Join us for a series of informal style presentations or provocations with other

MIRIAD postgraduate students and staff. The session will involve 10-minute
presentations, followed by feedback and discussions.
The presentations are as follows:
1pm: David Haley
Undisciplinarity and the Paradox of Education for Sustainable Development
At the Symposium Sustainable Development Research at Universities in the United
Kingdom, MMU, 5th & 6th April 2016, it occurred to me; Why are we talking about
Sustainable Development? Have we forgotten the route of this term in Brundtlands
Report (1987) and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit, in response to Climate Change?
Appropriated and applied to everything from financial viability to the growth of the
carbon industries this ubiquitous phrase, paradoxically, represents both the cure and
the cause of our greatest concerns. However, the 2016 UN Sustainable Development
Goals currently rank what some consider to be the most vital challenges, including
Climate Change and life on the planet at 13, 14, 15 and 16, of the 17 Goals, so
maybe Education for Sustainable Development in Higher Education needs to
contest the precepts and values offered by governments and international
organisations? But how may research initiate this epistemological question?
According to the Romanian physicist, Basarab Nicolescu Multidisciplinarity concerns
studying a research topic not in just one discipline but in several at the same time.
Interdisciplinarity has a different goal from multidisciplinarity. It concerns the transfer
of methods from one discipline to another. (T)ransdisciplinarity concerns that which
is at once between the disciplines, across the different disciplines, and beyond all
disciplines (Nicolescu 2008). However, this 10 minute provocation will consider the
need for undisciplinarity in higher education for students to become ecologically
resilient for adaptation. Indeed, this may be the point at which the creative arts are
finally valued, as traditional research methods, alone, inadequately address these
issues. The creative arts, potentially, offer the leverage points (Meadows 1999) to
provide the transition from order to disorder, thesis to antithesis, and structure to
process that may evolve as organisation, synthesis and pattern for a critically robust
Curriculum for Sustainable Development, and capable futures. This polemic
concludes with potential creative opportunities to emerge from learning the stark
realities of Climate Change.

1.15pm: Ruth White

Investigating the Role of Photobooks in Representing British Working Class Life
Since 1975 Through Research and Practice: A Discussion of Work in Progress

Some key questions underpinning this investigation are:

What are photography and the photobook able to point to, communicate or
reveal about:
The effects of Thatcherism and Neoliberalism on the life trajectories and life
chances of the British working classes (since 1975 when Thatcherism
and Neoliberalism began to replace Social Democracy in Britain)
The lived experience of being British and working class in this period
How photography and photographic theory has responded to/been shaped
by the economic and social changes that have occurred in Britain within this
period?
What are the limitations and possibilities of what photography
and photobooks can communicate?

1.30pm: Jo Phillips
Can Maps Connect a Persons Emergent/Embodied/Reciprocal Experience of
Landscape to a Design Process, which Takes Place at Various Scales?

1.45pm: Lin Charlston

Non-Human Agency in Processes of Growing and Making
I hope to generate discussion by presenting some items from my work-in-progress,
which is currently on display in the MIRIAD cabinets. My provocation will be
supported by quotes from my literature review.

2pm: Lewis Sykes

Thinking Abstraction
In an as yet unpublished essay I wrote before my Ph.D. thesis, I critiqued Michael
Betancourts 2006 paper, Visual Music and the Birth of Abstract Art. It raised
interesting perspectives for me about an alternate, continuing tradition for abstract
art forms such as non-representational film and visual music that cant be
satisfactorily theorised by the Modernist yet still dominant Greenbergian theory of
painterly abstraction - as an essentially pure form of art where the canvas
maintains its nature as a flat surface, and the paint maintains its nature by not
representing anything other than paint. As a visual musician I support Betancourts
argument for a reassessment of Visual Musics pivotal yet unacknowledged role in
the development of twentieth century abstract art while taking issue with his
assertion that the synaesthetic abstraction embraced by the Romantics can be
understood as an alternate, continuing tradition for abstraction. Id like to raise some
of these issues and invite feedback from the MIRIAD community - with the longer
term intent of establishing an Abstraction & Materialism Group to create a shared
context where these arguments can be explored and developed by small gathering
of interested researcher practitioners.