Entanglements

Karen Christopher and I will be visiting several UK cities in 2023 to entangle our recent book projects with performance, film and conversation with local artists. Details can be found here.

Interdisciplinary Futures

Our new interdisciplinary undergraduate programme has now launched. The MA in Interdisciplinary Futures is designed to help students develop knowledge and skills from across different disciplines in order to address complex social and global challenges. Students will gain key employability skills through collaborative experiences with different communities and partners. Recruiting now for September 2023.

Performance in the Field: Interdisciplinary practice-as-research

My new book, Performance in the Field: Interdisciplinary Practice-as-research, is now published by Palgrave Macmillan. This monograph shares my ‘performance fieldwork’ at sites including a museum, a cave and a nightclub. It brings together over ten years of performance research.

Deep Time and Future Pasts in Gully Cave

24 January 2023 – 23 February 2023. Online at the Scottish Society of Artists Viewing Room.

17 December 2022 – 10 January 2023. Royal Academy Buildings at the National Gallery, Princes Street, Edinburgh

A short film of our performance fieldwork at Ebbor Gorge in Somerset will be screened by Cutlog as part of an installation at the Scottish Society of Artists’ 130th Annual Exhibition.

I made the film with Laura Bissell, Helen Billinghurst, Jamie Lorimer and Phil Smith, with film makers Catherine Dunn and Jack Reed. It was funded by the Royal Society of Edinburgh’s Arts and Humanities Workshop Scheme. Thanks to Danielle Schreve for showing us how to travel through deep time.

Crossing disciplinary lines

Read my blog entry, co-written with Maddie Kurchik, on the University of Edinburgh’s Teaching Matters site: Crossing disciplinary lines: What is interdisciplinary learning really like?

My presentation at the University’s Learning and Teaching Conference is also online (co-presented with Andy Cross): Future Change Agents: Mapping interdisciplinary learning at Edinburgh Futures Institute

Hope Street Walk

Laura Bissell and I have created an audio walk for Hope Street in Glasgow.

This is a walk through Glasgow and into other places, for a fragile city in a precarious time, towards hope.

Written and performed by Laura Bissell and David Overend
Sound by Matthew Whiteside

Funding from Edinburgh Futures Institute

Creating Edinburgh: The interdisciplinary city

Created for a new course with Edinburgh Futures Institute, this digital resource explores the city of Edinburgh as a site for learning through several ‘field topics’ – from Literary and Performing Edinburgh to Decolonising and Sustainable Edinburgh.

Visit the site at edin.ac/creating-edinburgh

The course is now available as an Open Educational Resource here.

Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010-2020

Our new book is published this month by Triarchy Press. Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010-2020 collects essays, poems and blogs by me and Laura Bissell, along with various texts by many of our collaborators, collected over the course of 10 years of creative journeys.

We hosted a launch event at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland in Glasgow on 23rd September:

Making Routes Launch Event

Invitation to Making Routes Thursday 23 September at 7.00pm Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, 100 Renfrew Street, Glasgow, G2 3DB

Exactly 10 years after Making Routes launched in Glasgow, we are gathering together again as we embark on a new phase of our journey.  Held in partnership between the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland and the Edinburgh Futures Institute at the University of Edinburgh, the event starts at 7.00pm at RCS for a programme of performances and presentations on creative mobilities. At 8.30pm, we will then walk the length of Hope Street and raise a glass to another decade of journeys in performance.  The event will also celebrate the publication of our new book with Triarchy Press: Making Routes: Journeys in Performance 2010-2020. Copies of this will be available for sale on the evening.   We have invited some of the Making Routes contributors and collaborators to join the authors Laura Bissell and David Overend. These include Phil Smith and Helen Billinghurst (Crab & Bee), Sarah Hopfinger and Beverley Hood. These artists and researchers will help us think into the future of this project at a time when art and mobility are being radically revalued. Further details about the event and contact details for registration are available here.

Veterinary Studies interview

I was recently invited by Glen Cousquer to contribute to a course on Research Approaches Across Disciplines for the School of Veterinary Studies at the University of Edinburgh. We discussed my recent research on performing wild geographies and reflected on the value of working beyond our disciplines. An audio recording of our conversation is available here: