Sophie Durbin, a UHI Archaeology Institute PhD student, has published an article in a special edition of Different Visions, which puts forward a novel approach to Orkney’s Norse and Neolithic archaeology through the lens of post-modern performance.
Different Visions is an open-access journal devoted to progressive scholarship on medieval art. This special issue addresses the methodological unity between sensory experience, reader response, and performance studies through the paradigm of “social sculpture,” a term introduced by Joseph Beuys in the late 1960s.
The essays in the issue offer a paradigm to rethink approaches to medieval materials, documents, and objects by reframing these extant materials as only one actor within the greater collage of embodied participation that shaped medieval religious, political, and social communities.
You can access her article here: Choreographing Around Earth and Stone: The Prehistoric/Medieval Dynamic in Orkney, Scotland – Different Visions
Sophie is an interdisciplinary researcher and a graduate of the MA Contemporary Art and Archaeology (graduating with distinction in 2024). She started her PhD, entitled Burial Assemblages of Early Medieval Orkney: Approaches for Remote Audience Engagement in October 2025 and is supervised by Dr Antonia Thomas (UHI Archaeology Institute, Director of Studies), Dr Sarah Jane Gibbon (UHI Archaeology Institute), Professor Ingrid Mainland (UHI Archaeology Institute) and Dr Siobhan Cooke-Miller (Orkney Museum).
