On Slowness.
Since the inaugural meeting, the Future Advisory Board has positioned the Summer School as an ‘interval’ to PSi conference (0.5, 1.5, 2.5) to focus on the space between each annual conference, and the connections, overlaps, and dissonances between conference themes. This year, with the PSi 2020 conference postponed, the interval seems particularly apt to mark the space where the conference would otherwise be, and to reconsider new questions of precarity brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic. In place of the postponed Rijeka meeting, we will still convene a Summer School, adapting a more flexible model and a slower temporality. Reflecting on the “crisis of COVID-19,” FAB’s conversations have turned to the value of slowness as the thematic center, reading slowness as a method of research, an object of study, and a tool for sustainable and resistant practice. The numbering of 3.33 reflects the oddity of the interval, never quite complete and ever continuing. It equally gestures toward a subtheme of listening, the tempo to which we set our records. As part of the Summer School, we will engage with written scholarship, online performances, and other forms of exchange to explore together the politics of slowness and its productive disruptions.
Time Frame: 27 July – 6 September 2020
Summer School 2020 will take place over six weeks. This six week model extends the compressed six days of conferencing into an intentionally slow, decompressed mode of learning, collaboration, networking, and engaging to reduce additional strain or fatigue. We anticipate a weekly prompt, which you can choose to engage with on a week-to-week basis.
You may participate in one week or all six weeks, but we encourage continuity. Our intention remains to foster a collaborative, sustainable environment for conversation, creativity, and critical inquiry amongst our global peers and to pay attention together to how our fields, research, and practice are entangled with the current moment and its futurities.
Format:
The format is still evolving, but we anticipate both synchronous and asynchronous modes of engagement. This may include online performances, short inputs of invited speakers, offline tasks, and group discussions. We hope that this format will allow for relaxed, collegial exchange as well as inspired thinking and collaborating. One possible outcome is looking towards a joint publication in some capacity based upon responses to the weekly provocations.
Summer School 2020 