TECHNE Conflux: Urban Voices: From place-making to place-listening
10th Oct 2018 10:00am-12:00pm
Location: Rich Mix, East London
This workshop is offered as part of a TECHNE Conflux,
an extended training, development, exhibition or performance programme
which aims to enhance research or intellectual skills, or facilitate the
sharing of expertise amongst doctoral students in the arts and
humanities.
Explore ‘place-listening’ as a creative method for urban research.
Mainstream urban regeneration is often a visual process designed to enhance the economic prospects of a place by making it more appealing: architects and developers produce drawings populated with smiling citizens, swinging their shopping bags under a blue sky; public art and urban design features are transformed into sleek promotional images designed to sell the place to desired residents or tourists.
As an alternative to these place-making processes, the Urban Voices workshops explore ways of ‘place-listening’ - an immersive and multidirectional engagement with a place that aims to know or understand what is already there but is not immediately to hand. Through a playful exploration in and of urban space, participants will be trained in methods and techniques of ‘place-listening’ by means of game-like exercises, reflective questioning and dialogue with blind/partially blind people.
This is the second workshop in a programme of events in 2018-19 that culminates in a GeoHumanities Summer School in 2019 in Bude, Cornwall. The programme revolves around the question of how an expanded practice of listening to field sites, human voices and bodily states may inform research, creative practice and/or writing.
The
workshop is also part of the British Academy Funded public engagement
programme, Urban Voices (2018/2019), which