Out of Practice Seminar
The creative and the critical are deeply imbricated in one another.
What happens when this artificial division is suspended – when creative imagining leads critical inquiry, and when affect and thought lead each other?
- Venue
- Room 243, Second Floor, Senate House, London
- Time
- Tuesday evenings
- Convenors
- Joseph Ford (ILCS), Robert Hampson (RHUL), Katja Hilevaara (Goldsmiths), Clare Lees (IES), Timothy Mathews (UCL), Mathelinda Nabugodi (UCL), Christopher Ohge (IES), Redell Olsen (RHUL), Emily Orley (Guildhall), and Gill Partington (IES).
Out of Practice – what comes out of thinking approached as a practice of expression and formulation? What disappears as we lose the practice of critical form in all its range, allow it to become instrumentalised, abstract it from its creative impetus and disciplinary interactions, its familiarity with the range of critical forms and privilege?
The Out of Practice Seminar is hosted at the University of London, School of Advanced Study’s Institute for English Studies (IES), and its Institute of Languages, Cultures and Societies (ILCS). It was founded in 2023 by a group of creative-critical researchers from across the University of London, and aims to build on the School’s ambition to establish a forum for experimental approaches to Humanities research, including practice and the practice-led. Drawing inspiration from practitioners past and present including bell hooks, Roland Barthes, Edouard Glissant, Hélène Cixous, Saidiya Hartman, Walter Benjamin, Jane Rendell, Lydia Davis, Gertrude Stein, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, Maggie Nelson, Claudia Rankine, Juliana Spahr, Maria Fosco, the seminar hopes to build a forum for interaction across other groups working in a variety of creative-critical modes. The organisers welcome proposals for papers, performances or workshops from creative-critical writers and practitioners, translators, scholars, editors, performance artists and writers, and creative activists at any stage in their career or creative critical journey.
As part of the 2023/24 cycle of seminars, live illustrator Beatrice Baumgartner-Cohen created the above live graphic recording of the session led by Clare Lees and Emily Orley.
If you have any questions, please contact joseph.ford@sas.ac.uk.
The group also runs a mailing list, click here to join.
