'Indicative Readings'

THINKING AFTER KNOWLEDGE ‘Indicative Readings’ for Speculectures

It would be good to start by hearing what students have been experiencing and thinking about looking at culturally and discussing where I am ‘coming from’ in terms of current interests and recent cultural experiences.

But I don’t want to set collective readings which everyone is forced to read (and often do not read) each session. This can be a very useful and effective traditional technique and it can be experienced elsewhere during the course. For my own seminar however, I believe it will be far more effective to record the Speculecture sessions and post them as MP3s on Backboard to complement the Blog. The aim is that students can pick whatever reference or idea really interests them from each session, then follow it up and re-introduce it to later discussions.

The point is both to avoid interrupting the spontaneity of the sessions (by note-taking, white-board use etc.) and also to avoid imposing any preconceived notion of a canon or hierarchy of sources and referents. The aim of this is to maintain a sense of tabula rasa or carte blanche about what a contextual studies, or a contextual studies tutor should be, should provide or should prioritis,e in tune with a sense of rapid and radical shifts in the social and technological arena and in the fields of art and education.

Nevertheless, the Speculecture and conversation that follows will produce an array of unexpected directions and connections that can be pursued by individual students using the Blog and MP3s as ‘notes’. Each session, and the seminar series as a whole, will therefore produce a ‘canon’ of its own.