About Cambridge Creative Research Conference 2024
The first annual Cambridge Creative Research Conference (CCRC) is on Saturday 26th October 2024, online via Zoom, at 10:00 – 17:00 BST.
It is a free online conference designed around participatory, inclusive and fun workshops to support participants to understand and use creative research methods, tools, concepts, frameworks, and processes. The conference has three strands: ‘Artistic expression and communication’, ‘Innovative approaches to knowledge creation’, and ‘Social context and identity’, and will also feature a keynote by Lucy Rycroft-Smith entitled ‘Value and values in creative research’.
Participants can also vote for workshops to receive three awards: most accessible and inclusive; most Innovative and creative; and most well-presented, which will be presented on the day. A certificate of attendance will be provided to all participants. Workshops will not be recorded. The conference is free of charge to attend.
ABOUT Writing in Community: Love and Desire as Pedagogic Practice (workshop by Linh S. Nguyễn)
The traditional western creative writing classroom follows a workshop format that alienates writers of colour, gesturing to the need for radically inclusive practices that shift dynamics of privilege and marginalization (Chavez, 2021). My research engages with anti-racist and decolonial methods to propose accessible ways of supporting diverse student writers who are historically excluded from institutions of learning. This workshop provides examples of pedagogic practices that treat art as process instead of product, with activities that rely on movement, pleasure, and honouring what surfaces unplanned (brown, 2017). Rather than using verbal prompts, I guide participants through exercises like map-making, list-building, and sketching feelings. These methods provoke attention to emergence, holding emotions, and embracing love and desire as ways of making knowledge in community (Lorde, 2018). In refusing to teach writing as a skill of grammar or diction (Strunk & White, 1999), I reject a Cartesian mind/body split in favour of embodied pedagogy. With these practices, students can approach creativity on their own terms, with intentions that differ from those outlined by institutions of learning; participatory methods allow students to be co-constructors of their arts education and learning communities. I build on my experience in arts facilitation and adapt successful practices derived from physical theatre (Lecoq et al., 2019), feminist studies (hooks, 2014 and Lorde, 2018), and emergence (brown, 2017). My workshop will be of interest to educators and students interested in how pedagogies from non-western and anti-imperialist communities can dismantle dominant learning traditions within education.