AHRC-funded Community Connectivities/Temporal Belongings workshop, 20-21 June 2011

I participated in the AHRC-funded Community Connectivities/Temporal Belongings residential workshop on 20-21 June 2011. The workshop convener Michelle Bastian did a great job facilitating the interactions between participants by employing various different formats / approaches to lead the participants to experiment academic time collectively. For example, instead of having Q&A between the audience and the speaker right after a talk, participants were asked to form a group to discuss and share their thoughts. Participants were asked to do 5-minute lightning talks or Pecha Kucha presentations. Brainstorming, card-sorting, mind-mapping, screening, world cafe, open spaces – all these activities broke the routines of conventional academic conferences or workshops. Not only critical and provocative questions concerning temporalities and communities were raised and discussed, participants also experienced different / non-linear temporalities at this workshop. Such fun.

Thematic Mapping and sorting colour-coded cards on 20 June
– chaotic order or orderly chaos?

Open Spaces on 21 June –

People proposed a question and call for participants to discuss the question. There were 11 questions proposed and some questions were merged into other questions due to various reasons (e.g., lack of participants / time, similarities / relevance of questions).

I was in the group in search of hopes: “Can, ought or should we do away with hope?” – And this is the convener of this group – Paul Stronge from the University of Cambridge (below)

The photos below show the output from the group discussing power and ownership of time

The photos below show the output from the group discussing “what is social memory”

Output from one of the world-cafe tables: how communities interlink with temporalities…