Dr. Julia Winckler's research sits across multiple strands:
Visual Culture, Photographic Archives
Memory, Migration, Contested Topographies, Exile Studies
Reactivating Archives through Artistic Interventions
Photography and Critical Pedagogy
She is the co-research lead, with Dr. Uschi Klein, for the Visual Culture, History and Memory strand at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories.
https://blogs.brighton.ac.uk/cmnh/our-activities/our-academic-themes/visual-culture-history-and-memory/
She is also a member of CMNH's and the Centre of Resilience for Social Justice' steering groups.
Julia Winckler's research investigates archival traces within the context of collective memory and migration narratives and explores how neglected archival sources have the potential to reveal forgotten histories that can alter our understanding of the past and present. Through the use of creative and interpretive visual approaches, using photography as a tool to think about historical experience, multiple articulations of memory and meaning are expressed, with the aim of generating new academic knowledge.
The author Ben Okri has described 'the artist [as] a conduit through which lost things are recovered' (2005); and Winckler's research methodology considers archival research as a material, embodied practice. Through extensive investigation in archival collections, material is gathered and a strategy is mapped out. For her research projects, Winckler usually travels to the sites that hold cultural and historical significance.
Through reactivation and visualisation, using photography as the key medium, past memories are reframed and resituated in the present. Combining an archaeological with a genealogical approach, traces are documented; their significance to the present assessed, as some of the historical functions are lost or no longer important. The genealogical approach necessitates an investigation that starts in the present, a retracing of the journey, that is physical and experimental, setting up encounters and dialogues.
Lost and recovered narratives have been a key theme of Winckler's work to date. Memory and migration narratives of emigration (Two Sisters), exile and loss (Traces), exploration (Retracing Heinrich Barth), displacement (Leaving Atlantis), expedition/peregrination (My Canadian Pilgrimage) and interwar home-making (Fabricating Lureland) have been visualized and probed using the language of photography. These projects have been disseminated through public exhibitions, at conferences, exhibition catalogue publications and public engagement workshops, as well as informing Winckler's teaching practice.
Over the past twenty years, Winckler has undertaken extensive work with and within communities in Hong Kong, West Africa, Canada and the UK to enable broader access to personal cultural heritage amongst disadvantaged areas and demographics. She has sought to improve inclusivity of knowledge production and to reanimate disconnected or underdeveloped narratives and histories. Oscillating between photographic and archival research, photography is mobilized to reconstruct collective memories and give them a renewed cultural presence.