Reflecting on the Mini-Undergraduate Dissertation Showcase
This year, GENDER.ED was able to host a Mini-Undergraduate Dissertation Showcase as part of our Annual Research Showcase. In this blog, Undergraduate Intern Mouna Chatt, and Kaveri Qureshi, Associate Director, converse about what they saw as the highlights and significance of the mini-showcase.
On the 14th of May, GENDER.ED hosted its Annual Research Showcase, which, for the first time, featured a Mini Undergraduate Dissertation Showcase. Undergraduate students across all disciplines at the University of Edinburgh were invited to showcase their dissertation research touching upon gender and sexuality studies by featuring a poster at the event. 22 students featured their work at the showcase, and 12 different degree programmes across the University were represented. Mouna Chatt, GENDER.ED’s Undergraduate Intern, and Kaveri Qureshi, Associate Director of GENDER.ED, converse on the mini-showcase.
Mouna:
I was inspired by the diversity of creative research methods and topics represented at the showcase, ranging from utopian counter-mapping, various archival research and critical discourse analyses of media to ethnographies and research based on interviews and written autobiographical testimonies. One of my favourite posters was Mia Nelson’s, ‘Girls* Night Out: Utilising Feminist Utopian Method to Explore Nightlife Experiences and Potentials in Edinburgh’. Mia used feminist utopian method to investigate how women and non-binary people in Edinburgh experience nightlife spaces and invited her interlocutors to re-imagine nightlife spaces by thinking through what a utopian nightlife experience would look like.
As Undergraduate students, it is not uncommon to feel that our dissertations are not ‘real’ research. Dissertations are rarely treated as valuable pieces of knowledge production and exchange. However, by giving undergraduate students the opportunity to present at a showcase, our research projects are validated and become an integral feature in a non-hierarchical space of knowledge exchange.
Kaveri:
Like you Mouna, I was super impressed by the range of the research that students showcased. From a supervisory perspective, I was making notes on the wide range of data types, data sources, analytical methods and theories students were engaging, so as to be able to encourage future supervisees on my own programme to go about their dissertation research in ways outside the mould! I would be hard-pressed to identity favourite posters, but on a personal level I did particularly enjoy Alexandra Wallace’s, which turned to the Mass Observation Project as an archival source through which to explore how young people learnt about queer identity in post-war Britain, 1945-1980. Back in 2001, my own Undergraduate dissertation pursued somewhat similar questions, exploring gender differences in how gay men and lesbians encountered their sexuality through spatial practices, via a review of published scholarly literature. Had I known about the existence of this fascinating archive, I might have been able to do something much more original. Who knows how my academic development might have gone differently, as a result!
Going forward, I think all of us in the GENDER.ED team would love to be able to continue to showcase Undergraduate dissertation research in future years. So Undergraduate students, please watch out for any call-outs around this next academic year! Also, I have invited this year’s contributors to write up their research findings in blog form, and been delighted with the warm and positive response from students so far. These will start coming out in the Autumn. We know from our most recent stakeholder survey, that readers of the GENDER.ED blog very much appreciate the research reports we publish. So, I hope that this will engage our readers, enabling everyone to follow the important gender and sexuality studies research undertaken at all career stages at the University. I’m really happy that the blog can provide Undergraduate student authors with a lasting web presence for their projects. These definitely deserve lasting attention!
