Returning Here After Being There: Part Two
May's Open Space session was billed as having five presentations, but after three brilliant ones we were satiated, and needed our remaining time to process and respond. July's space Returns Here...once again, completing the anticipated presentations from members of University of Edinburgh's Centre for Creative-Relational Inquiry who have been writing around themes of writing, loss, absence and presence. The two presentations we return for are:
Fiona Murray, The silent absent: on the exhausted self
The only sound I hear is the sound of my breath, my cat’s miaow.
I am lost inside.
Alone.
But I will sleep as soon as this abstract is written.
Because I am exhausted.
Burnt myself off the page.
This paper writes into and from the exhausted self from the understanding that this self is a political subject (Chaudhary, 2019). This paper works with Berlant’s concept of “crisis-shaped subjectivity” in a bid to find some sense of empowerment, from a place of depletion.
Jonathan Wyatt, The breaking body: Everyday tales of the lost and found
A paper on how a(n ageing, White, male) body breaks, how it might (or might not) heal, what a body in its everyday movements remembers, knows, conveys, carries, mourns; about what is lost but present. Bringing to the page the everyday poetics and prosaics of the struggling, soaring, body, and the legacies it holds, it will be a paper that looks for creative-relational possibilities for writing the in/corporeal.