Talking Research July

Talking Research is student-led initiative aimed at creating a relaxed social space for PGRs from across the university to socialise, share their research and gain an appreciation for different research projects through short, informal talks.

We have developed into a growing community of PGRs ranging from Masters students to final year PhD candidates, so if you are new to research, Swansea or all of the above, Talking Research provides a relaxed environment to engage with other PGRs.

The event starts at 17:00, with the first talk starting around 17:30. Each talk is around 10 / 20 minutes. Theres plenty of time before, after and between talks to chat to other PGR students.

Note, if all the tickets for this event sell out feel free to still come along!

This time we have two excellent talks:

Shaun Laing- How to Build a Tractor Beam: An Introduction to Levitated Optomechanics

• Light carries momentum, and so, when something small deflects it, there is recoil. From solar sails to laser tweezers, this is Newton's third law applied to light. Using light in this way to control nanoscale motion is known as optomechanics, and applies the tools of light creation and manipulation to this new mechanical frontier. Using light to manipulate small objects allows us to separate this motion from the environment like never before, opening the opportunity to explore physics from quantum mechanics and micro-forces to observations of gravitational waves.

Clara Sky Madge- Cellotaped Snapshots: Time and the Problem of Narrative

• Events in time and space are not stories. Things happen in essentially random ways, with no particular design (much as we might try for an effect) and humans move through their lives with little to no attachment to clock time. Rather, time is felt variably from moment to moment. And yet, when we are asked about past, present and future events, we tell stories; imposing narrative structures to the non narrative realities we live through. My research seeks to create a novel with no particular sequence: a series of random events, encountered randomly and in no particular order, and then survey readers about what narratives they found in the text. Since the text carries no narrative per se, any narrative they outline will be their own, derived from the text and devised as part of the reader's process of moving through the text. In exploring the reader's process of atomising, reconstructing and responding to the text I hope to reveal more about the process of narrative, and by extension our experience of time and space.

Survey site for Clara's work: https://slippedseemings.com/

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Hayes & Beale, 96 Brynymor Road, Swansea, United Kingdom