Institution:	University of the Arts London
Section A: Context statement (not scored by reviewers)
I have always had a deep empathy for students who wrestle with writing and reading in creative practice art and design courses. It has been a mission of mine, for over 35 years, to remove the many societal and educational barriers students can face, so that they feel more confident in their abilities to express themselves in the many constructions language can take.  I always wanted to have the confidence start a piece of writing with the phrase, ‘Being dyslexic, I don’t like to… (p. 3), as MIT’s Media Lab, director, Nicholas Negroponte said in Being Digital (1995). Being labelled and ‘diagnosed’ as dyslexic at the age of 5, I have always had a curious relationship with reading, writing and language. I have always loved to read but have shied away from writing as it has never flowed easily or filled me with joy. Until recently that is. I still write clumsily, spell words in very strange ways and concoct sentences that meander without knowing where they are going.    Nevertheless, I have taught and been involved with teaching writing at FE/HE/PhD levels for all my teaching career. The tensions and contradictions I have with language have helped me empathise with, and build the confidence of, art and design students. I help turn their distrust and diffidence towards writing into a powerful communication tool, to help advance their creative practices.     It was astonishing, that whilst teaching, Mark was integrating every single student of the class, always taking care of the different skill sets and levels of knowledge the students were in. Mark doesn’t ignore those different skill sets but rather uses the students’ diversity to set up a co-educative learning environment, enabling the students to learn highly valuable knowledge interactively from each other.  Jan Gensch Level 5 UG Student UAL
Section A word count (maximum 300 words)	299
Section B: Claim against the NTFS Award Criteria (evidence against each Award Criterion 1-3 scored separately by reviewers)
Criterion 1: Individual excellenceEvidence of enhancing and transforming student outcomes and/or the teaching profession; demonstrating impact commensurate with the individual’s context and the opportunities afforded by it.
‘Being dyslexic…’     My philosophies and practices of education have always been strongly rooted in ideas of social justice and the values of critical pedagogy (Freire 1970, hooks 1994, Deleuze 1968). The Universities that I have substantively worked in over the last 20 years, University of Greenwich, Ravensbourne and University of the Arts London (UAL) have actively encouraged students from underrepresented backgrounds to apply. London College of Communication (LCC), where I work, has 40% Students of Colour and 40% international students and 25% declared as dyslexic. My aim as a Senior Lecturer, Programme Director and now as a Reader in Critical and Nomadic Pedagogies at UAL, has always been to help construct inclusive, engaging, challenging units, courses and programmes of study that are collaborative and co-authored by staff and students alike.   Mark is the most positive advocate of thinking through writing and purposeful writing for artists and designers. He writes some of the most interesting briefs for students aimed at getting them to see writing as an aid to their practice rather than an institutional hoop through which they must jump. Dr Julia Lockheart Head of Historical and Contextual Studies. Swansea College of Art. Editor of the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice.    One important precursor to my current educational initiatives developed into an article I wrote for the Journal of Writing in Creative Practice (2012), which opened with the sentence, ‘50% attendance, 50% average mark, and 50% plagiarised.’ This was the condition of some of the writing and assessment of the students I started to teach at the time. After completing my PhD at Goldsmiths and as the new Unit Leader I delivered all the theory and written elements of a BA Graphic Design course. The Dean and Programme Leader recognised there was an issue with attainment and with awarding gaps for Students of Colour in particular. I was asked to investigate the reasons for thisand to find ways to urgently address these issues.    After extensive research into the positioning of theory and writing in art and design courses I rewrote the year one contextual studies brief and called it GAMSWEN (news mag backwards).  The students had to produce a blog/website, newspaper or magazine that was a chronicle of their lectures and seminars. Each lecture, seminar or trip was to have its own page, or pages, dedicated to it. These ‘articles’ were fully illustrated and referenced, as in a magazine or newspaper. The students developed one of these chronicles of lectures, seminars or trips into a feature article; an extended piece of writing of 1,000 words.  When the first GAMSWEN lecture began, taken by Dr Mark Ingham, I was ready with pencil in hand. Mark’s particular style of lecturing created a relaxed atmosphere where it was easy to listen to everything, he had to say about the following 12 weeks.  Level 4 BA Student    The results were astonishing. From the low point of 50% attendance, 50% average grade (low 2.2) and cases of academic misconduct at nearly 50%. This unit was transformed into having one of the highest attainment figures in the faculty. All 90 students handed in their work on time, there were no serious cases of academic misconduct and the average grade went up 18% to being in the high 2:1s. Further analysis of this unit by the University Quality Department showed that the attainment/awarding gaps in all cases were reduced to virtually zero. For me this was one of the most satisfying aspects of this unit. Students with a declared learning disability, students of colour and first-generation students all did considerably better than they did previously.    Developing academic writing engagement and putting the GAMSWEN project into practice was a pivotal moment in my teaching career. I used my pedagogical research into the growing literature on writing in creative practice university courses, to create a unit that was engaging, transformative and inspired students to have confidence in their own voice and writing ability. At the end of the unit students were far less fearful of writing and saw it less ‘something to get out of the way’, but more as a powerful way of curiously and critically reflecting on their own thinking about their own practice.     Mark’s guidance is unfailingly generous, well-informed and delivered with infectious enthusiasm for teaching values that draws out our best. His many projects bear the hallmark of his ability to connect with staff and students, that deepens our teaching culture and see in Mark all the qualities of excellence that will bring credit to the Association. Professor Pratap Rughani UAL Dean of Research  The lessons I learned from GAMSWEN helped me as the new theory lead and coordinator for 400 Level 4 and 350 level 5 students in the Contextual and Theoretical Studies (CTS) department at London College of Communication (UAL). I saw similar patterns of disengagement with students at LCC as in my previous teaching posts. I therefore introduced several initiatives that I had found successful in raising attainment and engagement at other HEIs I had taught at.  I Introduced a brief for all level 4 UG students, ‘What is Referencing’. Having tried many ways of teaching academic referencing to students not familiar with its purposes and operations, I developed a more creative approach. The outcomes were a short, researched essay on the history and application of Harvard Referencing, accompanied by a poster designed to convey these principles visually to our new students. I found that after this project students had a much better understanding of referencing than by just teaching them the mechanics. As a result, when the 400 strong cohort of Level 6 students submitted their dissertations the occurrence of academic misconduct reduced from 40 cases the previous year, some profoundly serious, to 4 minor cases that were not consequential. Our internal unit survey confirmed that the ‘What is Referencing’ brief had laid the foundations for this change. The survey showed that students felt much more confident in understanding the importance of references in academic writing and research, and how referencing worked and remarked on the Level brief as one of the main reasons for this. The transformation and impact I achieved with this seemingly simple brief reducing the cases of suspected plagiarism down from 10% to a mere 1% in two years has been one of my proudest moments in the 35 years I have been teaching. This brief continues to be developed successfully by my colleagues in the Design School at LCC and other courses use at UAL in different guises.    Concurrently, I developed a blogging project for all Level 4 students. They were asked to develop a personal online presence, including a blog, from their first day at LCC in the Design School. This was a highly successful initiative that I had introduced at my previous university. It was taken up with great enthusiasm by staff and students at LCC. One of the aims of asking students keeping blogs was to enable them to feel more comfortable writing regularly and to give them an audience for their writing. My research had shown that students often do less well in their theoretical units in art and design courses due to the way the courses are structured. Some art and design theory courses are completed by a summatively assessed ‘academic essay’. As art and design students this is often something they had little experience of, or desire to do. I wanted all students to start to gain more confidence in their abilities to communicate through writing and for it to become a powerful tool in their creative practices.   After 3 years using blogs to develop writing practices, I designed a student led research project into the benefits of online presences in art and design education. Funded by a UAL Teaching and Learning grant, Learning and Teaching Theory Online (LATTO), analysed qualitatively and quantitatively over 950 of the student’s blogs from the past 3 years. Its extensive research outputs enabled staff help students develop their online presences into dynamic Personal Learning Networks.   As an arts practitioner who teaches theory and theoretical writing, I have always been interested in the way different aspects of art and design courses could combine to help create a holistic educational environment for all students. I made a clear case, based on extensive research and practice, for these online presences being a place where students can explore academic and other modes of writing.  The blogs successfully combine student’s various creative practices with the theories about their practices. Rather than becoming disenfranchised from writing their voices gained more power from being more confident in expressing themselves in writing. They were transformative.  Mark’s innovative and evolving teaching practices centred on modes of writing for students on creative practice courses, through developments such as GAMSWEN, and LATTO, have been transformative at LCC / UAL but also across the sector where his expertise and research have been shared and led to changes in curriculum design and teaching practices’ Jason Copley, Associate Dean Learning, Teaching & Student Experience LCC
Word count for evidence against Criterion 1 (maximum 1500 words)	1499
Criterion 2: Raising the profile of excellenceEvidence of supporting colleagues and influencing support for student learning and/or the teaching profession; demonstrating impact and engagement beyond the nominee’s immediate academic or professional role.
‘Becoming Influential…’    In 2016 I became the first SFHEA in the Design School at LCC. This invaluable experience led me to take it upon myself in conjunction with UAL’s Teaching and Learning Exchange, to help my, often reticent, colleagues to apply for this award. I have now mentored 11 colleagues from our School and 3 from other Schools to successful completion of their SFHEAs. I am especially proud to see my esteemed colleagues become more confident in expressing their teaching excellence and become less shy of their own leadership and teaching achievements. The Design School now has the most SFHEAs of any School at UAL and with my support there are 10 more waiting to apply.  I had noticed that one of the less confident aspects of my colleagues’ SFHEA applications was their knowledge and use of pedagogical theories (UKPSF A5). To help staff across LCC and UAL I developed an interactive resource, ‘Pedagogical, philosophies, theories and approaches.’ I mapped out the variety of pedagogies that are used at UAL and others that I thought would be useful. It is successfully used by UAL’s Teaching, Learning and Employability Exchange as one of the resources for the HEA professional recognition programme. It is extensively used and has become a highly appreciated resource at UAL.    Mark, I came across the pedagogical, philosophies, theories and approaches for critical and creative teaching presentation on the SFHEA professional recognition programme site. It’s fantastic, thank you so much for doing this. Valerie Mace: Course Leader BA Design for Branded Spaces LCC   I have also given permission for this to be used at Imperial College for their SFHEA applicants. A MEd student said, ‘not only the technology and his presentation that I liked, the content itself is very useful and succinct. A great resource all in all and will be useful for lots of beginners like me, I also feel the resource is created in a way that it will still be as useful in a few years’ time.’   In my role as the Design School’s Teaching and Learning Innovation Lead, I have helped over 20 members of staff in successful applications to LCC’s and UAL’s Teaching & Learning Innovation Funds, £60,000 in total. These practical and theoretical pedagogical projects have hightened the profile of staff within and beyond UAL. Many are now applying to be UAL Teaching Scholars and to become Teaching and Learning Pathway Readers. They are now much more confident at disseminating their innovative ideas at national and international conferences. My mentoring has had a very positive impact on their approaches to scholarship and teaching practice. This growing confidence has meant that staff and students from the Design School have had work published in Spark, UAL’s Journal of Creative Pedagogies and other peer reviewed pedagogical journals.    Mark has made a huge impression on the Design School, his experimental practice and restless pursuit of innovation in the cause of an improved learning experience for our students is both timely and inspiring. Dr Nicky Ryan: LCC Dean of Design   I have significantly developed new ways of teaching and enhancing the curriculum at UAL by creating innovative ways to deliver theoretical content. Rather than taking the usual linear historical approach I set up a pattern for delivery that played to each member of staff’s pedagogical strengths and subject knowledge. This enabled students to learn from the most capable lecturer in each subject they were taught. This seemingly minor shift dramatically helped us go from teaching a more traditional theoretical canon, to one that was more contemporary and responsive to student’s needs. It was the start of a process of finding ways to decolonise the curriculum in the Design School at LCC. It had the added bonus of helping colleagues manage their considerable workload in ways that gave them more time to research and prepare their curricula.  My advocacy of innovative teaching and learning at LCC/UAL over the past 7 years has significantly changed and contributed to the way critical theory is taught in the Design School at LCC and beyond, and this was included by Professor Susan Orr in UAL’s TEF submission.      UAL Teaching Scholar, Dr Mark Ingham, worked with 400 LCC design students on a conference about their creative text outputs called ‘Thesis in Form’. The External Examiner called it “a well-designed and delivered programme that empowers the students in their knowledge and critical thinking, and in the presentation of that work.”UAL: TEF Submission 2017  As Chair of a Finish Task & Finish Group on Future Models of the Dissertation I drew together staff from all the Schools at LCC, to use their differing approaches to teaching theory. My report led to recommendations that are in the LCC UG Quality Handbook.  We looked at the whole curriculum and student journey from their start at LCC and we recommended that the students were given more choice in how they expressed their research. I introduced briefs that were practice led, based on current models of this type of research output. This has had a great impact on the way theory is taught at LCC and has given the students and staff greater confidence in exploring expanded ideas of how research can be conducted and made public.   Mark’s … advancement of Critical Performative Pedagogies in Art & Design Education nationally and internationally, has created transformative learning opportunities for our students … His work on “Future Thesis/Dissertation” and leadership thinking was able to uncover hidden barriers to academic writing and learning development, opening new ways of approaching and thinking about writing as an integral part of design practice.Zey Suka-Bill: Dean of Screen School LCC    There has been a move at some UK Creative Arts HEIs to reduce the amount of theory and writing taught on their courses. For me, this is a great mistake as it disenfranchises students from having the power and confidence to speak and write about their own and other’s work. It widens the gap between those that can articulate themselves confidently in writing and those who will be limited by these policies. As a teacher of both theory and practice in creative arts disciplines for over 30 years and as an External Examiner in 6 UK and Irish Universities I have argued, and in most cases won, the case for theory and writing research being too valuable to the student’s creative thinking for it not to be taught. I have argued that it is the way this is taught that is the issue, not student’s reticence due to a fear and lack of confidence.     I have consulted at several UK HEIs about how practice based final year BA dissertations could be used to engage their students more productively in these capstone projects. A number of Universities, including the University of Buckinghamshire and Middlesex University now have final theoretical written projects that involve a practice element in their visual arts courses.        As External Examiner, Mark has been both highly supportive of our Course ethos and our approach to teaching and has also brought the experience of his academic and creative practice, in terms of valuable advice and recommendations. William Brown: Head of Design LMU/Cass School of Art      Through the many conferences and symposia, I have organised and presented at, I have been able to share my pedagogical thinking and to reach out to wider audiences. These have had considerable impact in the sector on the ways theory and writing can be taught in art and design HEIs.  These include: Pedagogical Thinking for the Academy of the very near Future, or how the Wasp Became the Orchid”, Swedish Twitter University 2011; ‘“eRTFs” (Enriched Text Formats) Online, continuous and present writing in Art and Design.’ In: Screen Writes, symposium 2014, LCC. (Co-organiser); ‘Mark. How did you know anything before the internet existed?” Digitally Engaged Learning (DEL) Conference New York 2016. Paper/workshop; ‘The Theory and Practice of ‘Theory and Practice’ in Art and Design HE’, UAL Exchange Teaching Platform national conference, 2018 (Co-organiser with Dr Dave Webster Associate Dean CCW/UAL); ‘Digital Cartography in Smooth and Nomadic Spaces: A Fabulation.’ UAL’s Digital Edge Conference, 2019; ‘Rhizomatic Collaborative Assemblages (Swirling the Atmosphere)’. Keynote: LCC’s Teaching and Learning conference 2019; ‘Creating Transdisciplinary Stories’ ELIA Biennale Conference 2020 (with Dr Silke Lange Associate Dean CSM/UAL.); ‘Do we belong here?’ Philosophy Society of Great Britain– Oxford University 2021 (with Vikki Hill UAL Educational Developer); ‘Becoming-Blended-Becoming-Hybrid-Becoming-Multiple-Becoming’ Hybrid Spaces Conference – Glasgow School of Art 2021. Through these expositions I have been able to show my transformative learning and teaching initiatives, and to show the significant, value and impact they have had at UAL and the sector as a whole. Mark in all his work has made enormous strides, at LCC, UAL and the sector more broadly to integrate theory and practice through their own writing and making practices. This is significant because it has diversified practices available to students in the academic environment and supported the reduction of the attainment gap. Dr Dave Webster: Associate Dean – Learning Teaching CCW UAL
Word count for evidence against Criterion 2 (maximum 1500 words)	1496
Criterion 3: Developing excellenceShow the nominee’s commitment to and impact of ongoing professional development with regard to teaching and learning and/or learning support.
‘Becoming Lost and Found…’   In 2017 I was awarded UAL’s highly prestigious Teaching Scholarship for my project, ‘Thinking Design’ (Ingham 2017). I researched, and put into practice, ideas of metacognition in HE art and design teaching and learning. I went beyond the contestable ideas of ‘learning styles’ and investigated ways to think about and use ideas of learning to learn, to help our leaners learn better. This was a highly impactful and successful project which led to being awarded a UAL Senior Teaching Scholarship. Following this project, I was awarded a highly competitive fully funded UAL 6-month Teaching and Learning Innovation sabbatical. During Assembling Agency: Agents, Agency, and Agencies in Assembling Liminal Learning Spaces (Ingham 2019), I researched ideas of informal learning spaces. This was to help students and staff in preparation for moving to LCC’s new building.    After returning to LCC I decided to become more ‘nomadic’ in my thinking and teaching (Semetsky 2008, Deleuze and Guattari 1980). I chose not to have an office and worked in spaces that were public and better suited to my thinking about the importance of liminal spaces in education. Wanting to reconnect with as many colleagues and students as possible, as quickly as possible, this was an ideal way of being openly visible and available.   Working in these in-between spaces enabled me to be a visible integral part of the students transitions into LCC. This had very productive consequences. I became a ‘guide’ to new students who were lost and could not find their classrooms or were intrigued by the exhibition. A topic of conversation was about our Design School Manifesto (2018) displayed at the entrance to LCC. The students where very taken with it and started discussions with me about ideas of belonging and language. A question cropped up about why it was only in English as there are large proportion of students for whom English was not their first language at UAL.   Since then, I have been developing the project, ‘Becoming Lost and Found in Translation’ with staff and students at LCC. This practice-based pedagogical research analyses how all the languages of our students, whether from the UK or abroad, can be used to enhance learning. This project champions translation as one of the key critical thinking elements of all art and design student’s lives and current and crucial ideas of belonging and identity   This sort of project is particularly valuable at times of restricted physical access and I am sure it will be really successful. Nigel Carrington, Vice-Chancellor UAL   I asked students and staff at LCC if they would help translate the manifesto into another language sent out on the first day of the new academic year 2018/19. Within two days we had over 60 responses and translations of the manifesto into 35 different languages. The feedback was remarkable. The students said it made them feel they belonged more to the Design School and felt more invested in its ethos and future. Colleagues then developed the idea of translation being a metacognitive process in the formal design lessons in the Design School.  Students loved Manifesto translation exercise. They found all sort of ways to do it. It will also allow me to situate them within this institution and speak about the community of practice – lovely. Dr Nela Milic, Year 2 Contextual and Theoretical Studies Coordinator My aim for this project is to help new students transition into the diverse communities at our university. It creates a sense of belonging for all our students at all stages of their engagement with UAL. It is inclusive, especially for all students who may feel ‘othered’ when entering Higher Education. Whether to do with race, age, gender, disability, class, sexual orientation, gender reassignment, religion/belief or any other protected characteristics.As Programme Leader for Contextual and Theoretical Studies, I enrolled on to UAL’s PGCert standalone unit ‘Inclusive Teaching and Learning in Higher Education’. Run by  ‘Shades of Noir’ (2021) and the Teaching and Learning Exchange. It was something I had advocated colleagues to take since I joined LCC and had been a champion of itsaims for many years. Having completed my PGCE at the IoE in 1990 I realised that I needed to update my knowledge of the current thinking on inclusivity in HE. It helped me understand much more about the politics, philosophies and policies that underpin inclusive teaching and learning that can make a radical difference to our students’ achievements at UAL. I wrote an essay on my ‘Becoming Lost and Found in Translation’ project for this course. I analysed and described how this project helped students gain a greater sense of belonging and how it greatly valued their prior knowledge and experiences as positives and not as barriers to their learning at LCC/UAL. The reach of this project has gone far beyond the Design School at LCC and has been disseminated widely. It has been selected for inclusion at the Decolonising Arts Institute UAL roundtable this summer. My work for this project has had a substantial impact at LCC and UAL on students and staff pedagogy. I have written about it in several academic papers and presented at national and international pedagogical conferences. This year I have had three papers accepted at prestigious conferences based on this project.  ‘Lost and Found in Translation’. Media Education Summit 21 Leeds University; ‘Becoming Lost and Found in Translation’ Cumulus, Rome 2021 Published Paper and ‘Being in Translation’ International Collaborations Conference, Kent University 2021.Your Becoming Lost and Found in Translation project on the translation of the Design School manifesto as a means of making students’ linguistic resources visible would be an excellent fit for the roundtable… Dr Victoria Odeniyi: The Decolonising Arts Institute UAL. My practice-based arts PhD included a section on the use of the personal pronoun in academic research writing. Using feminist critiques of the impersonal style academic writing can often be obliged to take, helped me understand how important it is for the voice of the student to be acknowledged in academic writing. This has helped me create curricula, briefs and classes that see student’s voices as powerful ways of helping them gain more confidence in their expression though writing.I was chosen from a very competitive pool of applicants for a post-doctoral research project for UAL for a scoping project/literature review of creative arts practice-based PhD supervision (Ingham 2010). This was an invaluable experience that help me understand the continuing development of practice-based PhDs in the UK and for me to help new PhD supervisors. I have continued to explore the pedagogies of supervising art and design PhDs and recently had a collaborative article, ‘Becoming-Supervisor-Becoming-Supervised’ accepted for a peer-reviewed publication.  I have been able to put this pedagogical research in to practice by supervising 3 students to PhD completion and by supervising 12 current PhD students at UAL, 6 of whom are researching into creative pedagogies. This has led me to chair The Experimental Pedagogies Research Group (EPRG) at UAL which consists of 6 PhD students at UAL and 12 members of staff. We are developing the of setting up an Experimental and Creative Pedological Research Centre/Institute at UAL. Mark’s practice is of watching, listening and thinking with us, rather than demonstrating what he knows in conspicuous displays of intelligence. Such empowerment of students, and less-confident colleagues, underpins Mark’s professional practice. Jonathan Martin: PhD Student/Lecturer. UAL Since becoming a Reader at UAL, I have had two chapters published on Performative Pedagogies and Blended Learning. ‘Leap into Action’ included my chapter, Assembling Agency (Ingham 2020) and ‘Cases Studies on Active Blended Learning’ includes my chapter, Becoming Blended (Ingham 2021). These both look at transformative creative and critical pedagogies and how they can be radical developed for our students yet to come. I am currently writing a book, ‘The Rhizomatic University and the Nomadic Learner’ which deals with the future of writing in post-pandemic art and design HEIs. As a member of UAL’s Academic Leaders Forum Steering Group led by Simon Ofield-Kerr, our Deputy Vice Chancellor; UAL’s and LCC’s Teaching and Learning Attainment Committees; LCC’s Quality Committee, and as the Teaching and Learning Innovation Lead for the Design School at LCC I have ensured that UAL’s transformative teaching and learning strategy has been at the core of the pedagogical thinking throughout our university and beyond. If awarded an NTF I would be even more able to champion pedagogies that remove barriers to learning to make writing a powerful tool for all students at UAL and beyond. Being a dyslexic academic has helped me help others to be far more confident and more compelling in their creative practices. Mark has consistently enriched our understanding of what teaching and student engagement can, and should, be.  His nomadic method has given him insight and impact beyond anything a more ‘office based’ approach could hope to achieve….he is both trusted and respected by cross-sections of students and by a range of staff, from technicians to senior management alike. Dave White: Head of Digital Learning UAL.
Word count for evidence against Criterion 3 (maximum 1500 words)	1500
Section C: Reference List (not scored by reviewers)
bla.bla.bla.translation (2020) Instagam for Becoming Lost and Found in Translation. Deleuze, G. (1968/2004) Difference and Repetition. Continuum Impacts Design School Manifesto (2018) LCC Design School.  Freire, P. (1970/2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed.  New York: Continuum hooks, b. (1994) Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, Routledge Ingham, M. (2007-2011). GAMSWEN. Course blogs Ingham, M. (2012). #GAMSWEN (MAGS).  Ingham. M. (2012.) From Wish You Were Here? to GAMSWEN and onto Designed Dissertations: Connecting the design studio with writing in design. Journal of Writing in Creative Practice. Ingham. M. (2015). Learning & Teaching Theory Online (LATTO).  Ingham. M. (2017) Thinking Design’ UAL Teaching Scholarship project.  Ingham, M. (2018). Agents, Agency, & Agencies in Assembling Liminal Learning Spaces.  Ingham, M. (2020). Chapter Two: Assembling Agency—Learning in Liminal Spaces. In: L. Campbell, ed., Leap into Action: Critical Performative Pedagogies in Art & Design Education, 1st ed. New York: Peter Lang Publishing, pp.49-50 Ingham, M. (2021). Becoming Lost and Found in Translation. Cumulus Rome 2021. Design Cultures (of) Revolution. Ingham, M. (2021). Becoming Blended in Cases Studies in Blended Learning. Level 4 Student. (2012). The GAMSWEN Summary.  Negroponte, N. (1995). Being Digital. Hodder & Stoughton. London. Semetsky, I. (Ed) (2008). Nomadic Education: Variations on a Theme by Deleuze and Guattari. Sense Publishers. Rotterdam, The Netherlands. ‘Shades of Noir’ (2021) Formally part of University of the Arts London (UAL), as its Centre for Race and Practice-Based Social Justice UAL TEF Provider Submission (2016) UAL.

This lightening talk is based on fragments from a lost radio interview with Felix Guattari

Ideas of, Ecosophy (Ecological Philosophy), Chaos-mosis and The Three Ecologies as useful ways of thinking about Earth and Equity and Subjectivity were discussed.

Somethings may have been lost in my translation.

Introduction: Welcome Felix,  Enchanté,     your background is unlike that of any of your peers. In 1953, with psychoanalyst Jean Oury, you founded the La Borde psychiatric clinic, which was based on the principle that one cannot treat psychotics without modifying the entire institutional context.

You participated in the May 1968 student rebellion and you realised early on that it was possible to introduce analysis into political groups.

You have fought fascism all your life and, amongst many other concepts, developed thoughts on microfascisms and how to counteract them.

In 1972 you co-wrote Anti-Oedipus,  which Michel Foucault described as  “an introduction to the non-fascist life”.

And co-wrote A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, in 1980.

Which had been described as a positive exercise in the affirmation of, “nomad” thought.

Q: Felix, you have recently written on how to develop a deeper understanding of why the combination of planetary health, social health and personal health should be looked at as a whole so they become intersectional. Can you say something about this?

A. Yes of course, without modifications to the social and material environment, there can be no change in mentalities.

Now more than ever, nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between eco-systems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes of reference, we must learn to think ‘transversally’.

Just as monstrous and mutant algae invade the lagoon of Venice, so our television screens are populated, saturated, by ‘degenerate’ images and statements.

In the field of social ecology, men like Donald Trump are permitted to proliferate freely, like another species of algae, taking over entire districts of New York and Atlantic City; he ‘redevelops’ by raising rents, thereby driving out tens of thousands of poor families, most of whom are condemned to homelessness, becoming the equivalent of the dead fish of environmental ecology.”

Here, we are in the presence of a circle that led me to postulate the necessity of founding an “e cos sophy” that would link environmental ecology to social ecology and to mental ecology.’

Q. How can we do this? “… I place great importance in what I called ‘incorporeal species’ (music, the arts, cinema), and their ability to reframe sensual perception, forcing people into encounters with alternative ways of thinking and nonhuman forces, creating new modes of being in the world.”

I think we need to affirm and reinvigorate our experimental care for mental and social ecologies, as much as we assume a care for the state of the physical ecology of our natural environment.”

The Earth is undergoing a period of intense techno-scientific transformations.

If no remedy is found, the ecological disequilibrium this has generated will ultimately threaten the continuation of life on the planet’s surface. Alongside these upheavals, human modes of life, both individual and collective, are progressively deteriorating.

Political groupings and executive authorities appear to be totally incapable of understanding the full implications of these issues.

Despite having recently initiated a partial realization of the most obvious dangers that threaten the natural environment of our societies, they are generally content to simply tackle industrial pollution and then from a purely technocratic perspective, whereas only an ethico-political articulation – between the three ecological registers (the environment, social relations and human subjectivity) would be likely to clarify these questions.

We need new social and aesthetic practices, new practices of the Self in relation to the other, to the foreign, the strange – a, whole programme that seems far removed from current concerns. And yet, ultimately, we will only escape from the major crises of our era through the articulation of:

a nascent subjectivity

a constantly mutating deterritorialisation of society and politics

an environment in the process of being reinvented.

Thank you Felix, and have you any final words for our listeners?

Yes if I may, I would like to finish by quoting from one of my favourite writers Italo Calvino, from Invisible Cities

“ The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.

There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it.

The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

Merci, Salut, À plus“.

My Drawing (2000) called BoyPoolRhizome used in various Deleuze and Guattari inspired publications and tattoos:

Book covers
• Drawing Boy Pool Rhizome used as Cover art for: The Polyphonic Machine: Capitalism, Political Violence, and Resistance in Contemporary Argentine Literature. (2018). By Niall H. D. Geraghty. University of Pittsburgh Press. 2018.
• Drawing Boy Pool Rhizome used for PhD cover art. ‘science and technology studies, spatial politics and future making’. Requested by Dan Kristian Kristensen. 2017.
• Drawing Boy Pool Rhizome used for PhD cover art . The power of form: Swarming resistance in cyberspace’. Requested by Imogen Armstrong SOAS. 2016.

Book illustrations
• Drawing Boy Pool Rhizome used in Degrees of mixture, degrees of freedom: genomics, multiculturalism and race in Latin America, By Professor Peter Wade, British Academy Wolfson Research Professor. Published by Duke University Press. 2017.
Posters
• Drawing Boy Pool Rhizome used for: The Words of Others: Remembering and Writing Genocide as an Indirect Witness. By Caroline D. Laurent. (Used in defence of her PhD at Harvard University – Department of Romance Languages & Literatures). 2017.
• Drawing Boy Pool Rhizome used for a conference on Radical Democracy at The New School for Social Research. Requested by Signe Larsen – The New School for Social Research in New York. 2016.
Invites
• Boy Pool Rhizome used for ‘Contemporary Art in Coffee Shops’ Cincinnati, Ohio, USA, Requested by Mary Clare Rietz. 2016.
Online
• Becoming Rhizomatic used by Bibliothèque publique d’information (public library), in the Pompidou Center, Paris, for their online magazine, Balises. Requested by Fabienne Charraire. 2018.
Tattoos
• Drawing Boy Pool Rhizome to be used as a tattoo. Requested by Jasmin Degeling. 2017.

More at: https://markingham.org

Comment by Ed Leenders:

Replying to Marcin Kedzior like you describe the drawing with your knowledge of Deleuze it looks as if this work directly explains his philosophy.
For sure you know Deleuze’s book on Bacon, there he makes a difference between figure (with f) and Figure (with F) that expresses the intensity of the visible.
Can there become an appearance of a Figure in this drawing above?

Reply by Marcin Kedzior Hi Ed, I’m not completely familiar with that distinction–small f is static representation and subjectivity, capital F is forces that might arise from material, physicality, or other things? If that’s the case then YES! Here the striking thing is the multiplicity of unraveled bodies and the primacy of multiplicity before any single static body is individuated. Note the subtle grid (or more like nets of subjectivity) that underpins it and some very precise transversal diagonals. So if I am reading Figure correctly, the movement beyond the singular, contained body and possibilities of forming collective bodies is what this drawing points to for me.