Executive Summary

The proposed Open-space workshop is intended to provide students with an intensive engagement with a complex text that is challenging in both philosophical and literary terms. Students will be asked to respond to and work with the text in creative and improvisational ways, by, for instance, developing tableaux that represent key themes or developing implicit ideas and patterns through dramatic role-play. A space on campus will be needed that can accommodate large and small group work, movement, and performance. The two staff members involved have worked with students on texts such as Kierkegaard’s Either/Or, Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and Eliot’s The Waste Land. We have not yet selected the text(s) for this project, but our plan is to work with a source or sources that address the relations of art and science. Our tentative idea is to involve works by Darwin and Nietzsche, but we want to consider some other possibilities as well. We aim to have students experience the text(s) as raising important questions about the practices of art and science and the values embedded in these areas of human endeavour.

We hope to involve 25-35 students, of whom the majority are likely to be undergraduates, but it will be open to MA and PhD students as well. We will recruit one person to be trained in how to organise and run such workshops, and two undergraduates to serve as lead learners, who will document and evaluate the project. We hope the training and experience will benefit the individuals in their future studies and work, and we also hope the trainee will be able to contribute to future Open-space learning projects at Warwick.