Please join the Adventures in Posthumanism Network for their research seminars which are open to all. The seminars will be delivered online via Zoom (all times are GMT).
Wednesday 26 March, 13:00–14:30 | Thinking artfully with matter: A posthuman enquiry of the pedagogical value of sketchbooking
Speaker: Dr Melanie Potier
Abstract
Becoming attentive to art practices in terms of what they can do rather than what they are, my thesis generates a more uncertain and artful engagement with how sketch-booking processes engender a more response-able relationship with the world. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought, this exemplification of the speculative potential of force and form, emerges as a powerful resistance to the constraints of the neoliberal education system. Practising art as immanent doing, Erin Manning’s theory of incipient movement works to develop concepts, such as research-creation, event-time, artfulness and thought in motion, which find expression through the mundanities and ordinary occurrence of the everyday. By refusing to engage in the fixities and constraints of formal pedagogical practices, prescribed by the systemic mechanism of institutional bodies, the process of sketchbooking offers engagement with education research and pedagogy, to reimagining who and what can be valued in Secondary and Further Education; suggesting how practicing art artfully can trouble and challenge the colonial structure that continue to marginalise and exclude. In order to avoid the formalising structure of writing with chapters, the writing instead pleats together a processual web of real people, fictional characters, unutterable discourses, as well as ordinary objects of the everyday, that educate and teach us what a collective sensing of learning might look and feel like. A learning, not confined or reduced to curricular outcomes, but learning which seeks to enliven new modes of activity, blurring the lines between thinking and doing, and thereby, offering potential that resists the dominate value systems imposed by formal education.
Becoming attentive to art practices in terms of what they can do rather than what they are, my thesis generates a more uncertain and artful engagement with how sketch-booking processes engender a more response-able relationship with the world. Exploring the relation between sensation and thought, this exemplification of the speculative potential of force and form, emerges as a powerful resistance to the constraints of the neoliberal education system. Practising art as immanent doing, Erin Manning’s theory of incipient movement works to develop concepts, such as research-creation, event-time, artfulness and thought in motion, which find expression through the mundanities and ordinary occurrence of the everyday. By refusing to engage in the fixities and constraints of formal pedagogical practices, prescribed by the systemic mechanism of institutional bodies, the process of sketchbooking offers engagement with education research and pedagogy, to reimagining who and what can be valued in Secondary and Further Education; suggesting how practicing art artfully can trouble and challenge the colonial structure that continue to marginalise and exclude. In order to avoid the formalising structure of writing with chapters, the writing instead pleats together a processual web of real people, fictional characters, unutterable discourses, as well as ordinary objects of the everyday, that educate and teach us what a collective sensing of learning might look and feel like. A learning, not confined or reduced to curricular outcomes, but learning which seeks to enliven new modes of activity, blurring the lines between thinking and doing, and thereby, offering potential that resists the dominate value systems imposed by formal education.
Biography
Melanie worked in the performing arts before taking her present, pedagogical role in Further Education. Melanie has recently completed her PhD in Education at the University of Plymouth. Her thesis explores the potentiality of sketchbooking as a proposition to engage in the ‘not-yet-known’ and as a practice to engender other ways of living and learning that embody and exemplify an artful engagement with research-creation. She is currently completing a new book project on art and writing that pays close attention to how neurodiverse modes of thinking can be recognised, honoured and put to work.
Melanie worked in the performing arts before taking her present, pedagogical role in Further Education. Melanie has recently completed her PhD in Education at the University of Plymouth. Her thesis explores the potentiality of sketchbooking as a proposition to engage in the ‘not-yet-known’ and as a practice to engender other ways of living and learning that embody and exemplify an artful engagement with research-creation. She is currently completing a new book project on art and writing that pays close attention to how neurodiverse modes of thinking can be recognised, honoured and put to work.
Zoom link: https://plymouth.zoom.us/j/91717780430
Wednesday 4 June, 13:00–14:30 | Writing Sensation: Sense, Events and Encounters with Creative-Relational Inquiry
Speaker: Andrew Mark Gillott, University of Stirling and Leeds Beckett University
Abstract
How do we convey felt, intimate encounters between people, shared objects, spaces and atmospheres? How do we inquire of moments that make themselves felt with the sparest of signs, in flashing glances and gestures; the felt feeling of relations in which unfamiliar forms take shape? Just how might we set about writing sensation?
How do we convey felt, intimate encounters between people, shared objects, spaces and atmospheres? How do we inquire of moments that make themselves felt with the sparest of signs, in flashing glances and gestures; the felt feeling of relations in which unfamiliar forms take shape? Just how might we set about writing sensation?
Andrew takes on these questions with creativity, speculation and invention. His book illuminates the ‘creative-relational’ as a poietic and transversal concept of an inquiry capable of attending to the way events throw themselves together, and how forms take shape in the interplay of difference. Engaging with postfoundational and postqualitative approaches to inquiry, Writing Sensation offers readers both engaging, creative and affirmative readings of scholars such as Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, Erin Manning and Brian Massumi, and enactments of how one may write the immanent moment of emergent circumstances.
Biography
Andrew is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Health Sciences & Sport at the University of Stirling and Visiting Fellow in the Carnegie School of Sport, Leeds Beckett University. He is particularly interested in collaborative, transdisciplinary and postfoundational modes of inquiry that offer ways of probing a sense of what is happening as it makes itself felt.
Andrew is Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Health Sciences & Sport at the University of Stirling and Visiting Fellow in the Carnegie School of Sport, Leeds Beckett University. He is particularly interested in collaborative, transdisciplinary and postfoundational modes of inquiry that offer ways of probing a sense of what is happening as it makes itself felt.
We very much hope you can join us for this event to be chaired by Dr Mary Garland and Dr Ken Gale.
Zoom link: https://plymouth.zoom.us/j/98621692083?pwd=cG3Hm4MoQJCvgDcDPZPAcifTbXeNGA.1
Meeting ID: 986 2169 2083 / Passcode: 652767
Meeting ID: 986 2169 2083 / Passcode: 652767