On 2nd June 2023, the one day hybrid conference "activist/aesthetics" brought together scholars, artists practitioners and activists. The day focused on the "aesthetic" elements of activism.
The conference was co-organised by Lauryn Anderson, Avani Tandon-Vieira and Anna Corrigan. Lauryn, a Harding Scholar, is in the second year of a PhD in English.
She gave the following description of the conference:
The activist/aesthetics conference emerged from a reading group of the same name which ran between October 2021 and March 2023, in which we collaboratively read and engaged with different material and cultural productions of protest movements from the 20th century. The conference was designed to bring some of these voices together in dialogue, and to consider a range of perspectives from outside of Cambridge; alongside UK-based scholars, we had scholars presenting from Malta, India, Peru, the US, and Canada, on topics ranging from Utpal Dutt’s Revolutionary Theatre, Archival re-imaginations of Photographs of wet-nurses in Lima, and the practices of 'unruly research' and multi-sensory ethnographic approaches to activism. We also wanted to facilitate a space of praxis rather than just theory, and so the day included an art exhibition of radical print publications including rare editions of magazines Bazaar, Savacou, and Black Phoenix, as well as a poetry reading by two activist-poets, Bhanu Kapil and Heba Hayek. The day felt full of possibility and created space for genuine, creative and collaborative reflections, which we were very grateful for.
Fellow Harding Scholar Daniela Meneses Sala, in the first year of a PhD in Latin American Studies, also presented at this conference. The panel "Creative interventions in the archive: Recuperating photographs of wet-nurses in the Courret Archive (Lima, Peru)" was co-presented by Daniela and CLAS PhD graduate Dr Andrea Aramburu. This panel discussed the preliminary finding of a workshop held by Daniela and Dr Aramburu in Bristol in May. An expanded version of this workshop will also be held in Cambridge next year.