AHEAD

Faculty funding to visit University of Nottingham – Ningbo

Thanks to AHEAD funding, the Talking Trees team was able to travel to UoN Ningbo for extensive Research and Development with collaborators, Dr Lan Lo (University of Nottingham) and Dr Derek Irwin (Associate Dean of Education, UoN Ningbo). This involved site visits to map a route for our audio walk across the UoN Ningbo Campus (which is similar to the University of Nottingham’s campus), as well as discussions with Derek about the logistics of hosting audio on the UoN Ningbo Faculty of Arts website and installation of plaques.

Dr Lan Lo and I spent time mapping our existing audio tracks from Nottingham onto the potential trees in Ningbo and routes between them – which could only have been done in situ. This enabled us to send amends to our sound artist, Chris Cousin, to adapt our tracks for use in Ningbo. The plan is to install the plaques and the audio tracks in Autumn 2024. While in Ningbo we also led a theatre workshop with some BA students who are studying Theatre as an extra-curricular activity – this enabled us to test out new workshop activities involving John Berger’s Field essay (1981) and engage in some site-based writing which took place at the trees we plan to use for our audio walk.

We delivered a one-hour information session to Confucius Institute staff and students at UoN Ningbo who we plan to involve in our project when it is installed as participants and/or advocates. We were then invited to speak at Zhe Jiang Wan Li University to Business Students and delivered a 90-minute seminar about the project and its themes with a focus on international collaboration. We met the Dean of the Faculty of Business who is interested in the project, and this may lead to future collaboration with the university. Finally, we spent time with Derek discussing the idea of creating a new tree track – entitled Family Tree – which will be sited outside the campus and have a community focus.

This would involve interviewing local community members, as well as staff and students, about the university’s relationship to the city, and be sited at an old Yew Tree that has seen much change over the last 20 years since UoN Ningbo opened. There is potential to expand the Family Tree concept to other project partners (e.g. Zhe Jiang Wan Li University) and involve the students who attended our activities. Dr Lan Lo has set up a We Chat group to keep details from everyone we spoke to during our visit and will update them on potential collaboration. We are now waiting for the installation of the tracks in Ningbo before hosting a launch event.