A BOOK OF RIOTS

or my collaboration to the AHRC-funded Research in Translation project

View Exhibit Here

How do you communicate your post-doctoral research to an 'intelligent 12-year-old'? Without dumbing it down, without stripping it of its complexity, without oversimplifying it out of all recognition? How can you translate it into a medium other than the printed word? How can you make it interesting to an audience that doesn't automatically take an interest in the topic? These were the questions and the great challenges implicit in the project Research in Translation: public engagement through exhibition displays jointly organised by Dr Ceri Jones (University of Leicester) and Dr Serena Iervolino (UCL Qatar) this year at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester. 

You've spent a decade or so deepening your research, honing down your academic style, taking in the latest, subtlest theories on the subject, juggling with great variety of sources, seesawing between methodologies, quibbling over nuance of argument. Now forget all of these, step down from your Academy of Laputa and face the real world for a change. 

The Book of Riots I submitted to the exhibition relies on a simple dichotomy: the disparity between what officials thought about various riots (causes, motives, triggers, culprits) and what actually happened on the ground. For more topicality and relevance to present-day concerns, I embedded my own research material (regarding peasant uprisings at the beginning of the 20th century) within a triad of riots: 1907 peasant uprising in Romania, 1967 Detroit riots and 2011 English riots. One could not think of three more disparate events and yet a basic commonality of riot management dynamics is there in all three of them. Each of the three was misread by the authorities of the time, each of them had a rationale of their own, in glaring contrast to what the authorities thought was happening. 

The actual exhibit consists of a book briefly describing each of the riots, and audio files which reenact the voices of the rioters based on extant documents of the time. In other words, these voices are not fictionalised, they are dramatised primary sources, snippets of archival material, sociological inquiries, interviews. 

Here is a draft sample of the 1907 voices of peasant rebels in Romania. Apart from the main narrator voice (Karina Fernandez, who kindly agreed to lend us a hand), none of the others are by professional actors:

https://archive.org/download/RomaniaPeasantUprising2/Romania-Peasant-Uprising2.mp3

Apart from text and audio, the display needed a catchy introductory poster, which, as we were told during the training sessions, was meant to attract attention to the exhibit, draw the visitor in, 'hook' them in. This, like the rest of the exhibit, underwent a metamorphosis from initial concept and my own wonky sketches: 

to trying (and failing) several times to find a professional illustrator and, finally, through a stroke of luck and Facebook vagaries, finding a great up-and-coming young illustrator, Alexandru Săvescu, who was able to take this on and translate it into professional drawing:

Working on the Book of Riots has been a great learning experience: trying to pitch a visual and textual message so that a museum audience can comprehend it and take interest in it may seem, on the face of it, a piece of cake. You find, when you are actually doing it, it is anything but that! It is not about dumbing down information, but rather about making it accessible (was it Voltaire who said that if a message cannot be translated, then maybe it is not worth translating in the first place?), communicating vital notions and experiences to non-specialists and feeding them into the public mainstream of ideas. Whilst the exhibit itself can no doubt be improved and refined further, the experience gained in putting it all together remains invaluable.

A big Thank-You to all of those involved in shaping this exhibit: the two organisers, Ceri Jones and Serena Iervolino, who have put a tremendous amount of work into this exhibition and have been most helpful every step of the way; my kind and patient mentor Pippa Sherriff; all the workshop participants and presenters for their useful, thought-provoking comments and suggestions; Maureen Duke (the bookbinder, who made a great effort to help when I ran out of options); my impromptu audio voices Karina Fernandez (the only pro in the cast), Amy Samuelson, Jason Vaughn and Daniel Brett (who reminded me what friends are for); and Alexandru Săvescu (the illustrator).

Last but not least, my gratitude goes to the Leverhulme Trust, which provided additional financial support for my exhibit.

Footnote to the Exhibit:

- the script for the audio recordings is based on genuine interviews and primary sources:

1. for the 1907 Romanian Peasant Uprising I drew on Oțetea et al., Documente privind marea răscoală a țăranilor din 1907, Editura Academiei RSR, București, 1977-.

2. for the 1967 Detroit riots I'm quoting material from Max Arthur Herman, Summer of Rage: an Oral History of the 1967 Newark and Detroit Riots, New York, Peter Lang, 2013.

3. for the 2011 English Riots I used the Guardian and London School of Economics Report (many thanks to Gavin Bailey for pointing it out to me).