Keynote for the Ethics in Arts, Design and Media Education, 12 December 2018, Central St Martins, UAL.
http://events.arts.ac.uk/event/2018/12/12/UAL-Teaching-Platform-Ethics-in-Arts-Design-and-Media-Education/
ETHICS
– Home-Work Displacements
Early this year, around the time of the UCU pensions strike, I gave two keynotes, one at Rebuilding Architecture, the University of Yale in January 2018 and the other via skype, as I had to be on the picket line, at Critical Practice, University of Arizona, in February 2018. Both these talks engaged with my work on ethics, in connection to the London housing crisis, on the one hand, and fossil fuel divestment, on the other. The strike brought to my attention a new discipline ‘critical university studies’ which feels like a perfect home for this research, which is a form of constructive institutional critique, where speech acts perform as modes of critical spatial practice, documented in the form of site-writings.
https://www.architecture.yale.edu/calendar/73-rebuilding-architecture
– Ethics as Critical Spatial Practice
This week I am delighted to report that my work on ethics, along with colleagues at the Bartlett, such as Professor Mike Raco, Dr Claire Colomb, Michelle Shipworth, Dr Michael Walls, Dr Kerstin Sailer, Dr Martin Austwick, and Dr Efrosyni Konstantinou and others, has been recognised with a UCL Education Award. That our work has received this honour is in no small part due to the support of Bartlett Dean, Professor Alan Penn, and extraordinary labours of Dr David Roberts, the Bartlett’s Ethics Fellow, who had submitted this nomination (without my knowledge!).
‘Jane has been awarded for her long-term work on ethics in built environment teaching, research and professional practice and her department believes she is a real star! Jane’s pioneering ethical inquiry inspires reflexive, supportive, creative education of the future built environment practitioners and it is precisely this sort of unsung, but vital work that merits recognition with a UCL Education Award.’
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/teaching-learning/news/2018/jun/achievements-ucl-teaching-and-learning-recognised-education-awards
– Redefining the Social in Architecture
I will be giving a condensed version of my work on ethics, as Home-Work Displacements, as an invited speaker at Redefining the Social In Architecture, CHASE PHD Programme, ICA London, (June 2018).
https://www.ica.art/on/learning/symposium-redefining-social-architecture
SITE–WRITING
– Coming to Terms
On a recent fieldtrip to Berlin, with MA Situated Practices students, and course director, artist-architect James O’Leary, I gave a short talk called Coming to Terms, at the amazing installation Floating University, Berlin, for a series of discussions on hot-terms, connected to site-specificity, and to lexicons, hosted by Gilly Karjefsky.
https://www.facebook.com/events/358254964685176/
– L’avant coup and l’apres coup
Performance practitioners, Emily Orley and Katja Hilavaara, generously asked me to write an opening and closing to their brilliant new collection of creative critical and critical creative writings; Emily Orley and Katja Hilavaara (eds) The Creative Critic (Routledge, 2018).
In ‘Foreword: L’avant coup’ and ‘Afterword: l’apres coup’, I look back to an event I curated -writing, which brought together geographers, architects, artists, critics and writers to consider the implications of hyphenating their writing practice. This was the final event in the Architecture & series I had convened as Director of Architecture Research at the Bartlett School of Architecture from 2004-2011. I looked back on this event through the psychic lens offered by ‘l’apres coup’, and the complementary experience that André Green has named ‘l’avant coup’.
This book will launch at Critical Creative Writing, University of Newcastle, at 6pm on Wed 27 June 2018.
https://creativecriticalwriting.wordpress.com
– Practices of Care: ‘site-writing’ and its curation.
My colleague artist Dr Polly Gould, who is a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Newcastle Architecture School, and alumni of my site-writing module at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL – Joe Crowdy, Joanne Preston, Rachel Siobhan Tyler and Lili Zarzycki, and I will present Practices of Care: ‘site-writing’ and its curation.
This workshop will focus on methods of ‘site-writing’ and practices of care, and, more specifically, curation. During this workshop I will introduce concepts and methods developed out of my site-writing practice, and published in Site-Writing: The Architecture of Art Criticism. Polly Gould will present ideas around curation as a practice of care, and curation of writing. Joe Crowdy, Joanne Preston, Rachel Siobhan Tyler, and Lili Zarzycki will perform, from a considered curation, their ‘site-writing’ projects, developed as part of Critical Spatial Practices: Site-Writing module, part of the MA Architectural History, and MA Situated Practice, at The Bartlett, UCL.
Whether interdisciplinary, creative-critical, autobiographical, or otherwise eccentric to the academy, these works were developed in the relational space of the site-writing seminar/workshop. Despite the dynamics of care shared in such a space, the writing nevertheless constitutes a vulnerability, or fragility.
This will provide a foundation for the second part of the workshop, which is devoted to a shared discussion of work-in-progress by its participants. Participants will also have the option of presenting their work to the group.
https://creativecriticalwriting.wordpress.com/creative-critical-writing-workshop-2018/
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/architecture/programmes/postgraduate/ma-situated-practice
HOUSING
– To unsettle: art as a reflexive verb?
Curators, Charlotte Day, Shelley McSpedden & Elise Routledge, invited me to contribute an essay for a fantastic exhibition of artworks by artists such as Jasmina Cibic, Forensic Architecture, Jill Magid and others at the Monash Art Gallery, Melbourne, Australia, 2018. I wrote the essay for Unsettlement at a time when the Windrush scandal was unfolding in the press in the contest of the UK’s ‘hostile environment’. The essay reflects on the ethics and aesthetics of acts of settlement and unsettlement: ‘To unsettle: art as a reflexive verb?’
https://www.monash.edu/muma/exhibitions/exhibition-archive/2018/Unsettlement
– May Mo(u)rn
May Mo(u)rn has been published in Chinese in a wonderful of writing and photographic works, Art and Waste, edited by Rupert Griffiths and Xinwei Zhu
http://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/0tGsUECybxqe9R4AsKovTw
– review of Anna Minton’s Big Capital.
I’ve recently written a review of Anna Minton’s Big Capital (Penguin, 2017), a book I feel tells the story of London’s Housing crisis in the most visceral way possible, Anna’s mixes empirical research with encounters with people involved in the crisis from property speculators to displaced residents. See the April 2018 edition of Architecture Research Quarterly.
https://www.annaminton.com
FEMINISM
– A Feminist Approach to Critical Spatial Practice
With Despina Stratigakos, I was invited to contribute to a fascinating debate on Architecture and Feminism, curated by Chloe Loh, at University College Dublin, where led by Chloe students from across the Architecture programme have been responding to feminist texts by artworks of their own.
One of the texts they were asked to respond to was my own, ‘Only Resist: A Feminist Approach to Critical Spatial Practice’, recently published in The Architects Journal, and a reworking of earlier ideas in an essay I contributed to Lori Brown’s Feminist Practices (London: Ashgate, 2012)
https://www.architectural-review.com/essays/only-resist-a-feminist-approach-to-critical-spatial-practice/10028246.article
– Feminist Architecture: From A to Z
And a new short piece Feminist Architecture: From A to Z is on line at Edwin Heathcote’s collection of writings in and around design here
https://www.readingdesign.org/feminist-architecture-a-z
PSYCHOANALYSIS
– The Transitional Space of the Setting
One of the first places I started thinking about the relation of architecture and psychoanalysis through the transitional space of the setting, and as such a precursor to my new book, The Architecture of Pychoanalysis, is ‘Art’s Use of Architecture: Place, Site, and Setting’. This was originally written for Psycho Buildings, curated by Ralph Rugoff in 2008, and has just been republished in a beautiful collection of essays, Fifty Years of Great Art Writing, marking the 50th anniversary of the Hayward Gallery.
https://www.southbankcentre.co.uk/blog/fifty-years-great-art-writing-hayward-gallery
https://www.ibtauris.com/books/the%20arts/architecture/the%20architecture%20of%20psychoanalysis%20spaces%20of%20transition
And I am also excited to be responding to an exquisite new publication by esteemed psychoanalyst Nathan Kravis. His new book, On the Couch: A Repressed History of the Analytic Couch from Plato to Freud, just published by MIT Press, will launch at UCL’s Institute of Advanced Studies at 6pm on 22 June.
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/ias-events/ias-book-launch-on-the-couch
– L’avant coup’ and l’apres coup
Performance practitioners, Emily Orley and Katja Hilavaara, generously asked me to write an opening and closing to their brilliant new collection of creative critical and critical creative writings; Emily Orley and Katja Hilavaara (eds) The Creative Critic (Routledge, 2018).
In ‘Foreword: L’avant coup’ and ‘Afterword: l’apres coup’, I look back to an event I curated -writing, which brought together geographers, architects, artists, critics and writers to consider the implications of hyphenating their writing practice. This was the final event in the Architecture & series I had convened as Director of Architecture Research at the Bartlett School of Architecture from 2004-2011. I looked back on this event through the psychic lens offered by ‘l’apres coup’, and the complementary experience that André Green has named ‘l’avant coup’.
This book will launch at Critical Creative Writing, University of Newcastle, at 6pm on Wed 27 June 2018.
https://creativecriticalwriting.wordpress.com
Forthcoming Publications
‘Condensing and Displacing: A Stratford Dream-Work’, Alberto Dumas and Anna Minton (eds) Regeneration Songs, (London: Revolver Press, forthcoming 2018).
‘Figures of Speech: before and after Writing’, Jonathan Charley (ed) Writing and Architecture (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2018).
‘Configuring Critique’, Chris Brisbin and Myra Thiessen (eds), The Routledge Companion to Criticality in Art, Architecture, and Design (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2018).
‘Activating Home and Work’, Sandra Loschke (ed.), Rethinking Architectural Production: Between Experience, Action and Critique, (London: Routledge, forthcoming 2018).
Daily newsletters:
The Strike Chronicle Day 1
The Strike Chronicle Day 2
The Strike Chronicle Day 3
The Strike Chronicle Day 4
The Strike Chronicle Day 5
The Strike Chronicle Day 6
The Strike Chronicle Day 7
The Strike Chronicle Day 8
The Strike Chronicle Day 9
The Strike Chronicle Day 10
The Strike Chronicle Day 11
The Strike Chronicle Day 12
The Strike Chronicle Day 13
This is a schedule of some forthcoming events around the UCU Pension Strike at UCL and the Bartlett.
For more details see
https://www.ucu.org.uk
http://www.ucl.ac.uk/ucu
And for the Bartlett School of Architecture
https://www.s-t-r-i-k-e.org
Mon 26 Feb
9am-12: outside 22 Gordon Street
strike-writing & sign-making
Join us to write and read words from strikes and picket lines past, present and future. Bring your favorite quotes and poems and songs to read aloud, and writing implements to pen and tweet your own strike-writing.
This will run in parallel with a sign-making session.
12:30pm
UCL UCU: Demonstration, Tavistock Square
Followed at 2pm a teach-out, organised by UCL History (Paul Mason, Catherine Hall and others)
the Building Centre in Store Street
Tue 27 Feb
10am-12: 22 Gordon Street
hedge schools and other forms of transformative pedagogy.
Join us to talk radical pedagogy, civic education and teaching to transgress!
1-3pm: Tuesday 27 Feb, UCL UCU, 52 Gower St.
David Graeber will be teaching-out followed by discussion.
David is author of Debt: The First 5000 Years (2011); The Democracy Project (2013); The Utopia of Rules (2015); and the eagerly awaited: Bullshit Jobs, A Theory.
Wed 28 Feb
9am-12: 22 Gordon Street
crit-out
BREAK//LINE will present their the union banner and manifesto, and talk about developing critiquing the trespass of capital into practice and pedagogy.
We are keen to reach out to design staff and students. So anyone with a project relating to the themes of the strike – inequality, precarity, debt, intergenerational equity, …. P
Please come along to a crit which will take place inside at the front of the foyer and on the street.
Current PhD students will talk from the street about themes civic pedagogy, participatory and performative practice relating to their research located inside the building in the PhD show.
Take up a position wherever you feel comfortable.
12 noon:
March for Education: Back Pension & Pay Strikes
Assemble Malet St, London WC1E 7HY.
uculondonregion.wordpress.com
Thur 1 March (a non-strike day)
IAS Talking Points seminar with Professor Mary Rawlinson (Stony Brook University) will be speaking on ‘Intergenerational Generativity – Toward a Feminist Ethics of Life.’
6-8pm in the IAS Common Ground; for more information see http://www.ucl.ac.uk/institute-of-advanced-studies/ias-events/ias-talking-points-intergenerational-generativity-toward-a-feminist-ethics-of-life
Events coming up
Monday 5th March 2018
From 07:30 – picketing at the Quad entrance on Gower Street. The forecast is for warmer weather next week but it will be very cold in the mornings so please wrap-up warm.
8:30 – 9:30 – a delegation will go to lobby the UCU / UUK talks facilitated by ACAS at RIBA HQ, 66 Portland Place.
12:00 – 13:30 strike meeting at Congress Centre, 28 Great Russell Street , London WC1B 3LS
Tuesday 6th March 2018
From 07:30 – picketing at the Quad entrance on Gower Street. The forecast is for warmer weather next week but it will be very cold in the mornings so please wrap-up warm.
11:00 – 12:00 Teach Out by UCL Laws on Blacklisting at 11am-12pm at the 52 Club, 52 Gower Street. All UCL UCU members and UCL students welcome.
12:00 – 13:00 strike meeting, 52 Club, 52 Gower Street
13:00 – 13:50 Teach Out with Tariq Ali, 52 Club, 52 Gower Street. All UCL UCU members and UCL students welcome.
Wednesday 7th March 2018
From 07:30 – picketing at the Quad entrance on Gower Street. The forecast is for warmer weather next week but it will be very cold in the mornings so please wrap-up warm.
12:00 – 13:00 strike meeting, 52 Club, 52 Gower Street
13:00 – 14:50 Teach Out Caring for the City (Mike Edwards convening). Convened by Just Space, this session will have presentations and discussion on participation in planning, housing, food security, environment, as part of a new radical London Plan. ucljustspace.wordpress.com @justspace7 at 52 Club, 52 Gower Street. All UCL UCU members and UCL students welcome.
Thursday 8th March 2018 International Women’s Day
From 07:30-picketing at the Quad entrance on Gower Street. The forecast is for warmer weather next week but it will be very cold in the mornings so please wrap-up warm.
10.00–: 22 Gordon St. #BodyPolitic workshop
On International Women’s Day, Thursday 8th March, Clare Farell and Miles Glyn of #BodyPolitic will join The Bartlett picket line at 22 Gordon street to host a special Solidarity-Complexity workshop.
#BodyPoltic works to encourage and facilitate others to use their bodies as a space for creative response and positive resistance; through workshops, and the re-use and re-purposing of clothing and materials.
Join #BodyPolitic at 10 am on 8th March to turn your body into space for EXPRESSION/DEMONSTRATION on 8th March. Bring your favourite or LEAST favourite jacket/garment– no further materials required.”
12:00-13:00 strike meeting, 52 Club, 52 Gower Street
13:00-14:45: Feminist teach-out, at 52 Club, 52 Gower Street. All UCL UCU members and UCL students welcome.
This feminist teach-out, (Ben Campkin convening), opens up space to bring together UCL researchers, educational practitioners and activists who are addressing precarity, inequality and protest in relation to gender and through intersectional approaches.
Florence Sutcliffe-Braithwaite: Women on the picket line in the miners’ strike of 1984-5
Justine Canady, Women’s Officer at UCLU: Current campaigns and activities at UCL
Bella Webb and Alizay Agha: Our Bodies: Sexual Assault & Harassment on Campus
Laura Marshall and Ben Campkin: LGBTQ+ night-spaces & safer spaces for women in London, from 1986 to the present
Sarabajaya Kumar: Intersectionality: the birth of a new non-profit organisation and our agenda for action
Maria McLintock: Between the picket lines
Miranda Critchley: Yarl’s Wood hunger strikers
Open Mic: if you would like to make a contribution to this event, through a reading, talk, poem, etc. please let us know at the start as there may be space in the programme.
Friday 9th March
13:00-14:00 formal EGM meeting next week to consider the progress of the dispute. Venue TBC. All UCL UCU members welcome.
UCU Pension Strike, Week 4, Teach-outs at the Bartlett and around the UCL Campus
Mon 12 March
9am-12: 22 Gordon Street Picket
10am: Museums & UCL: Teach-out.
Outside 22 Gordon Square (the entrance to STS).
Join us to discuss the crucial roles played by museums at UCL! Speakers include: Dr. Chiara Ambrosio (Science & Technology Studies), Dr. Georgina Brewis (Education, Practice & Society), Dr. Emily Dawson (Science & Technology Studies), Dr. Emma Richardson (History of Art), Dr. Marquard Smith (Culture, Communication & Media) and Dr. Alice Stevenson (Institute of Archaeology).
1-3pm: UCL UCU, Club 52, 52 Gower St.
Teach-out: Still the Enemy Within? Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners with Nicola Field, Mike Jackson and Mike Simons. (Ioanna facilitator)
3-4pm: Teach-out by Stephen Marshall and Daniel Fitzpatrick (Bartlett School of Planning)
The Anthropology Pedagogy Gazebo, Outside 14 Taviton Street
The City as a Network of Learning: Reviving A Pattern Language for the Smart App age?
In his classic book A Pattern Language, Christopher Alexander and coauthors imagined the city as a ‘Network of Learning’, weaving education into the physical and social fabric of urban life. Here we revisit and reimagine these ideas in the age of the Smart App, asking how (where, and by whom) such a network of learning could be created today.
Tue 13 March
9am-12: 22 Gordon Street
Picket
10am: teach-out on Housing with Anna Minton, author of Ground Control (Penguin, 2009) and Big Capital (2017) and Harvi Chera (UCL Cut the Rent Campaigner).
11am: teach-out: Art/Histories of Protest
(Art) Histories of Protest
UCL History of Art Teach-Out
Tuesday, March 13
11 to noon
20 Gordon Square
Mignon Nixon, “Let the Pants Fall Where They May”
Marta Zboralska, “WE ARE NOT SLEEPING”
Bob Mills, “Why University Strikes are Positively Medieval”
Johannes von Müller (The Warburg Institute), “The Art of Throwing a Stone”
Maria Mileeva, “Art and Hooliganism in Putin’s Russia”
Stephanie Schwartz, “The Time of Protest”
Tamar Garb, “Rhodes Must Fall”
*From 9:30 to 11 am please come and add your image of protest to the gallery we will erect across from Gordon Square. This can be a work of art that is itself a protest, a portrayal of strike or protest, or visual culture associated with a historical protest movement. String and tape for installing images will be provided.*
1-3 possible teach-out on EU migrants in HE and beyond – venue/facilitator tbc
Wed 14 March
9am-12: 22 Gordon Street
Picket
10am: rubber-stamping workshop with illustrator Judit Ferencz.
11am: University/Interrupted: a creative workshop on the affective impact of striking led by Claire Tunnacliffe (Bartlett) & Jade French (QMUL)
Noon: London Region UCU demonstration to Parliament.
See https://uculondonregion.wordpress.com/2018/03/03/education-demo-2/
Assemble: Malet Street London WC1E 7HY at 12noon.
Thur 15 March
9am-12: 22 Gordon Street
Picket
9.30am: Some thoughts out on the counter economics of the strike (Peg Rawes, Bartlett School of Architecture)
Morning – UCL Laws – ‘What is Modern Slavery?’ Virginia Mantouvalou with Kate Roberts, Head of the Human Trafficking Foundation (venue tbc).
1-3pm: UCL UCU, 52 Gower St.
Teach-out hosted by UCL Dept of the Americas, Josh Hollands convening, with Bernard Coard (Grenadian politician, teacher and critic of institutional racism; helped draft the communist Worker’s Liberation League manifesto in Jamaica). (Venue tbc)
3-4:30pm, UCL Anthropology (14 Taviton Street)
Universities as sites of power and resistance: a view from the Global South
This event focuses on universities as political actors in contested societies. Our attempt is to highlight the ways in which universities function as sites of state power and violence as well as sites of resistance.
Chair: Dr. Barbara Lipietz, Bartlett Development Planning Unit
Speakers:
Prof. Vanessa Watson School of Architecture, Planning and Geomatics at the University of Cape Town
Dr. Catalina Ortiz, Bartlett Development Planning Unit, Public Universities as enclaves of critical dialogue in the Colombian peace making process
Prof. Haim Yacobi, Bartlett Development Planning Unit, Israel/Palestine: Universities, Militarism and Colonialism in the Occupied Territories
Fri 16 March
9am-12: 22 Gordon Street
Picket
9am-1pm: Crit-Out: BSc Architecture and Interdisciplinary Studies, Project X
plus
10am: Strike Chronicle collective write-out.
1-3pm: UCL UCU, 52 Gower St.
Teach-out: Governance, Ethics, Divestment
Speakers tbc but to include Saladin Meckled-Garcia (UCL Political Science), Sherrill Stroschein (UCL Political Science), Jane Holder (UCL Laws), Jane Rendell (Bartlett School of Architecture), Diana Salazar (Development Planning Unit), Julia Schaff (UCL Fossil Free).