Teaching

Art and Capitalist Life (Year 3 Hons)

This course is concerned with artists’ engagement with ‘capitalist life’, in all its complex, tangled and hidden aspects.  Moving from the late 1960s to the present day, the syllabus tracks a persistent demand for the negotiation and documentation of social realities across a range of diverse practices; from performance and participatory approaches through to sound, lens-based and digital media. Asking what is caught by the term ‘capitalist life’ we structure our discussions around specific themes including time and the working day, domestic labour, racial infrastructures, housing struggles, healthcare, sex and intimacy.  

Curating Contemporary Art: Histories, Theories and Practice (Year 4 Hons)

This course addresses the rise of the curator as a creative figure from the late 1960s to the present day.  It offers Year 4 students an opportunity to consider the histories and theories of contemporary art from an alternative perspective that focuses on the contexts of production, mediation and display. Topics examined include curatorial labour and agency, artists’ appropriation of curatorial strategies, attention economies, biennial culture and the hegemony of the group exhibition, experimental institutions, curating ‘immaterial’ practice (discursive and non-object-based art) as well as the specific issues pertaining to collections of contemporary art.

The Need to Document: Contemporary Art from Performance to Biopolitics (Postgraduate Taught)

This course focuses on the deployment of lens-based documentary strategies by artists from the 1960s to the present day including photography, film and video.  Though the compulsion to document has undoubtedly taken on new levels of urgency since 1990, it is certainly not a new concern within contemporary art.  Incorporating an examination of performance practices, ‘global conceptualism’, the politics of representation under postmodernism and the complexities of art’s recent ‘biopolitical’ and ‘documentary’ turns, we will analyse the decisive role that lens-based documentation has played in the heterogeneous intersections between art and life in the 20th and 21st centuries. 

Guided Research Placement (Postgraduate Research)

Experiential learning is an important part of the MSc by Research in Collections and Curating Practices. This 60-credit course is designed to interlock with the core course ‘Collections: Theories Practices and Methods’. The activities and assessments will encourage students to read across these courses, giving them opportunities to construct, synthesise and apply their understandings in a sector context. Our goal is to create a learning environment through which students can tackle ‘real world’ problems in a project framework that enables them to experiment, generate critical reflection and shape their future practice. 

In Week 1 students are set a brief developed by one of our partner institutions.  They are asked to work collaboratively in a small group to deliver and evaluate the project over two semesters.  Though they are given a high degree of autonomy, seminars, assignments and assessments provide a supportive framework to help guide their development. 

Relationality, Creative Practice and Education (Postgraduate Taught)

Co-taught with Dr Andrea English for Edinburgh Futures Institute.

This course critically responds to the present, and potential future, realities of data-driven education systems by interrogating the ethical and political dimensions of debates on datafication in educational contexts as well as by proposing ways to foster inclusive, relational education futures.

Developed across the School of Education and Edinburgh College of Art, it provides students with a space for imagining possible futures of education through the lens of ‘relationality’. The concepts of ‘relationality’ and specifically ‘listening within educational relationships’ – both of which are currently developed within the fields of educational philosophy, art history and art practice – offer ways of understanding education as grounded in human relationships. As such, these ideas provide a critical lens for students to examine possible counter-narratives to the current cultures of measurement and datafication in education. Students expand their critical and creative capacities through interdisciplinary engagement with arts-based approaches, the University’s remarkable Art Collection as well as with professional creative practitioners. The flexible project-led assessment model can be tailored to fit the context of either students’ own programme pathway or professional lives.