• Kat Gupta’s research blog

    caution: may contain corpus linguistics, feminism, activism, LGB, queer and trans stuff, parrots, London

5 Comments

haunting texts

  By ,

Last semester I was teaching a History of English module. With little in the way of previous teaching materials, I had considerable scope to develop my own – and woah, did I have fun with that. I grew up in a medieval city, its Anglo-Saxon quarters still somewhat in evidence and traces of its inhabitants and their trades and their prejudices echoed still in the street names. The city itself is a palimpsest, post-war layered on Victorian layered on Georgian layered on Tudor layered on medieval layered on Anglo-Saxon and, crouching in alcoves, the city’s old Roman walls. It’s impossible to live there and not let that somehow soak into your bones, just a quiet awareness that your life is one breath against the city’s dreaming stones. And yet, all of this history is just part of your life. When you grow up playing on castle ruins (destroyed in the English Civil War and never rebuilt) and running around a medieval great hall and there are Roman coins on a table in your primary school because they were dug up in someone’s dad’s field, and you spend your teenage years perched on tombs and ruining tourists’ photos by sprawling messily… Continue reading

No comments

Publication Day!

  By ,

I am beyond delighted to announce that Representation of the British Suffrage Movement is now available from Bloomsbury Academic. A preview of the book is available through Google Books if you’re interested in reading it. It’s the culmination of many years of hard work, yelling/swearing at my data, yelling/swearing at my computer, being a constant trial to my loved ones and possibly a plantation’s worth of tea, but it’s finally here! It seems a very long time ago that I drafted a thesis proposal with a sleeping puppy on my lap; indeed, the puppy in question is now eight years old. I don’t think I could have imagined where that thesis proposal would take me. Researching the thesis and then turning it into a book has been an adventure, truly expanding my intellectual horizons, challenging my ideas and assumptions (and patience), and bringing me into contact with some of the smartest and most generous people I could have hoped to meet. I recieved my author copies a couple of weeks ago. They are incredibly handsome and some have already found new homes with some of the people who have supported and inspired me the most: my parents, my sister and… Continue reading

No comments

five thoughts (plus one) on same sex marriage

  By

This has been brewing for a while now, but with recent same sex marriage victories in the US and the Republic of Ireland, I think I want to jot down some of these thoughts. 1. Honestly, I am probably not the best person to talk about getting married. As a child I couldn’t even feign interest in my primary school classmates’ breaktime ceremonies held in the playground. As a teenager, one of my favourite rants was about marriage being an institution of patriarchal oppression trading women’s bodies among men for economic and social gain. Emotional and physical abuse, rape, forced reproduction and murder all happen within marriage. Marriage doesn’t guarantee love and security. I think LBGTQ critics of the institution of marriage Continue reading

No comments

why I won’t tweet my students’ exam howlers

  By ,

Another summer marking season, another article in Times Higher Education soliciting student “exam howlers”. This is predictable and wearying and I can’t help but feel that we keep having this exact same conversation about why it’s bad to publicly mock and shame our students. Kirsty Rolfe wrote about talking teaching and making mistakes and I wrote about being someone’s worst student a couple of years ago, but apparently it bears repeating. There was one respect alone in which Philip was recognized as a man of distinction, though only within the confines of his own Department. He was a superlative examiner of undergraduates: scrupulous, painstaking, stern yet just. No one could award a delicate mark like B+/B+?+ with such confident aim, or justify it with such cogency and conviction. David Lodge, Changing Places: a tale of two campuses Like Philip, I try to mark carefully and, being a perfectionist, probably spend far too much time thinking about whether a piece of work should be awarded a 62 or a 64 (let alone a 68 or a 70). Marking can be a joyless task but there’s only one paper that I’ve genuinely been annoyed at marking – one in which the student,… Continue reading

No comments

Activist academia, academic activism

  By ,

This is my contribution to a roundtable discussion on trans and non-binary activism at Sexual Cultures 2: Activism meets academia. My co-panellists were Ruth Pearce, Jade Fernandez and Dr Jay Stewart and the facilitator was Dr Meg John Barker. ____ Today I’m basically going to argue that academia and activism inform and enrich each other. There are commonalities between the two: both engage with the world around us, both describe it and seek to understand it. Both ask – and respond – to difficult questions. However, there are also differences: activism explicitly seeks change whereas not all academic work does so. Activism can also take many different forms, and there are different barriers to enter it[1]. Both my academic research and activism are interested in people – how they form the identities they have, how they communicate these and make them legible, how they understand themselves, how they challenge the societies they live in. My academic work has focused on the newspaper representation of the suffrage movement and, more recently, how trans people are represented in the media. Representation is crucial to changing perceptions of minority and/or disadvantaged groups – it is how people who may never meet us and… Continue reading

One Comment

Where are our elders?

  By ,

[content warning: discussion of homo-, bi- and transphobia, racism, domestic abuse and suicide. I’ve tried to keep these fairly non-explicit; the reports I link to go into more detail] This is a write up of a short talk I gave at the final conference of the ESRC seminar series ‘Minding the Knowledge Gaps: older lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans lives’. The organising team and I have been having an involved discussion since my first post and they were kind enough to invite me to speak as part of the summaries of previous events. In this talk I discuss lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans and queer (LGBTQ) identities, Black and minority ethnic (BME) identities and ageing identities. I ask what it means to live at the centre of these overlapping identities and look at how we can extrapolate some issues from what we know about overlaps of age and LGBTQ identities, age and BME identities, and LGBTQ and BME identities. However, this is by no means a perfect solution because it misses that complex intersections bring their own unique issues – there is effectively a known unknown about the experiences of older LGBTQ people from BME backgrounds, and I want to highlight… Continue reading

No comments

Reflecting on a year and a half of Conference Bingo

  By ,

I went to a conference 18 months ago where nearly everything that could go wrong went wrong. I stayed with the excellent Heather Froehlich afterwards, and as we talked about our crappy conference adventures we noted that a lot of these things were not isolated events. Conference Bingo mingles the humorous with a sharper edge. A good proportion of the items are there out of affection – I’ve certainly been both the starstruck postgraduate and the postgraduate frantically working (sometimes at the same time). I think (and hope) that most of these items provoke a chuckle of wry recognition as we recognise ourselves in them. Some of the squares are there because Heather and I find these things funny or ridiculous. I personally love witnessing “clash of the academic alpha males” because I can start an internal David Attenborough style narration to accompany them (“and here, two silverback males find themselves in unexpected confrontation…”). You will find me in the middle of any unseemly jostling for a power socket. Weird things happen to me at conferences. Here are a few of them: the time I ended up in a motel laundry room, with several prominent academics, in the dark, because… Continue reading

No comments

How to improve Samaritans Radar

  By

I’m on my way out of the house so can’t write why I think the new Samaritans app, Samaritans Radar, is a terrible idea; instead, I suggest reading what these people have already written about it. Another Angry Woman: I do not consent to #SamaritansRadar Queer Blue Water: Email to Samaritans about Radar Latent Existence: Samaritans Radar and Twitter’s Public Problem Jon Mendel: Problems with Samaritans Radar Jon Mendal has also written two posts discussing Samaritans Radar from a research ethics point of view: post 1 and post 2 Joey McK: Why the Samaritans’ Radar is bone stupid Here’s a really easy way this whole mess could have been avoided: trusted lists. You download the app. It shows you which of the people you follow you AND who follow you back have also downloaded the app. You can then send a request. Maybe something like this: “Hi, I noticed you use Samaritans Radar. I want to be able to support you if I can so feel free to add me to your trusted list” Or you can request someone to be on your trusted list: “Hi, I noticed you use Samaritans Radar. I’m building my support network on here and… Continue reading

No comments

Getting the most out of CorpusMOOC

  By

The second run of Corpus Linguistics: Method, Analysis, Interpretation started a fortnight ago. It’s an eight week massive open online course. The course description says it offers “a practical introduction to the methodology of corpus linguistics for researchers in social sciences and humanities”, but in reality, people on the course come from a huge range of backgrounds – undergraduate students, retired people, teachers, researchers, translators and those who simply are interested in language and want to learn more about it. I was a course mentor last time, so put together some tips to help you get the most out of the course. Work at your own pace The course is developed so there’s something for everyone. There are core readings and exercises each week suitable for beginners; there are also supplementary materials for those who already have some experience with corpus linguistics. I particularly like the “in conversation” videos with leading figures in corpus linguistics – it can be really helpful to see how people actually use corpus linguistics in their research, especially in the first weeks of the course. The course is carefully designed to build on previous weeks and to allow you to progress at your own rate.… Continue reading

One Comment

L, G, B – here’s your T

  By ,

On 30 September 2014 I attended Stonewall’s first group meeting of trans activists. I wrote about my thoughts on Stonewall’s missing T before the meeting; here is my response to the meeting itself. Other people have also written about it and I will be updating the list as other things are posted; please let me know if you’re written something about that meeting and you want me to link to it. Jane Fae: What happened at Stonewall’s first meeting with the trans community? Natacha Kennedy: Alliances and Oppositions. Trans activism and Stonewall Zoe Kirk-Robinson: Putting the T Back in Stonewall CN Lester: #TransStonewall – the first meeting Zoe O’Connell: #TransStonewall: The Meeting Ruth Pearce: Imagining a trans-inclusive Stonewall What happened on the day To very briefly summarise, there are four options on the table for Stonewall’s future involvement in trans issues. One option was that Stonewall can remain as an LGB organisation but works to be a better ally for trans people and issues affecting us. The general feeling in the room was that this was to be taken as given. The other three options were that Stonewall could be a much more active partner. We discussed the following three… Continue reading