Writing in the Home and in the Street

Funding Body

Principal Investigator

Richard Steadman-Jones, School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics, University of Sheffield

Co-Investigator

Kate Pahl, School of Education, University of Sheffield and William Gould, University of Leeds

Dates of project

From September 2010 – end November 2011

This interdisciplinary research project, led by Richard Steadman-Jones from the English Department at the University of Sheffield, connects three academics (Richard Steadman Jones, Kate Pahl, William Gould) together with three artists (Steve Pool, Zahir Rafiq and Irna Qureshi), to investigate everyday writing practices in three areas of Rotherham, East Herringthorpe, Rawmarsh and Ferham. The project involved a series of walks around the area, both with the project team and with a group of young people from High Greave School, in East Herringthorpe. The films and images of these walks were showcased at the recent ESRC Festival of Social Science.

   

In addition, Kate Pahl has been working with a small group of families to investigate home writing practices. She has looked at the materiality of writing and the way in which writing is embedded in everyday ‘stuff’. She has co-curated a chest of drawers with a group of 8 – 13 year old girls which was displayed in the Inhabiting Space exhibition at Jessop West. With Richard Steadman-Jones, who curated one of the drawers, the team thought about these things:

We are interested in the materiality of writing, both the surfaces on which text appears (stone, skin, fabric, tiles, the dirt on the back of a van, the condensation on the inside of a window) and also in the instruments used to make it (a pen, a needle, a chisel, a finger, a penknife). Coming from different academic disciplines – one of us is an ethnographer and the other is interested in linguistics and literary theory – we sometimes look at these issues in different ways. We both agree that all writing is in process and can disappear. Some of these drawers were the product of an ethnographic research study which focused on documenting home writing practices. Homes carry stories as well as objects. But these are sometimes secret and the families in the study have hidden texts within the drawers, as well as objects that tell stories in different ways.

The chest of drawers was also displayed at Bank Street Arts co-curated by two of the young people in the project. Their work represented the hidden nature of writing in the home and the secrets young people like to keep in their writing.

The project has resulted in a number of new connections across the Arts and Social Sciences and has enabled us to think about everyday writing in new ways.