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A Techne Conflux is an extended training, development, exhibition or performance programme which aims to enhance research or intellectual skills, or facilitate the sharing of expertise amongst doctoral students in the arts and humanities.
Credit: Jean-Paul Sartre, Gilles Deleuze, and Michel Foucault; picture by Elie Kagan.
Led by Dr Mike Rose (University of Surrey)
Critical research is defined as an approach skeptical of ‘problem-solving’ and the supposed social and political neutrality of knowledge construction and use of method. Alas, as the premise and thus research of critical approaches is intimately related to the question of method, the link to it is often hard to discern for PGR students.The matter is confounded by the current hegemony of ‘problem-solving’ and positivist discourse in UK Higher Education. The result is that students and academics alike have been unconsciously nudged into translating their work in terms inconsistent with their philosophical ethos and research method, and have likewise become ill-equipped to situate their work in relation to ‘problem-solving’; be that in the form of research proposals, funding bids, job applications, or a thesis/ thesis outline. This is making critical research vulnerable to charges of intellectual and methodological inanity. Critical approaches, however, are underpinned by a rigorous tradition of thought, offering necessary social, political and economic critiques, and challenges to research necessary to the epistemic and democratic advancement of academia. The Conflux ‘Philosophy and Critical Methods’ aims to address this lacuna in knowledge and researcher training, bringing together TECHNE students from across the disciplines to learn, adapt and develop the purpose of critical research and the multiplicity of methods employed therein, with the assistance of experienced practitioners and theorists.
Conflux website: https://technecriticalmethods.wordpress.com/
Led by Dr Danielle Sands (Royal Holloway)
The Conflux ‘How Like a Leaf’: Art, Nature and World will bring together TECHNE students from across the humanities to assess, adapt and develop interdisciplinary approaches to the relationships between art, nature and world, with the assistance of world-renowned practitioners and theorists. The phrase ‘how like a leaf’ is taken from the work of Donna Haraway, a thinker who is interested not only in the shared ‘molecular architecture’ of plants and animals, but also in the history of cross-species relations and the variety of tools and discourses with which we have addressed and represented these relations, as well as in the possibility of an aesthetics which bridges between human and nonhuman.
The Conflux aims:
The Conflux will consist of four themes: Encountering; Writing; Performing and Thinking. It is organised by: Danielle Sands (Royal Holloway), Nick Foxton (Kingston), Adeline Johns-Putra (Surrey), Lucy Mercer (Royal Holloway), Flora Parrott (Royal Holloway), Sara Upstone (Kingston), Daniel Whistler (Royal Holloway) and Libby Worth (Royal Holloway).
Led by Dr Donatella Barbieri (University of the Arts London)
The principal aim of this 6-month Conflux is to bring together PGR, academics and practitioners to investigate how ‘scenographics’ (Hann 2018) enact, speculate, or complicate orders of ‘world’. This overall aim breaks down into three key learning objectives for the PGR:
This line of enquiry builds upon the concept of ‘worlding’ first introduced by Heidegger and more recently refined by the anthropologist Kathleen Stewart. Worlding stresses the incessant processes that construct, re-constitute and affect how orders of world are experienced. Building on the critical frameworks that inform notions of ‘vital materialism’ (Bennett 2009) as well as ‘creative geographies’ (Hawkins 2014) and ‘affective atmospheres’ (Anderson 2011; Böhme 2013), this Conflux composes three expert workshops with invited scholars and practitioners that introduce and debate the key concepts through a combination of seminars, practical exercises and short lectures. These small group tasks and discussions will inform the curation and focus of an open symposium, which marks the end of the Conflux.
Conflux website: http://scenographics.rachelhann.com/
Led by Dr Kate Aughterson (University of Brighton)
Performance as Research (PAR) is an emergent research methodology which utilises and acknowledges the various modes of performance (voice, body, space, movement, language, sound, texture, shape, words) as illuminative and investigative modes of research. These workshops in the cultural hub that is Brighton will explore these modes of experience through a series of workshops by practitioners, performance historians and theorists in order to enable PhD students to develop their own performance as research, through detailed discussion and demonstration with participants over the fifteen months and with an opportunity to showcase final or work-in-progress at the Brighton Fringe (at a number of locations) in May 2020. The network established through the workshops and Open Space will provide participants with ongoing mentors for their work post PhD, and a network of creative and critical practitioners who can mutually support their future performative work and careers.
Whether you sign up for one of the Writing Days, or all four, the following questions may be tackled: what academic prose style is productive for my thesis? what is the relationship of this prose style to what I might publish? how to write about creative practice without cauterising it? how to relate art theory to art practice? how to write about my own creative practice? what different voices does my thesis require? what writing tips can I learn from leading voices across a variety of fields?
Led by Dr Deborah Madden (University of Brighton)
Conflux website: https://technearchiveconflux.wordpress.com/
Led by Dr Donna McCormack (University of Surrey)
This Conflux explores arts- and humanities-based research, methods and creative practices in the fields of health and medicine. It takes difference and anomalous bodies as its starting point to situate contemporary research, methods and practice in the growing field of monster studies and to address what monster theory may offer to our thinking on health, medicine and technology. The Conflux will give participants the opportunity to explore potentially new creative methods and practices, as well as more traditional analytical and critical approaches, with experts in health-based research and creative health practices. Finally, it will enhance knowledge of interdisciplinary collaborative research across the arts and humanities and medicine and health.
Led by Dr Eleanor Roberts (University of Roehampton)
This queer feminist Conflux series will galvanize and extend an established research culture of queer feminist scholarship and practice in the arts and humanities, through a series of events aimed at graduate students at Techne institutions. Each event will be focused on the reading of key contemporary queer feminist texts (‘texts’ here includes a number of possible forms including scholarly texts, artworks, and other materials) and workshops on politically urgent key topics with interdisciplinary relevance. The series will interrogate the key points of convergence and tension in contemporary queer, intersectional feminist and gender studies, decolonial critique, as well as theory and practice as interrelated. A diverse range of speakers will represent queer feminist work across a number of disciplinary areas including critical race theory, visual art and culture, theatre studies, performance studies, dance, philosophy, sociology, history, creative writing, and postcolonial theory. The series will be programmed on a decentering principle, including the vital work of scholars and practitioners of colour and ethnic minorities, spanning a range of geographic and formal spaces. In a queer feminist mode, it will provide a forum for in-depth engagement and exchange about the latest ideas, and conversations between established world-leading figures and early career research and practice.
Conflux website: https://queerfeministcurrents.wordpress.com
Led by Dr Eugene Michail (University of Brighton)
The “Voices at the Margins?” summer school offers PhD researchers space to engage critically with theoretical and methodological aspects of their own research that engages with memories, histories and voices ‘at the margins’. It will provide a constructive, reflective and supportive environment for discussions of theoretical and methodological challenges, issues and aspects of the individual research process that are often under-addressed in traditional academic settings. The summer school will be workshop-based and offers a rich opportunity for in-depth discussions about participants’ own research, as well as for an exploration of new state-of-the-art theoretical and methodological approaches in the field, based on participants’ own needs and interests. It will centre around the following four key components:
Over the past decade, a cross-disciplinary “memory boom” has accentuated the significance of memories of the past for the present and future. In this context, we aim to specifically explore memory processes related to memories that have been silenced, remain unheard or at the ‘margins’ of society, while also questioning how we define these ‘margins’, gathering PhD students from different disciplines.
Conflux website: https://voicesatmargins.wordpress.com/
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Led by Prof. Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco (University of Surrey)
Led by Prof. Rebecca Fortnum (Royal College of Art)
The Speaking of Her Conflux is a feminist research network that bring together artists, writers, curators, and scholars investigating women’s creative legacies. The network aims to retrieve the creative contributions made by women throughout history and in the contemporary moment via a series of events that emphasise the critical importance of feminist, arts-based methods of research. This network will generate discussion and ideas-exchange around the ways in which past and present voices can come into contact through creative forms of research, and why this is important now. The events aim to reanimate discourse around voice, experiment, form, and sexual difference that characterised earlier feminist work, by exploring and developing creative research methods from feminist perspectives, including four strands of exploration: auto/biographies, fabulation, re-enactment, and correspondence. These methodological strands are the means by which it becomes possible to ‘speak of her’: women artists and writers buried in archives, but not entirely erased, as well as women whose ‘work’ expands the meanings and manifestations of female creativity. In structuring our research events and activities according to method—rather than medium, genre, or discipline—we will develop a productive dialogue between theory and practice, shaping a newly emerging field of feminist inquiry that foregrounds the relations between art practice and art history.