This page will be regularly updated throughout the life-cycle of the project.
It will display the latest information on upcoming workshops.
You need to be signed-up as a member (participant) to book onto workshops.
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When | Wednesday 12th March 2025, 2-4pm
Where | Penryn Campus, Trefusis House Meeting Room
How much impact can a nineteenth century painter have on your research? Possibly more than you might imagine…
In this fun and practical workshop, we’ll use the art of Pierre-Auguste Renoir to unlock and discuss elements of our own research we may not have yet considered, learning skills for doing this on our own in future.
Employing some of Renoir’s most recognisable paintings as prompts, we’ll approach our own research from the perspective of his characters. We’ll write fictional short stories and discuss their relevance to our own research before re-drafting with the input of other workshop attendees in mind.
Bring an open mind and a willingness to explore your creative side. You might just find it benefits your research more than you imagine.
Intrigued? Book HERE.
About your workshop host
Peter McAllister studied English Literature at The University of Cambridge and was awarded a Distinction for his MA in Creative Writing. He now teaches at the University of Hull, is the editor and co-founder of Inkfish Magazine and a committee member for the Penzance Literary Festival. As a writer and former art dealer, Peter has more than a decade of experience in coaching creative professionals and students.
Blurring the boundary between novel and short story collection is the area of Peter’s PhD research. His own creative work builds layers of characterisation through linked short stories that result in profound moments of self-realisation and/or dramatic action. He has been shortlisted and highly commended in several International Literary Prizes for his fiction and poetry. His work has appeared online, in print journals and numerous anthologies and his debut book is slated for publication.
When | Wednesday 26th March 2025, 2 – 4pm
Where | Streatham Campus, Bryne House Seminar Room
One of the trickiest things in working across and between disciplines is sitting comfortably with the different kinds of language we use to talk about what we do. Not knowing what’s going on, or feeling that someone wants something from you that you just can’t provide, can sometimes drive you away from a project, when, in fact, it really is down to recognising each others disciplinary anxieties.
In this session we’ll play around with collaging texts we feel at home in with texts that are the equivalent of a shipwreck on an island of strange voices. In between these different ways of conceptualising disciplines and practices, we’ll try to write bridges, establish fording points, make kite strings to grab hold of that which will lift us and let us island hop. Metaphor and play will be at the fore as we grapple and melt each others disciplinary strongholds.
Please send in or bring along a text that you feel best represents the characteristics of your discipline and we’ll go from there. Mostly we’ll be talking between short acts of writing and doodling, licking sticking, but by the end of it we may have some writing that holds together an exciting range of texts that have become more than the sum of their parts through respectful and teasing negotiation.
About your workshop host
Professor John Wedgwood Clarke is a Professor of Poetry, English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. He is also Academic Director for Arts and Culture (Exeter Campuses) and a Co-director of Biodiversity and People Network at the University of Exeter.
Intrigued? Book HERE
Penryn and Streatham Campuses, Spring Term 2025
In his work, Tim Ingold (2003) challenges the idea that making is simply about imposing a pre-conceived design or form onto raw materials. Instead, he argues that making is a process of engagement with materials, where the maker learns and adapts through interaction with the world. Adopting a phenomenological stance, Ingold argued that meaning emerges through the act of making, not as something pre-planned or separated from it. For him, making is a form of “correspondence,” where makers and materials evolve together in a mutual process of becoming.
Following Ingold’s suggestion that making is a process of becoming more aware, we embark on a creative journey ourselves. Using natural materials – foraged and received – we will weave ‘bug hotels’ that can be placed in the natural environment. Though some techniques will be suggested, this journey is not about following a blueprint. Rather, it is about developing an intuitive and personal relationship between the self, the materials, and the surrounding environment. In this way, the workshop highlights one’s interaction with matter through making as a way of being in and with the world (Biesta, 2002). Through these meaningful interactions, we might come to understand and create meaning -and ourselves- in different and unexpected ways.
Your Host | Dr Matthew Isherwood, School of Education
Penryn Campus, June 2025
Description
What happens when we enter not only interdisciplinary, but interspecies collaboration?
In this practical workshop, we’ll work with the birds on Penryn campus, exploring what happens when we view them as our co-creators and -investigators.
We’ll look at a selection of work that collaborates, thinks-with, or translates birds’ song, movement and being. These will be poetic in the broadest, most expanded sense: spectrograms, bird-karaoke, calligraphic timelapse photography, and words.
Bring your own approaches to collaboration, visualisation, verbalising, sense-making, and invite the birds to create with you.
About your Workshop Host | Caleb Parkin is a practice-based PhD researcher in RENEW Biodiversity – his research considers human-nonhuman communication in poetry. He tutors for Poetry School, Poetry Society, Arvon, and holds an MSc Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes. He was Bristol City Poet 2020 – 22 and has featured in The Guardian and as guest poet on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please. Caleb’s debut collection This Fruiting Body (Nine Arches Press, 2021) was longlisted for the Laurel Prize and new collection, Mingle, is out in October 2024.