This paper makes particular reference to the University of the Highlands and Islands and asks: Does the geographical distribution of the university offer us new ways of thinking ‘university’? The relation between power/knowledge and university structures is explored, as is the notion that university can be thought of as action rather than institution, and the significance of the porous or leaky university which plays out with institutional space is also considered. These ideas are investigated through reference to innovative developments in education from the 1980s to the present. The key projects to which the paper refers are the state institution of the Collège International de Philosophie in France (1984), the self-institution of the Copenhagen Free University in Denmark (2001–2007), and the current European multi-institutional Academy project. These projects provide a series of formulations of university through which the distributed institution is critically examined. Of central importance is the emergence of the notion of the transversity, a mode of thinking, and practising, university as translocational, interstitial and discursive. Drawing on experiences of distance delivery of studio based education in fine art, the impact of the distributed university on learning is explored. Further lines of enquiry are suggested which will aim, in future work, to take cognisance of the technological imaginary which may be at play. This will also lead to future research into the question: How do we mobilise the radically leaky university in order to enmesh knowledge and life in the Highlands and Islands?
This paper conceptualises practice in the space between and beyond Art & Archaeology as a zone where disciplinary certainties and known practices are unsettled, expanded and recast. We will outline our current thinking about heritage landscapes as places and temporalities for engagement in the practice of what Henk Slager calls the para-archive. For us, landscape functions as a kind of living archive, however, following Jacques Derrida, we are sceptical of the privileged relation between archive, law and authority. Therefore, in this paper we will think through our interdisciplinary research in the context of the development of creative para-archives, which facilitate new, affective ways of thinking and making by bringing together the previously unimagined. Responding to the challenge of the SARS-CoV-2 discomfort zone, we seek to surface creative practices, activate archival disruptions and expand pedagogical approaches to the articulation of uncomfortable archival landscapes. The pandemic has brought into sharp focus the need to re-conceptualise visions of space, experiences of place and archival practices. During a virtual fieldtrip students accessed a range of materials from Scotland's National Record of the Historic Environment. We aimed to enable the co-design and co-production of a virtual fieldtrip, followed by discussions about our collective conceptualisations of landscapes of discomfort. The archaeological fieldwork in the virtual realm provides a context for students to engage in desirology as a catalyst for deranging, re-associating and re-imagining the archive in creative ways.
This article will demonstrate that practice‐led photographic research offers an example of dialogical encounter. Through recourse to an outline of my own practice and the experience of completing a practice‐led doctoral thesis, the article will account for photographic practice and interdisciplinary research in terms of dialogism. This will demonstrate that visual research is a productive nexus: it does not simply concern itself with the products of creative practice, but is a generative space itself. The article will also discuss interdisciplinarity from a personal perspective on practice‐led research, which, over time, has developed into an interdisciplinary mode of working. The radical notion of the dialogical self will be considered with specific reference to interdisciplinarity and practice‐led research. The dialogical encounter will also be considered in relation to transformative learning encounters and what is at play in learning through practice, an encounter which places its protagonists at risk. However, far from being a negative state of affairs, this interstitial space in which the researcher/learner/teacher is lost and found is in fact a highly productive place in which to be.
I am engaged in a practice led thesis, which has been challenged and shaped by thinkers in the fields of critical theory and philosophy. Although I work in dialogue with these theorists, I am principally a visual practitioner who is most at home with traditional, wet process photography.I began with a general concern regarding my own resistance to landscape photography as the depiction of the view, which has led me to question the persistence of the (illusion of) the unified photographic moment. My visual process, which began quite simply as a reaction against the pervasiveness of the view in photography, has, in dialogue with writers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Jacques Derrida and Rosalind Krauss, enabled me to theorise my own photographic practice as a form of writing. Central to this has been the investigation of different theoretical configurations of the semiotic sign.I contend that Rosalind Krauss’ conception of Surrealist photography as a practice of écriture, in fact accounts for photographic practice more broadly speaking. The spacing of the photographic sign, which Krauss describes as an ‘invagination of presence,’ defers the confluence of the signified and the signifier thus rupturing the illusion of presence in the photographic moment: the shutter differences the image from the world and the practice of photography reconfigures the world as a form of writing. However, not simply in the sense of a surface inscribed by light, but writing as a space in which the possibility for meaning is realised.
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