Question: Hi, and thank you to everyone who presented. My name is Bernadette and my question is for squatting in Camden, John. I thought you said you visit in your own film, but don't forget Diane. So my question is about memories and how we remember. Because the idea of a film can be quite a method of romanticising your younger years and that part of your life, but when it comes to Diane, grief is involved. So maybe you could speak to emotion and grief and how that manipulates or changes or sways the way we remember versus romanticising a younger bohemian self. Thank you.

Me: I mean this is something I've struggled with. I gave a talk last week at an education type conference where I talked about how I'm using epiphanies in particular and they can get me a long way. I like the storyfication thing of Herman and Adams and the journal of autoethnography, and I really tried hard to do this. I can do that [storyfication] if it's up to the last 15 years ago. Writing this real kind of very evocative text that brings people into my perspective, but when it gets beyond that, which is what you're talking about, I have real trouble. When I've submitted this abstract [to ICAE] I'll come clean and then I found out that you prefer more artistic type of things like we've been seeing which I thought "well that's brilliant". But then I remembered I'd written this song which triggered it. So this, the lyrics triggered what I was doing at the time because I had trouble, I do have trouble [remembering]. I didn't take that many heavy duty drugs. I did drink a lot but so I mean I didn't pickle myself too much. But it is that, so there's an added thing there's a distance of memory we do mythologize things and in some disciplines it's … I mean I'm a computer scientist though educational, I always got submitted to education for research exercises where you often try and triangulate things [to verify what you think is happening], but I wrote a paper for the journal of Punk and Post-Punk on my time with strawberry switchblade, a female led cult band, an indie band, and people seem to like the fact you can myth mythologize the past. They're thinking, they're saying, people from various sectors [disciplines] they seem to like it. Whereas I am, if you see my abstract [for this conference] I've got this, I'm trying to be as accurate as I can but I understand that I can't be because of memory, because of emotion, because of the mythologizing. But I think finding those lyrics help me remember it a bit better. And the photo [of Diane] just knocked me dead because, I then I remembered all my friends and how we, some of the people I knew that did that; I think she was the sister of the leader of the British National Party, but she used to wear dresses like that and she died of a heroin overdose as well. We used to see her lying around in the streets in Camden. So all these things come back, and some triggers may make them appear.

Question: Have any of you had any experiences of theorising through your arts practice and coming up with with new concepts?

Chair: Anybody want to speak to that question?

Me: [pause] I can take that. It wasn't through art practice but though through the methodology of epiphanies that really did it for me. I mean, there was attached to it certain amounts of, so there was four types of epiphanies for Denzin but the major one was changing my accent when I was working as a lecturer in London in the early 1990s from a northern accent, I'm from West Yorkshire, to try and fit in. And I didn't realise that till 2022 or something like that that "oh god I've I've adapted". So I did, I was a bit ashamed of myself when I realised. But so I found the epiphanies as a framework very helpful. But the art, look I am a musician and I compose and play but I have I've yet to explore it more.