Haunts #4 - Atmospheres of Social Haunting (17-3-2021) - online conference recording
Channel: Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group
Date: 2021-06-18

In June 2021 the Sheffield Hallam University Space & Place Group convened its fourth Zoom event on the theme of 'Haunts'. The event, Haunts#4: Atmospheres of Social Haunting, featured five presentations ranging across heritage, psychology, performance and film-making - all looking at the ways in which places have (or are claimed to have) a lingering haunting quality, which acts upon the individuals and/or communities who dwell within them. The presentations, each in their own way, shared a concern with how that sense of hauntedness is constructed: who invokes the ghosts? by what means? and for what purposes and effects? There was a particularly strong sense of sound as a potent element of this affective place-engineering and its attempt to sustain a particular shared atmosphere across time. This was illustrated in a variety scenarios: the memorialisation of the the victims of an 1830s cholera pandemic; the speaking of a stranger's continent-straddling life-course; the sonic configuration of the Cenotaph remembrance rituals; recorded sound as a spur to connect with the trauma of Jewish ancestors; and the use of sound and vision to 'give voice' to the post-industrial community of Bolsover. 

The speakers comprise:

Luke Bennett, Associate Professor, Department of the Natural & Built Environment, Sheffield Hallam University
Introduction & Building an intentional social haunting?: the Sheffield Cholera Monument 
  

Charlene Cross, PhD Student, Department of the Natural & Built Environment, SHU
On finding traces of another's past: Assembling an affective biographical narrative from found items and the Internet 
  
John Land, PhD Student, Department of Psychology, Sociology & Politics, SHU
Rituals: How perception of the disembodied establishes identity

Max Munday, PhD Student, Department of Media & Communications, SHU
Becoming-Jewish among the social ghosts 
  
Esther Johnson, Professor of Film and Media Arts, Sheffield Hallam University 
A role to play?: showing social haunting through collaborative filmmaking