Beautiful Trouble: Planetary aesthetics, poetics and creative methodologies
Third seminar in the Peace and Planet 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:Introduction by Marsha Meskimmon, followed by presentations from colleagues with experience of collaborative, practice-led projects: Michael Kjær and Julie Laenkholm. Followed by a participatory Co-Lab, comprising small groups developing creative interventions for real-world issues.
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.
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.
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].
Trinh T Minh-ha, Lovecidal: Walking with the Disappeared, NY: Fordham Press, 2016 [pp.137-48].
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.
Suggested further reading
Selina Gallo-Cruz, ed. Feminism, Violence and Nonviolence: An Anthology Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024 [Introduction, pp.1-11].
Ramin Jahanbegloo, ‘Prologue’, in Nonviolence: An Idea Whose Time has Come, London: Haus Publishing, 2023.