Social Sciences and Humanities Graduate Seminar

The Social Sciences and Humanities Graduate Seminar will take place on Wednesday 11 June at 6pm in the Simpkins Lee Lecture Theatre. There will be drinks in the Monson Room afterwards. 

The speakers will be:

Emily Lanham (DPhil Geography and the Environment) - Young People's Experiences of their Local Environment in a Fenceline Community

‘Fenceline communities’ are neighbourhoods that sit in acute proximity to highly-polluting industries and infrastructures. In environmental justice (EJ) scholarship, the ‘fenceline’ has been a site of intense scrutiny from academics and activists alike. However, there has been growing concern about the corollary impact of this research on community members. This presentation outlines a piece of research that responds to this renewed criticism by working with a group of young people from a ‘fenceline’ community to understand their lived experiences. In doing so, it demonstrates how researchers can still glean useful—and, in some cases, additional—insights whilst seeking to mitigate some of the criticisms of traditional EJ research.

Saffron Welch (DPhil Classical Languages and Literature) - Not Just a Phase: The Significance of Daughterhood in Homeric Epic

In Early Greek epos, daughters play an overlooked but essential role. While there is an emphasis on mothers and wives, daughterhood is typically understood as a transitional identity on the path to these more mature roles. This talk revises this understanding, viewing daughters as an essential and permanent phase of Homeric womanhood, that is an important element of succession and inheritance systems. Women, even those whose identity revolves around their husbands and married families such as Penelope, maintain a link to their birth families that manifests itself from patronymics to threat of sending them back to their parents for remarriage. Equally, daughters, such as Tyro, are often saviour individuals of their family, who are single-handedly responsible for their families’ survival. These women demonstrate a significance to daughterhood, presenting them as an essential point of inheritance and survival that extends past the traditional assumed marginalisation found in recent scholarship.