shows that the more personally and socially powerless you feel the heavier objects appear to weigh.

People’s social role, as indicated by a sense of social power, or a lack thereof, can change the way they see the physical environment

Eun Hee Lee

United States Marine Corps

Heave, Ho!

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Windows to the self?

tdk25 — Mon, 29 Oct 2012 16:55:05 +0000

Young children often make the mistake of thinking that you can’t see them if they can’t see you – hiding themselves by covering or closing their eyes. Using a process of elimination, a research team at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge has now found out why.

Testing children aged three and four, the team, led by Dr James Russell from the Department of Psychology, first asked them whether they could be seen if they were wearing a blindfold, and whether the researcher could see an adult who was wearing one. Nearly all the children felt that when they were wearing a mask they were hidden, and most thought the adult wearing a mask was hidden too.

Next, the researchers tested whether children think it is the fact that a person’s eyes are hidden from other people’s view that renders them invisible, or if they think the act of being blinded is the decisive factor.

To test this, a new group of young children were quizzed about their ability to be seen when they were wearing goggles that were completely blacked out, meaning that they could not see and their eyes were hidden. They were then asked about the same issues when wearing a second pair of goggles which were covered in mirrored film – meaning that they could see, but other people could not see their eyes.

Unfortunately, this test did not go quite according to plan. Out of the 37 children involved, only seven were able to grasp the concept that they could see out, but people couldn’t see them. Of these seven, six believed that they were invisible regardless of the goggles that they were wearing. In other words, the children's feelings of invisibility seem to come from the fact that their eyes are hidden, rather than from the fact that they can't see.

In both studies, when the children thought that they were invisible because of their eyes being covered, they nonetheless agreed that their head and body were visible. ̽��ֱ��researchers argue that this represents a distinction in the child’s mind between the concealment of the “self” and that of the body.

Coupled with the fact that hiding their eyes appeared to be the decisive factor when trying to make themselves feel hidden, the researchers wondered if their invisibility beliefs were based around the idea that there must be eye contact between two people – a meeting of gazes – for them to see their “selves”.

This idea appeared to receive some support from a further study in which more children were asked if they could be seen when a researcher looked directly at them while they averted their gaze; or, contrarily, if the researcher with gaze averted was visible while the child looked directly at them.

Many of the children felt that they were hidden so long as they didn’t meet the gaze of the researcher. They also felt that the researcher was hidden if his or her gaze was averted while the child looked on.

“It seems that children apply the principle of joint attention to the self and assume that for somebody to be perceived, experience must be shared and mutually known to be shared, as it is when two pairs of eyes meet,” Russell said.

Other explanations were ruled out with some puppet studies. For instance, the majority of a new group of children agreed it was reasonable for a puppet to hide by covering its eyes, which rules out the argument that children only hide this way because they are caught up in the heat of the moment.

̽��ֱ��revelation that most young children think people can only see each other when their eyes meet raises some interesting questions for future research. For example, children with autism are known to engage in less sharing of attention with other people (following another person's gaze), so perhaps they will be less concerned with the role of mutual gaze in working out who is visible. Another interesting avenue could be to explore the invisibility beliefs of children born blind. ̽��ֱ��authors speculate that skin-to-skin touching may serve as a proxy for eye-contact in the congenitally blind.

Researchers have offered a convincing new theory which explains why children believe that they are invisible when they cover their eyes.

It seems that children apply the principle of joint attention to the self and assume that for somebody to be perceived, experience must be shared and mutually known to be shared, as it is when two pairs of eyes meet

Dr James Russell

Audi insperation from Flickr.

Alice eyes. Researchers found that most children believe that people can only see each other when their eyes meet.

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