Print and Society Workshop
18th July 2019

2nd Floor Board Room, Arthur Lewis Building (building #53)
University of Manchester

This workshop brings together researchers from sociology, cultural and media studies, and history and English literature studies to discuss the reciprocal relations between print and society. The aim of the workshop is to develop an interdisciplinary dialogue on this subject, to understand whether and how disciplinary perspectives might be productively combined and to explore the potential for future discussions in this vein.

To register, please use the link here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/print-and-society-tickets-63473764739

Schedule

10.00-10.45 Dr Nick Thoburn
“Anti-Book: Communist Forms in Post-Digital Publishing”

Short tea and coffee break

11.00-11.45 Dr Michael Durrant
“”HERSCHEPT HET HERT”: Katherine Sutton’s Experiences (1663), the printer’s device, and the making of devotion”

Lunch

13.00-13.45 Anthony Iles
“Paper Assembly: The Journal as Form”

13.45-14.15 Molly Drummond
“Practicing ‘Zine Ethics’ in Form and Community”

Short tea and coffee break

14.30-15.30 Prof. Nick Thurston
“Publishing as Praxis”

Speaker Biographies

Michael Durrant is Lecturer in Early Modern Literature at Bangor University. His first book, The Dreadful Name of Henry Hills (MUP, 2020), focuses on the life and afterlives of a seventeenth century printer-publisher. He has written elsewhere on the construction of religious hypocrisy in printed mock book catalogues, textual transmission and royalist identity, historical representations of the British Civil War, and the materiality of religious devotion.

Molly Drummond is a 2nd year PhD student at Keele University exploring the utopian potential of safety. Her research looks for themes of critical expression, creativity, and hope in volunteer or not-for-profit community work. Building on her Masters’ research into zines, she is interested in alternative and independent publishing as a creative research method and a site of authentic expression. Her PhD explores the possibility that the work towards making a community space safe is an expression of a critical and hopeful community.

Anthony Iles is currently a doctoral candidate and Visiting Tutor at the School of Art & Design, Middlesex University. He is a Commissioning Editor for the series Documents in Contemporary Art published by the Whitechapel Gallery and MIT Press. A founder member of the Full Unemployment Cinema and a Contributing Editor with Mute / Metamute since 2005, he is the author, with Josephine Berry, of the book, No Room to Move: Art and the Regenerate City (Mute Books, London 2011),contributing editor to the recent publications, Anguish Language: Writing and Crisis (Archive Books, Berlin, 2015), and Look at Hazards, Look at Losses (Mute/Kuda, 2017) and a contributor to Brave New Work: A Reader on Harun Farocki’s Film A New Product (Buchhandlung Walther König, 2014). Other recent essays by Anthony have been published in the journals Cesura//Acceso, Mute, Radical Philosophy, Rab-Rab: Journal for Political and Formal Inquiries in Art and Logos.

Nick Thoburn is Senior Lecturer in sociology at the University of Manchester. He is author of Anti-Book: On the Art and Politics of Radical Publishing (2016) and Deleuze, Marx and Politics, and co-editor of Deleuze and Politics (2008), Objects andMaterials (2014), and Franco Berardi’s After the Future (2011). He has published on political theory, media aesthetics, social movements, and architecture, and is on the editorial board of the cultural studies journal New Formations.

Nick Thurston is a writer and editor who makes artworks. He writes regularly for the literary and art press as well as scholarly publications. He is the author of Reading the Remove of Literature (2006) and Of the Subcontract (2013). His most recent books include the co-edited collection, Post-Digital Cultures of the Far Right (2018). Recent and current exhibitions include shows at Transmediale (Berlin, 2018), Q21 (Vienna, 2018), MuHKA (Antwerp, 2018) and HMKV (Dortmund, 2019). From 2007-18 he co was co-editor of the independent publishing collective Information As Material. He is currently Associate Professor at the University of Leeds where he co-founded the Artists’ Writings & Publishing Research Centre andis a member of the Poetry Centre.

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