Beautiful Trouble: Planetary aesthetics, poetics and creative methodologies

Third seminar in the Peace and Planet's methodology seminar series.

How do creative projects in the arts contribute to pacifism and nonviolence in practice? What can creative methodologies teach scholars and activists about materializing new and/or counter forms of political imagination?

This seminar is envisioned as a Collaborative laboratory (Co-Lab), focused on the role of research creation in the arts (including creative writing and curating), and questions of nonviolence as a worldmaking praxis. It is intended to be discussion and workshop-based.

Format: Brief discussion, with invited presentations from practice-led researchers; Break followed by Co-Lab session with small groups developing creative interventions for real-world issues, thinking with the Beautiful Trouble toolkit, amongst other tools and one another.

Suggested preparatory reading

Claire Farago, ‘Introduction: Taking Responsibility in the Age of Capital’, in Writing Borderless Histories of Art: Human Exceptionalism and the Climate Crisis, New York and London: Routledge, 2025, pp. 1-24 [or just pp. 1-17].

Martin Luther King Jr, ‘The Quest for Peace and Justice’, The Nobel Lecture, 11 December 1964

Audre Lorde, ‘Poetry Is Not a Luxury’, reprinted in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, Berkeley: Crossing Press (1984), 2007, pp. 36-9. (chapters of whole book available online via ProQuest Ebook Central)

Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research-Creation, Durham, NC and London: Duke, 2019 [Conclusion, pp.97-107] (chapters of whole book available online via DeGruyter-Brill)

Trinh T Minh-ha, Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared, NY: Fordham Press, 2016 [pp.137-48]. (chapters of whole book available online via JStor)

José Esteban Muñoz, ‘Conclusion: “Take Ecstasy with Me”’ from Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, NY: NYU Press, 2009, pp.185-89. (chapters of whole book available online via JStor)

For those who are interested in the seminar theme, but have limited pre-reading time available, a compilation of excerpts from the key readings will be available.

Suggested further reading

Selina Gallo-Cruz, ed. Feminism, Violence and Nonviolence: An Anthology Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024 [Introduction, pp.1-11 (14-27 ebook)] (chapters of whole book available online via ProQuest Ebook Central)

Ramin Jahanbegloo, ‘Prologue’, in Nonviolence: An Idea Whose Time has Come, London: Haus Publishing, 2023 [This is a very short treatise; pick any section(s) of interest]. (chapters of whole book available via ProQuest Ebook Central)

Sign up

Attendance limited. To sign up, email: peaceandplanet@hum.ku.dk.

Sign up deadline 20 October.