On nesting

Writer Julietta Singh talks to filmmaker Chase Joynt about their unfolding collaborative work on a feature-length hybrid documentary, The Nest. Taking a majestic home in central Canada as its focus, the documentary looks to architecture as a portal through which to tell unexpected histories of Westward expansion, Indigenous uprising, ecopolitical activism, domestic violence, and the racialization of a nation. Mapping the structural, political, and intimate histories of the house, the film engages archival remnants and historical fabulation to illuminate forgotten feminist pasts and tell linked stories of its transhistorical occupants. The project asks: How can built environments reveal subjugated stories of the past? How are we affected by the historical traces that linger in our dwelling places? How are race, gender, class, sexuality, and physical ability embedded in architecture? And how might we ultimately understand ourselves as artifacts of space and place that are making and telling histories otherwise?

Robert Louis Stevenson and the Art of Collaboration

Robert Louis Stevenson, Collaboration, and the Construction of the Late-Victorian Author argues that understanding literary collaboration is essential to understanding Stevenson’s writings. Stevenson often collaborated with family and friends, sometimes acknowledged, and sometimes not. Early collaborations include three plays with his friend W. E. Henley. Later, he and his wife Fanny co-authored a volume of linked stories, More New Arabian Nights, also titled The Dynamiter (1885). Fanny also contributed to other work that did not bear her name, significantly the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and he drew on her diaries for his Pacific writings. He collaborated most extensively with his stepson, Lloyd Osbourne, with whom he wrote three novels: The Wrong Box (1889), The Wrecker (1892), and The Ebb-Tide (1894). Stevenson’s collaborations with Osbourne typify the critical problem my project addresses. Like Fanny Stevenson’s, Osbourne’s literary reputation has not been notable. Furthermore, there is evidence that Stevenson’s collaborations with Osbourne became frustrating. The core question this book addresses is this: why would this famous and successful author of Scottish literature practice a creative process that burdened him with inexpert collaborators? The answer to this question can be found in Stevenson’s novels, essays and plays, which dramatize the process of collaboration. Stevenson creates an alternate narrative of what it means to write—one that challenges commonly held assumptions about the celebrity cult of the author in Victorian literature, and notions of authorship more generally.

Cultural identity, migration and community development in Glasgow

This chapter examines two linked stories of community work and migration in Glasgow (Scotland's largest and most multi-ethnic city in terms of numbers and diversity). One is of the work taken forward by the Scottish Refugee Council with refugees and asylum seekers across the city; the other is of the neighbourhood-level work of Crossroads, a long-established youth and community association in the Govanhill area of the city. It is set within the shifting context of community work in the city over the years. The account here, covering 10 years, shows how the work moved from building links and organisational responses to ensure that this deprived population was able effectively to access a range of basic services, through advocacy, to more structured forms of organisation.