May 3rd - Talking, thinking and writing about Academic Identity, Utopia and Grace

 Change of date: this workshop will now take place on May 3rd

The identities theme 2011 spring term interdisciplinary  workshop will take the form of a talking and writing day exploring academic identity and, in these halcyon times within the academy, the relationship between Academic identity and the necessity of utopia as method or 'looking for the blue' for any of us to survive in academic life at all. The workshop will take place May 3rd 10.00am-4pm  in Room 410, GSoE and places will be limited in order to facilitate discussion and networking across disciplines. To secure a place , e-mail Jane.speedy@bristol.ac.uk


Timetable: 10.00am-11.00am Ruth Levitas, Professor of Sociology will talk and provoke discussion about  her current Leverhulme funded project on Utopia as method and how this shapes her own academic identity:


Negotiating Heresy in the Academy: Sociology, Utopia, Grace


Ruth Levitas comments:
I've been researching questions around utopianism for 40 years. Most people who do this are located either in literature or political theory. Social theory, and sociology more specifically, have not been very open to utopianism - although H G Wells said that 'the creation of utopias and their exhaustive criticism is the proper and distinctive method of sociology'. So although I'm a Professor of Sociology, most sociologists don't recognise what I do as sociology at all - a curiously marginal position. I'm currently funded by a Leverhulme Trust Fellowship to work on 'Utopia as Method'. I'll say a little about what this means - but the position I'm developing is heretical in two ways. Firstly, there's the normativity and future orientation of utopia which is at odds with sociology. Secondly, it is impossible to talk about the nature of a better society without recourse to an account of the selves that would inhabit it and thus the elucidation of a utopian ontology (or identity). The theme of a secular version of what I can only call grace as an existential experience and a relational quality (see writers like Levinas and Roberto Unger) is even more heretical for a sociologist - or indeed any social scientist, and may indeed put people off the whole idea of this workshop. My own sense is that I can only say what I want by being semi-detached from the Academy itself, and possible only by being old enough to contemplate retirement. So I'm interested in how we manage our own identities as academics when we fit neither disciplinary norms, nor possible academic norms at all, in our most honest accounts of being in the world.

11.00am-noon, After what promises to be an inspiring talk and discussion we shall have coffee and break into small interdiciplinary groups to have further conversations about our own sense of managing our own academic identities, heresies, utopias and versions of secular grace.
Noon - 1.00pm lunch will be provided

1.00pm-4.00pm Jane Speedy (GSoE); Ann Rippin (DoM) and Sue Porter (SfPS) will facilitate a collective biography  workshop on Academic identity, Utopia and Grace. Tea and biscuits will be provided after the workshop.


Collective Biography Workshop 

Collective biography is a collaborative writing method (and as such is a somewhat heretical research method in relation to the gaze of the REF) that works at the level of bodily knowledge and of affect, and moving beyond individualized versions of the subject, toward subjects-in-relation, subjects-in-process.  The practice of collective biography involves participants meeting and talking about their chosen topic, telling their own remembered stories relevant to that topic, and writing them down. The relationship between the participants and the written texts, and memories evoked in the workshop space, is developed through a close attention to each others’ stories. Through listening and questioning each other on the remembered, embodied, affective detail, each story becomes imaginable with/in the minds/bodies of everyone. After telling stories, and listening to stories, and talking together about those stories, each story is written then read out loud to the group. In the writing and reading  each storyteller works to express the remembered moments.  Within collective biography workshops, through developing the skills of listening and attending to the minute bodily detail of moments of being, it becomes possible for each story to become a collective story, its purpose no longer to signal the substance of any particular individual, but to open participants to new insights into the processes of being and becoming in the world—and to new ways of being.  If the group finds that they want to work further with the material they have generated it may be possible to work together after the workshop on  collaborative papers.