Ahead of Stafford half marathon Lecturer Keith Burnett looks at the use of sports massage to enhance your performance.

Keith Burnett MSc, PGCHE, FHEA, MSST is a Lecturer in Sport and Exercise Therapy at the University of Wolverhampton.

Ahead of the half marathon Keith will look at the use of sports massage to enhance athletic performance as well as discussing the ways sports students will be helping you on the day.

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Dr Darren Daly looks at the importance of drama in the community.

This lecture will examine the use of theatre to engage with and reveal local history. It will identify some of the main principles and theatrical forms for communicating history through performance and illustrate how they can reveal hidden histories and narratives. The lecture will use examples from the University of Wolverhampton’s partnership work with the Black Country Living Museum and Black Country Studies Centre, and a recent project called Hush Now by Feral Productions which investigated the historic Mother and Baby Homes located in the Black Country and the surrounding areas.

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Audiences now, are finding new methods of engaging with the musical and fandoms are beginning to establish a visible online presence and in turn, a shift in paratexts are created. Using social media to cultivate relationships, communities and fandoms, this particular generation are responding to the musical in new and innovative ways. Fan created paratexts are becoming a more popular as fans become more intent on establishing connections to the production. Younger audiences, and their tendency to engage with these interactions has allowed them to become the most active audiences on social media, whom are both critically engaged and creative. The access to online, interactive platforms such as Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube bring new opportunities for paratextual creations.

Examples of this ‘next stage of engagement’ can be seen through the production Dear Evan Hansen (2015), which is now pushing the limits of social media and successfully utilising Dolan’s utopian performatives to draw in audiences and engage its fandom, or as they have self-coined themselves, the ‘Dear Evan Fansens’. The fandom are using these paratexts in establishing one-to-one connections with its fans, allowing the fan created material to ‘speak back’ to the performance moment itself and it is this which validates a transactional relationship between fan and production. This work ultimately sets out the fandom’s desire to ‘be found’.

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Paula Satne is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy in the Faculty of Art at the University of Wolverhampton.

With a main area of research in ethics, Paula is particularly interested in both theoretical and applied issues related to human evil, the ethics of forgiveness and, more recently, the ethics of memory, including related themes in political philosophy (i.e. political forgiveness, commemoration, punishment and conflict resolution).

Paula has a longstanding interest in the history of ethics (i.e. Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant) and the intersection of ethics with philosophy of mind (i.e. moral psychology, motivation, practical rationality and the emotions) and with aesthetics (i.e. political and moral engagement in art).

In various recent articles, Paula has been developing a Kantian approach to forgiveness, exploring the relationship between forgiveness, moral development, justice and self-respect. Beyond Kant, research in this area is informed by the experience of conflict in Argentina where I reflect philosophically on the Argentine victims’ refusal to forgive and forget, drawing from contemporary literature in philosophy and other disciplines (history, psychology and anthropology).

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