Tag: presentations

Slides for the Holy Grail Guitar Show

I was due to be in Berlin this weekend, attending the European Guitar Builders symposium and giving a talk at the Holy Grail Guitar Show. Of course, it was cancelled due to Covid-19, but quickly turned into the Holy Couch Guitar Show!

“How do luthiers learn their craft?

All of the luthiers at the Holy Grail Guitar Show had to learn to make their first guitar but what are the sources of guitar-making knowledge and how are the practical skills learned? For the last two years, Joss has been researching how guitar-makers learn and teach their craft. At the HGSS, he will discuss the results of a survey of guitar-makers from across Europe, focusing on their education, training and experience. He will also talk about what he has found from interviews with over 30 guitar-makers and his on-going study of guitar-making at Newark College, UK. In doing so, he will refer to the efforts of amateurs and DIY culture in the 1950s, the later development of college courses, and the professionalisation of guitar-making since the 1970s.” 

Here’s a one minute video for social media, where I introduced myself and the ‘talk’.

Embedded below is my ‘talk’ for the HGGS, heavily annotated in the notes section of each slide (Download the Slides or a PDF version which is easier to read).

It’s an expanded version of presentations I’ve given before, this time incorporating more from an article that will be published later this year on the role of amateurs and autodidacts in the first decade of classical guitar making in the UK.

It also includes new survey data from March 2020. I issued a modified version of my original survey to EGB members and other makers outside the UK. The new data suggests my original data for classical guitar makers in the UK is fairly representative for guitar makers in general and now I’m writing up the surveys for publication.

If you have any questions, comments, want to talk about the research or participate in some way, please do get in touch. It would have been great to meet and talk with people in Berlin.

Email: jwinn@lincoln.ac.uk

Instagram: @josslwinn

Twitter: @josswinn

How can universities be transformed so that they center on public goods in teaching, research, and community engagement?

Mike Neary and I will be speaking in June as part of a theme on ‘How can universities be transformed…’ at the UNIKE conference in Copenhagen. We will be discussing our recent research project on co-operative higher education and contributing to the overall  discussion on the public and community purposes of universities. Below is the overall conference strand description. 

Within higher education, values such as democracy, solidarity, public good and community benefit are increasingly overshadowed by systems of management based on Taylorism and hierarchical control. The session explores these trends and draws on participants’ practical experiences, lessons learnt, and best practices to suggest alternative organizational forms. The session aims to use these experiences to promote both discussion and first steps in developing an audit tool to use to evaluate universities and hold them accountable for their promotion of public goods. Finally, participants will identify some alternative pathways to address the decline of public goods in universities: reform of existing institutions, creation of new institutions, etc.

The group will organise a workshop in which participants will brainstorm the principles, issues, approaches (democracy, social justice, pedagogy, ownership, financing, governance) in groups to address the identified problems, moving forward.

Conference programme (PDF)