This on-going Public Seminar Series started in October 2015 with the topic 'Women, Picture, Place', in which guest speakers from Scotland and Finland presented research findings on women photographers and film makers addressing 'the North' in the 1930s. The 2017 event addressed the theme of 'Place Image, Heritage and Archaelogy'. This October 2018 seminar was on the theme: 'An Auto-ethnographic Turn'. In 2019, 'Through a Northern Lens' series will contribute to 'Practicing Landscape' conference programme.

Auto-ethnography is an approach to observation and field work that has been adopted in various ways in art and design research and practice. Auto-ethnography developed in order to disrupt the unequal power relations that had obtained between apparently objective external specialist observers of people, places and activities and the observed 'others' of observation. In practice, expressions range from a species of situated autobiographical artworks, writings and reflections, through to the considered evaluation of the 'observer's part' in the research process and their negotiations with participants. In relation to the concerns of the Northern Lens series, our contributors to this seminar will discuss how their work engages with the auto-ethnographic shaped in very specific ways by notions of 'North'.

Co-organisers: Dr Frances Robertson, Dr Nicky Bird and Jenny Brownrigg

Speakers were: Teiji Wallace-Lewis (Ph.D. Research Student, School of Fine Art, Glasgow School of Art): 'The Politics of Home/Land: Geographies of Trauma Within the Canadian Family Farm and Archive'; Dr. Rachael Flynn (Lecturer In Creative Practice, School of Media, Culture & Society, University of West of Scotland) 'Letters from home: Releasing emotional narratives of migration and diaspora through creative research practice'; Dr. George S. Jaramillo (Lecturer and Research Associate at The Innovation School, GSA) 'Lines of Enquiry: Drawing as auto-ethnographic practice'; Dave Loder (Lecturer in Interior Design, GSA) 'Decolonising Landscape and the Entangled Visuality of the Anthropocene'; and respondants were Dr Jo Clements (freelance archivist) and Dr Ranjana Thapalyal (Senior Lecturer, GSA).