@afwilson
Undisciplined academic. Currently writing about inland mermaids, wetlands, politics, nationalism, and the environment. Sociology|Criminology|Folklore. Regular human, too. In spite of the current profile pic not much of a beer drinker.
I'm doing a short introduction to this on Sunday but that's not why you should come. You should come because it's an amazing film. There will be a discussion afterwards when you can tell me why I got it all wrong in my introduction. Click the link for details
www.derbyquad.co.uk/events/hiros...
March's Research Café should be fantastic! Featuring Professor Katharine Cox, Dr Ruth Larsen, and myself talking about Wuthering Heights as a film, as a novel, and its setting in the wild and sensual landscape. Thursday 19th March, 6.45pm #AcademicSky #EnvironmentalHumanities
v.gd/ETjstR
The 21st is, of course, Wednesday - you have a whole extra day to submit your paper proposal!
I love French new wave cinema and so I am completely delighted to be giving an introduction to Hiroshima Mon Amour as part of Derby QUAD's new wave season
www.derbyquad.co.uk/season-festi...
I have found the MCCT to be a convivial and supportive space for developing new work and new ideas with a broad and interdisciplinary crowd of international 'thought workers': academics, film makers, artists, activists, and anyone who draws on or is developing ideas in the critical theory tradition.
This year, Midlands Conference in Critical Thought will be held at the University of Warwick on May 21st and 22nd.
The deadline is fast approaching but please do consider submitting a paper even if it is a speculative or exploratory one. Perhaps especially so.
IMMINENT DEADLINE REMINDER:
Call for papers - MCCT Stream: (trickle, river, flood, wadi) Post-Anthropocene Scenes
Tuesday, 21st January. Details of this and other streams here: mcct.margins.org.uk
Amazingly, Zahawi only got round to deleting the below after the press conference announcing his defection to Reform.
As a flavour, these are last year's papers. Contributors were from beyond the Midlands and there was a comparable range of ideas
mcct.margins.org.uk/wp-content/u...
I went in 2024 (it was at NTU) and loved the variety of papers: from Brazilian psychoanalytic eco-literary analysis to the sociology of work today and many, many points inbetween. I found it supportive and convivial. So much so that myself and a colleague hosted 2025's iteration at Derby
Praxis is especially interesting in a dystopian kinda way, a network state waiting for physical territory to 'bring Mars to Earth':
techcrunch.com/2024/11/15/i...
It's always a good idea to follow the money. In this case Kobold Mining and Praxis
www.forbes.com/sites/martin...
Elon Musk has now the same opinions as the most extreme of the fascists
(my own stream within this)
free | nonhierarchical | dialogic
Activists, artists, academics, archivists: is this the conference you have been waiting for?
#academicsky
cfp deadline: 21st January
mcct.margins.org.uk
Until you looked you had none.
A photograph of a low, arched bridge over a river. Three arches are visible with a fourth arch concealed behind low hanging tree branches. The sky is a mostly cloud ranging in colour from white to dark grey. The river is low with the stony riverbed reveaaled in the left of the foreground. Current can be seen in the river between the two central arches.
Cromford Bridge. If you try and cross it after dark Crooker might take you to feed the River Derwent. I mentioned it writing about Derbyshire & Lincolnshire wetlands & the connecting rivers. The article is partly abt folklore, politics & ecological consciousness; hopefully published soon in Revenant
I'm really looking forward to activist and researcher Vanessa Boon's talk at this month's Research Café at the Quad in Derby
www.derbyquad.co.uk/events/resea...
Lovely, kind words from @lunatraktors.bsky.social - I cannot understand why I had not heard their music before. It is sublime!
Super hyped to be involved with this!
The book is concerned with unpacking and demonstrating how these ideas are claimed but also challenged and contested through ‘grassroots’ storytelling, everyday expressions of spiritual life, and the complex class histories of the telling and retelling of folklore.
These concerns are interwoven with disputes about nature as a resource for human exploitation or as a transcendent quality of life on Earth, often both. This is rendered more complex by the intersection of these disputes with a gendered and nominally indigenous claim to the land by ethnonationalists
If you're curious about what I'll be yapping about, this is a summary:
This book will provide the reader with a strong understanding of the way in which land, landscape, and the idea of nature have been central concerns of folklore and politicised forms of national culture in England.
Fake book cover
I am really happy to have signed a contract with Bloomsbury Academic for Mermaids, Waters, Places: Folklore, Politics, and Cultural Landscapes in England. (The 'cover' below is a fake I made while I was celebrating - the mermaid image is an open source image made by GDJ and distributed via Pixabay).
Amazing. That is pretty much a dream gig!
The next Research Cafe is 20th February and I will be picking up a thread that emerged in @malcschofield.bsky.social & David Sheffield's December talk and will be exploring the question, 'What is Hauntology?'
As ever, it is free but it helps if you book via: www.derbyquad.co.uk/events/resea...
I'm really looking forward to tonight's Research Cafe at Derby QUAD - Dr Julia Thomasz of the Institute for Advanced Study (UCL) talking about the importance of poetry in our lives and more widely. Free and at 7pm if you can make it.
CFP for Midlands Conference in Critical Thought extended to Monday 20 January. It is a free, non-hierarchical conference being held in Derby in April, 2025. Please see the linked document for more details.
static1.squarespace.com/static/64468...
Image of a description of the ethos of the MCCT it reads: The MCCT is an annual interdisciplinary conference that provides a forum for emergent critical scholarship, broadly construed. The conference is free for all to attend and follows a non-hierarchical model that seeks to foster opportunities for intellectual critical exchanges where all are treated equally regardless of affiliation or seniority. There are no plenaries, and the conference is envisaged as a space for those who share intellectual approaches and interests but who may find themselves at the margins of their academic department or discipline. The MCCT is an offshoot of the London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT) and shares its approach and ethos.
I'd particularly like to draw your attention to the stream I am co-convening with the excellent Dr Teodora Todorova - 'Critical Whiteness Studies'. There are 17 streams in total ranging across theory, politics, creativity, and healing.