2022
1 July 2022 – Presentation ‘The unruly rhetorics and talismanic properties of the pamphlet: Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer, a collaborative book project at conference, Art Publishing, Periodicals and Printed Things at Northumbria University
14/15 January 2022 – Presentation/performance – ‘Just doing stuff together:’ free improvisation, transversal micro-politics and democracy‘ Dr Geoff Bright (Manchester Metropolitan University), Dr Anton Hunter (professional musician, BIMM Manchester); Dr Gillian Whiteley (Loughborough University) in conference Rethinking Participatory Processes Through Music at University of Huddersfield
2021
20 June 2021 – Presentation/performance ‘Provoking aspects of power in sonic improvisation’ by Dr Geoff Bright (Manchester Metropolitan University), Dr Anton Hunter (professional musician, BIMM Manchester); Dr Gillian Whiteley (Loughborough University) at The Improviser’s Experience: Knowledge, Methodology, Communication, online event hosted by the University of Huddersfield (postponed from last year due to Covid)
2019
20 June 2019 – ‘Be a Citizen Pamphleteer!’ – talk and pamphlet-making workshop at Palazzo Mora, European Cultural Centre, Venice to coincide with exhibition of Re-imagining Citizenship exhibit (May-November 2019)
13 June 2019 – ‘Molecular moments: hopes for re-imagining artschools yet-to-come’ – paper presented at one-day symposium, Art Education: Interesting Histories and Alternative Futures, Radar, Loughborough University ArtsCentre.
2018
September 2018 -‘ The Materialities of Protest : the afterlife of pamphlets and printed ephemera’, paper presented as part of a session I convened at the 2-day Protest Memory AHRC network workshop (organised by Emily Keightley) at Loughborough University
May 2018 – ‘Demand communal luxury daily! History lessons and ‘immense fires of joy, an assemblage of print-based ephemera savouring suspensions of time, cracks in the pavement, and other recent ruptures. A temporary interactive installation of pamphlets and ephemera, accompanied by a pamphleteering provocation at Stages of Utopia and Dissent, 50 years on…symposium at Loughborough In London
2017
October 2017 – Engineering the imagination, creating spaces of appearance: political performativity and Welfare State International, presented at Politicized Practice Research Group seminar
July 2017 – Presented ‘Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer; Alchmemy’ as invitee to event on practice-based AHRC doctoral projects at Baltic, Gateshead.
June 2017 – presented ‘Art Culture and Community – Making Research Connect’ as part of International delegation to develop collaborative research from School of the Arts, English & Drama to ORIPA, Odessa, Ukraine
May 2017 – Co-organised For & Against weekend festival with Radar (one-day research symposium, public events, market stalls etc and curated an exhibition at Charnwood Museum) as part of ongoing RadicalAesthetics-RadicalArt (RaRa) Art, Politics and the Pamphleteer project
March 2017 – Presented ‘Moochers, wasters and vagabonds: the arts of sloth and reverie as oppositional (in)activities’ as invited keynote speaker at Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis international workshop‘Unnecessary, Unwanted and Uncalled for: A Workshop on Uselessness’ at University of Amsterdam
January 2017 – ‘Ignorant schoolmasters, militant teachers and history lessons: building a community of (artist) scholars and (possibly) another University’ at Radical ReThink event, ICA London
2016
September 2016 – Independent Social Research Foundation funded two-day workshop on Art Activism and Political Violence co-organised with Prof Ruth Kinna at Loughborough University
‘Disobedient objects or ‘paradoxical forms of conservatism’? A few reflections on aesthetics, ethics and the afterlife of artworks’ at ISRF Art Activism and Political Violence2-day workshop, Loughborough University, 2016
‘Vibrancy in Venice: a matter of activist history’ paper presented at AAH conference, Edinburgh, 2016
‘Resisting an absent future: hopes for the Artschool yet to come!’ at the The Politics of the Artschool, Nottingham Contemporary, 2016
2015
‘From being one to being many: minor acts of dissent and the creation of counterpublics’ paper presented at Performance & Politics & Protest, University College, Cork, Ireland (preparing for publication)
2014
September 2014 – Invited contributor to panel discussion on film about Herbert Read, To Hell with Culture at Anarchist Network Studies Conference,
Loughborough University
3-5 October 2014 – Chaired In Dialogue event at Nottingham Contemporary and acted as invited respondent for plenaries at event,
Invited panel contributor to The Commodification of Radical
Aesthetics at ManchesterSpring event, Islington Mill, 2014
‘Bikes Caves Raves…a bricolage of speculative parallels’
at Ruth Beale’s Trade Gallery symposium, June 2014
2013
‘Feralist forays as countercultural resistance:
contemporary practices beyond trash aesthetics’
presented at High Trash: a conference on the
normalisation and the origins of Trash Aesthetics
at Siegen Museum, Siegen, Germany, 7- 9 June 2013
2012
‘A thousand lines of flight’: Post-anarchism and Contemporary Art’ – a panel of papers co-organised (with Kuba Szreder) at Anarchist Studies Network Conference – Making Connections, Loughborough University 3-5thSeptember 2012
‘What rough beast…?’ Monstrous practices of dissent
and the ends of conviviality’ Gary Anderson (Free
University of Liverpool/Institute for the Art and
Practice of Dissent at Home, UK), Geoff Bright (Manchester
Metropolitan University, UK) presented at Contested
Democracy: contestation and participation in the
English-speaking world. A critical evaluation at CREW
International Conference, Institut du Monde
Anglophone, Universite Sorbonne, Paris 3
20-22 September 2012C
‘Silly, sick, slick: the fall and rise of comedic art’
presented at Humourous Intent, Oriel Mostyn
Gallery, Llandudno, N Wales 2-4th March 2012
2011
‘Political Pranksters, Provocateurs and Pan-ic: Re- connecting Countercultural Practices’ presented at Trickster Strategies in Artists and Curatorial Practice, conference, University of Wroclaw, Poland, 26th/27th October 2011
‘Rot: the aesthetic recuperation of the ruin (ed), the wretched and the feckless – invited as keynote speaker at Subversive Beauty, Association of Art Historians Student Summer Symposium, Loughborough University, 30th June/1st July 2011
‘Is there no alternative? Re-imagining the university’ presented at Educational Spaces of Alterity, Critical Pedagogy Conference, University of Nottingham, 26th April 2011
2010
‘Sounding transitory utopias: improvisation, potenza and praxis’ presented at Noise, Affect and Politics conference (University of Salford July 2010)
‘Transitory utopian potential: spontaneous models for creative critical communities’ presented at the session, Artist Citizen: Catalyst, Collectives, and Utopias at the Annual Conference of the College Art Association (CAA) in Chicago in February 2010.
2009
‘Provocative praxis: activism and the political avant-garde’ presented at Revising/Re-visiting the Avant-Garde in Visual and Cultural Research Centre, Kingston University, 2-3rd July 2009
2008
‘The ‘subversive thread of imagination’ and affect : Jeff Nuttall and 1968’at 1968: A Global Perspective at University of Austin, Texas, October 2008
‘Retrieving 1970s radicalism: Welfare State International and multimedia mayhem’ at 1970s British Visual Culture conference, University of Portsmouth, July 2008 http://www.1970sproject.co.uk/events/papers.php
‘Scavenging from margins to mainstream: artist as bricoleur’ at University of Paris, Sorbonne symposium on Assemblage, March 2008 http://www.centrechastel.paris-sorbonne.fr/Colloques/assemblage_programme.pdf
2007
‘Bomb culture: Jeff Nuttall and 1968’ at AAH conference, Belfast, April 2007
2006
‘Radical roots and Street Pickings: Bay Area assemblage now and then’ – at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds November 18th 2006
2005
AAH conference paper presented Bristol, April 2005 – Kitsch as cultural capital: art and populist
aesthetics in Fifties’ Britain
2004
Chaired session of academic papers at the Herbert Read Conference at Tate Britain 25th and 26th June 2004
Does Size Matter? The ‘Masculine mystique of the big’ – Women, Monumentality and Public Space at Practice and Identity: Women Sculpture and Place held at Dorich House, University of Kingston, May 2004 http://fada.kingston.ac.uk/research/vmcr/vmcr_events.php
Association of Art Historians conference in April 2004 A sculpture of possibility: poetics and politics in urban space. The paper addressed the contemporary interface between the sculptural, the architectural and the urban, exploring, for example, Lucy Orta’s ‘agitational’ clothing/performance/sculptural works and informed by the writings of Henri Lefebvre and Paul Virilio.
2002
‘Art for Social Spaces: Public Sculpture and Urban Regeneration in Postwar Britain’ at Designing Britain conference, University of Brighton, September 2002http://vads.ahds.ac.uk/learning/designingbritain/html/ass.html
Co-convened a strand of papers – The colonisation of space – the empowerment of sculpture – at ‘Capital : Culture : Colony’, the Association of Art Historians’ conference in Liverpool April 2002.
‘Recording talked lives : straight from the artist’s mouth?’ at a symposium on Voice and Technology at the Slade School of Fine Art on 22 February 2002.
2001
An Evening of cross-‘Beats’, ‘cut-ups’ and rubbish : British and American Assemblage in the Sixties. Paper given 20 March 2001 at the Paul Mellon Centre for the Study of British Art in London as part of the annual series of public lectures staged by the Public Monuments 0and Sculpture Association – the overall theme of the series was Collaborations : Cultural Influences on British Sculpture.
1999
A ‘comradely salute’: Social Realism and the Public Work of Peter Péri, paper presented at conference, ‘Figuration/Abstraction: Strategies for Public Sculpture in Europe 1945-1968′,’ held at Henry Moore Institute in Leeds 2-4 December 1999.
Co–convened a series of papers – ‘Evaluating Sculpture : Patronage, Production, Consumption’ – for the Association of Art Historians’ conference held at the University of Southampton and also presented a paper entitled Junk, funk and empty space : trashing material values in the 50s and 60s, April 1999.
1998
Playing with Paradox : George Fullard : two public lectures at Mappin Art Gallery, Sheffield, 1998.
An evening talk and tour of the exhibition Playing with Paradox : George Fullard at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge co-hosted with sculptor, Phyllida Barlow, 1998.
‘Real’ workers, monumental heroes or the pursuit of Everyman : Peter Peri and his antecedents at ‘Work and Image’ conference held at University of Leeds, 1998.
Looking forward, looking back? Avant-gardistes, engagés and British sculpture in the 1950s at Association of Art Historians’ (AAH) annual conference held at University of Exeter, 1998.
1997
‘Famously unacceptable’ and unacceptably idiosyncratic? George Fullard’s sculpture in the 1950s and 60s at Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, 1997.
Re-viewing the ‘famously unacceptable’ : another look at the sculpture of George Fullard (1923-1973) at University College London, 1997.
Realism, humanism and the ‘insignificant’ figure : Fullard and the 50s in a series of talks on ‘British Sculpture in the Fifties’ at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 1997.
‘Realism, humanism and the ‘famously unacceptable’ : George Fullard and the Fifties, paper given at University of Leeds, 1997.