Reading, experimentally (2020)

We read about irony and ambivalence, about humor and mountains with agency, about mushrooms, capitalism, organisations, cosmologies and we read about writing as gesture of the body, as unknowned areas and forms of knowledge. (Victoria)

One piece got under the part of my skin that had thought I’d welcome all experimentation. It provoked me to become aware of the limits of my own ambition and even more viscerally conscious of my own anxiety about how, or whether, to police the boundary of what makes writing legitimately academic. (Helen)

Metaphors and memes, ambivalence and cosmologies - reading and writing texts that use and interact with these methods and ways of being and knowing have inspired reams of writing - some usable, some not - but always enjoyable and eye opening. [Arran]

We have read snippets which have powerfully evoked the following/ brought the following images or scenes into mattering (Laura):

1 wedding dress (Church 2007)
1 frog dissolving into scum (Kathleen Stewart, 2016, 33)
1 journey taken by two colleagues (Benjamin Jenner, 2020, no pagination)
1 ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (Whitney Phillips and Ryan M Miller, 2017, front cover) [Arran]
1 car bumper sticker (Sedgwick, 1997, 4)