Poetic Justice Values Conference 2022
"Going Places" with the Spoken Word Community:
Youth Education Between Spiritual & Poetic Justice
Online | In-person 02 - 03 December 2022
“Going Places” will be a 2-day hybrid conference (online and in-person), inspired by the poem Going Places and its verses: “I think I’ll paint roads/ on my front room walls/ to convince myself/ that I’m going places”, penned by acclaimed British author Lemn Sissay OBE, who will open the conference. The government requires English Schools to teach for young people’s spiritual, moral, social, and cultural development with British Values, known as SMSC, rife with historical prejudice. With Covid-19 poetry cuts on the GSCE, UK youth poet Kadish Morris warned “poetry saved me, don’t deny to next generation”. The conference will bring together young people, poets, teachers, academics, scholars, creative and cultural organisers, activists and policy-makers, to harness community to “go places” spiritually, morally, socially, and culturally.
The conference recognises Lemn Sissay's landmark legacy across poetry, education, advocacy and equity in the care system, which has been honoured by the Battersea Arts Centre's annual Festival - Going Places - celebrating the talent and work of care experienced artists. The Going Places festival was hailed as a "blueprint for arts institutions". The conference wishes to honour and extend the festival ethos to widening access in academia for underrepresented groups to inspire careful work with artists as educators, community-builders and creative-critical researchers - offer a creative blueprint for education to counter intersectional trauma, and be a place to thrive, not survive.
Please visit the Going Places conference 2022 page for further updates, and information about how to register.
Up and coming PJV events
Creative-Critical Methods For(u)m
WRITING & PUBLISHING RESEARCH OTHER:WISE
October - December 2022 | University of Cambridge
The Poetic Justice Values project is holding an interdisciplinary For(u)m titled Writing & Publishing Research Other:Wise offering 5 webinars and 5 workshops (free to attend). The for(u)m follows the contemporary university’s turn to creative-critical research methods, community-building, and epistemic justice through innovative academic publishing by re-centring hybrid, innovative and counter cultural art forms. Events will feature specialist external guests, across academia and creative industry. Primarily intended for scholars in the social sciences, humanities and the arts, the for(u)m is also open to interested scholars across all disciplines. Please note, while workshop places are limited, the For(u)m webinars will be open to all interested. To receive a webinar Zoom link, contact: PoeticJusticeValues@educ.cam.ac.uk.
The for(u)m invited workshop applications primarily from PhD students and Early Career Researchers (ECRs) based at the University of Cambridge, and on request, attracted delegates from across UK and international academic, creative, and community sectors. The programme of activities runs from October 13th to December 3rd, 2022.
Aims and Topic
The main aim is to develop knowledge and practical skills of creative-critical methods (CCM) in academic writing and publishing. A key point of departure will be the role of CCM in questioning privilege and doing justice to varied lived experiences of intersectional oppression, social harms, and trauma.
Training will be provided across a range of CCM such as:
- hybrid playwriting and grime-poetry
- introduction to chorepoetry (i.e. lyrically motivated movement)
- critical poetic inquiry
- feminist zine-making
- autoethnographic spoken word
Themes include:
- creative-digital publishing experiments
- staying with the REF-able publication
- poetic justice and the neoliberal university
The format of the for(u)m is participatory, seeing CCM as a form and forum, open to interpretation. It borrows from the social turn to creative-activist movements like the Spoken Word, Forum Theatre, inspired by the social science and artistry of the method of portraiture by Prof Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot, critical-creative methodologies in transnational spaces and contemporary arts like Black experimental writing. The For(u)m will conclude with the co-creation of a zine, starting conversations for a new research network. The for(u)m will also lead into the “Going Places” Conference December 2-3 2022, inspired by the work of poet Lemn Sissay OBE who will give the opening reading.
Watch this space for the announcement of upcoming events, email PoeticJusticeValues@educ.cam.ac.uk to join our mailing list or follow @PJV_project on Twitter.
Partners
Special thanks to our partners Young Identity, and funders Cambridge Digital Humanities, Economic and Social Research Council ESRC and the Judith E Wilson Fund (Faculty of English). Learn more about the work of the Cambridge ESRC Doctoral Training Partnership for Social Sciences.
