2 months late but made it to the Binley Mega Chippy on the way to my Auntie Marge's funeral where I came across a great ‘found text’! - think Bob Cobbing……I recently spent the day at FLEXchange at Kings - so nice to be around like-minded people, although from different backgrounds and starting points. Creative thinking fueled all the conversations. I was there to facilitate an arts/science/well being workshop. We had to devise, develop, and present a proposal for an actual issue. My group focused on community building and the issue of stifling bureaucratic systems in academic life and the way in which fear governs our decisions, both as students and lecturers. How can you create a sense of ownership or have agency to build a community in such a structural bureaucratic stranglehold? We came up with the idea of using coloured paper and coloured pens to demonstrate the idea of a curriculum that fits nobody as the participants have not been considered in the delivery. You may have delivered content (pens) but did it land (paper)? A truly half full kind of day. Meanwhile onto screens – the glorious Good Luck to you Leo Grande was moving and open. Books - just finished reading and found myself agreeing with much of Stranger Than We Can Imagine: Making Sense of the Twentieth Century by John Higgs. It is full of great revelations and one of the many coincidences/revelations I had was reading about Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Laringhaven for the first time in the book whilst simultaneously seeing her work in Venice. The book is full of interesting facts and connections - recommended if you are unsure about the world we are living in, there are no answers but lots to think about - did you know the police force had a pagan society? Or that before the Americans celebrated and courted Werner von Braun and rushed him from Nazi Germany to build their space program, he was responsible for the death of 20 thousand slaves through forced labor whist building his underground factory that developed the V2 rockets.
