ONGOING EVENTS
In a search for the virtual pitch
When the Skin is Thin
From 1st of September 2016
Silent Evenings
From 6th of September 2016
Thinking in Darkening Times
From 7th of September 2016
In a way, The Orion Grid is a contemporary return to Plato's academia, taking a road via the values of the 1960s Liberation Movement. As Fisher (2015) says, the Liberation Movement was not only about rights, social justice and solidarity; the Liberation Movement was also about peace, serenity and love and this was somehow lost in the struggle. The Left and the progressive social science of the twenty-first century, he says, need to recover this positivity of their roots and to enable people to bring power and energy back to their own lives.
The events I offer aim to countervail what Fisher calls "the time overloads and mass production of anxiety" of today, by enhancing people’s use of their minds and by a democratisation of accessing their inner and outer worlds. Taking a careful note of the failed psychedelia of the 1960s, I am exploring a road for a consistent search in developing methodologies to perfect the whole range of activities of the mind. The events are designed to foster a range of modalities of thinking such as reflection, use of reflexivity, mindfulness, understanding, judgement, will, story telling and so on. The events work with a broad range of modes of being of the mind such as dreaming, creativity, unconscious phantasy and lucid fantasy (and other ways of using images and imagery) and how those link to relatedness and relationships.
The ultimate purpose is mobilising the group dynamics to increase our capacity for a meaningful action in our personal and professional roles, an action based on us being allowed to become better drafts of ourselves, in service of building a better world.
Tailored reading and other material (working notes, a learning log, videos, blogs, etc) will be provided following each session to link to discussions of experiences and cases, to assist in sense making, to facilitate work between sessions and to prepare for the next session. The texts below are recommended as a means of setting up the scene.
Recommended reading
On working with self
Watts, L. Managing self in role: using multiple methodologies to explore self-construction and self governance, Ch. 10 in Clarke, S. and P. Hoggett (eds), 2009, Researching Beneath the Surface: Psycho-social research methods in practice, Karnac.
Butler, J. An account of oneself, Chapter 1 in Butler, J. 2005 Giving an Account of Oneself, Fordham University Press.
Benson, C. Childhood, responsibility and acquiring powers to place oneself as a moral agent, Ch.8 in Benson, C. 2001 The cultural psychology of self: place, morality and art in human worlds, Routledge.
On working in the (inter)organisational domain
Trist, E. (1979) Referent Organizations and the Development of Inter-Organizational Domains. A distinguished lecture to the Academy of Management (Organization and Management Theory Division) 39th Annual Convention, Atlanta, Georgia, 1979. Published in Human Relations, 36:269-84, 1983.
Strati, A. Organisational aesthetics, experience and plausibility, Ch. 1 in Strati, A. 1999 Organisation and Aesthetics, Sage Publications.
Sher, M. In search of the “structure that reflects”: promoting organisational reflection practices in UK health authorities, in Sher, M. 2013 The dynamics of change, Karnac.
Armstrong, D. Emotions in organisations: disturbance or intelligence?, in Armstrong, D. 2005 Organisation in the mind: psychoanalysis, group relations and organisational consultancy, The Tavistock Clinic Series.
Armstrong, D. The analytic object in organisational work, in Armstrong, D. 2005 Organisation in the mind: psychoanalysis, group relations and organisational consultancy, The Tavistock Clinic Series.
On working at the societal level
Grosz, E. Refiguring bodies, Introduction, in E. Grosz 1994 Volatile bodies: toward a corporeal feminism, Indiana University Press
Alexandrov, H. Experiencing knowledge: the vicissitudes of a research journey, in Clarke, S. and P. Hoggett 2009 Researching beneath the surface: psycho-social research methods in practice, Karnac
Beedell, , P. Charting the clear waters and the murky depths,, in Clarke, S. and P. Hoggett 2009 Researching beneath the surface: psycho-social research methods in practice, Karnac.
Froggett, L. Artistic output as inter-subjective third, in Clarke, S., Hahn, H. and P. Hoggett (eds) 2008 Object relations and Social Relations, Karnac.
Foucault, M. Opening a few corpses, Ch. 8 in Foucault, M. 1963, The birth of the clinic: the archeology of medical perception, Routledge.
Bauman, Z. Emancipation, Ch. 1 in Bauman, Z. Liquid modernity, Polity.
On working at the aesthetic domain and beyond
Arendt, H. (1954) Concern with Politics in Recent European Thought, lecture.
Borges, J.L.The lottery in Babylon, in Boges, J.L. 1964 Labyrinths: selected stories and other writings, Penguin Classics.
Brown, W. Thinking in time: an epilogue on ethics and politics, in Scott, J. and E. Weed (eds) 2011 The question of gender: critical feminism, Indiana University Press.
Armstrong, D. The Authority of the Dream, Paper presented at “The Dreaming Consultant”: In Memory of W. Gordon Lawrence, Israel 11-12 December 2014, published in Socioanaysis V0l 17 2015 pp1-11.
Other useful material
Examined Life: philosophy is in the streets, a film by Astra Taylor, ICA films