Organisers' abstract: "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 October 2017 event addressed the theme of 'Place Image, Heritage and Archaelogy'. This October 2018 seminar will be on the theme: 'An Auto-ethnographic Turn'.

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'"