ARIEL's Critical Conversation Forum

Mathelinda Nabugodi, Critique as Practice

Mathelinda is Programme Director for the Creative Critical Writing / Inquiry PhD programmes in SELCS-CMII. While these programmes have a prehistory dating back to the mid-2010s, they were 're-launched' in 2024, at which point she took over the PD role. In this talk, Mathelinda will reflect on her experience after two years as PD, focusing on the potential applicants who get in touch, what kind of questions and expectations they have, and challenges they face. She will also discuss writing as practice - contrasts, similarities, distinctions from other practice-based disciplines.

Mathelinda Nabugodi is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at University College London. Her creative critical research explores the connections between European culture and the Black Atlantic world: her new project, provisionally called Nordic Noir, examines Scandinavian involvement in the transatlantic slave economy from the seventeenth century onwards.

Annie Davey, Collaborative Practice-led Projects

Annie will discuss the affordances of practice-based research and the ways it can slip between and butt up against disciplines to open new perspectives by way of recent research exploring the politics of AI using analogue materials (Ways of [Machine] Seeing) and scriptwriting as a method for reflexive thinking in fine art pedagogy (The School of Fine Arts as Sitcom). She will also reflect on the teaching of practice in light of work with students with diverse prior educational experiences on the MA Art Education, Culture and Practice, a studio-based programme located within a social science institution, with an emphasis on the conditions in which it can be inhibited and can thrive.

Annie Davey is Lecturer in Art Culture and Education in the Department of Culture, Communication & Media. Her work sits across art and pedagogy. She has worked in galleries, further education and art schools and is currently Course Leader of the MA Art Education Culture and Practice at UCL Institute of Education, which this year celebrates 50 years of teaching practice-based research with teachers, artists and educators.

Yeoryia Manolopoulou, Design Research

Yeoriya will discuss the Bartlett Design Research Folios and the role of design research as a vital and generative agent in the creation of exceptional projects in the fields of architecture, landscape, urbanism, and design. By valuing design as research and research as design, this influential open-access project aims to transform academic frameworks and the definition and culture of architecture at large. In the last decade, the publication has grown to two series, comprising of 66 volumes in total.

Yeoryia Manolopoulou is an architect and a pioneer in developing the field of design research in architecture. She is Professor of Architecture and Experimental Practice at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, its former Research Director (2011-2023) and current Design Director. She is the author of Architectures of Chance (Routledge 2013) and Losing Myself (Venice Biennale 2016), and the Founder and Lead Editor of the Bartlett Design Research Folios (UCL 2008-2022).

Tom Western, Doing Creative Geographies (Or, how to sneak the art school into the social sciences)

Tom will reflect on various attempts to bring creative practice approaches into research and teaching in the Faculty of Social and Historical Sciences. Drawing on a background of studying music in art school environments, then figuring out how to transpose this into work in a Geography department, the talk draws upon efforts to build arts-based methods and forms of assessment into teaching at undergraduate and masters levels; working with colleagues on the practice-based PhD pathway in Geography; and collaborations with arts organisations at both grassroots and large institutional levels. In different ways, all this work is about making spaces where creative practice isn’t some weird outlier or limited to people who self-identify as artists, but is something vital, open, undisciplined, collective, participatory, and pointed towards social and spatial justice.

Tom Western is a Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at UCL. His work builds creative geographies that seek to imagine futures beyond the colonial past and present. Tom works primarily in Athens, where he’s involved in various forms of collective research. He regularly produces spatial art-research pieces – gathered together on his website undercartographies.city – that offer illuminations of Athenian and Mediterranean histories, geographies, movements and relations.

Szilvia Ruszev, Uncomputable (Arts-led critical AI practice)

Szilvia will discuss attempts to bring arts-led, critical, and practice-based approaches into research and teaching on generative AI. Drawing on a background in filmmaking and screen studies, and working across creative practice and critical AI studies, the talk considers how artistic experimentation can function as a mode of inquiry into their epistemologies, infrastructures, and imaginaries. Focusing on the concept of the uncomputable, Szilvia explores how developing creative-critical methods engaging with generative AI to produce audiovisual artefacts can expose the limits, frictions, and exclusions embedded in data-driven systems. Drawing on transdisciplinary methods that weave together film making practice, generative AI, and relational pedagogy, Szilvia’s recent research experiments with non-linear, emergent forms of learning to rethink how creative practitioners and practice-based researchers can approach increasingly opaque AI systems. Creative practice is framed here as method, critique, and intervention—an active site for negotiating responsibility, authorship, and imagination in the age of generative systems.

Szilvia Ruszev is a media practitioner and Lecturer in Fiction Film at UCL. Her interdisciplinary research interest is situated in the fields of screen studies and critical AI, intersecting various methodologies of a creative-critical praxis. Some of the recurring themes in her research are sensuous knowledge, expanded montage theories, and politics of post-cinema with a specific focus on the entanglement of networked technologies, capitalism and representation of social categories such as race, class and gender. She is the Principal Investigator of the AHRC/BRAID (Bridging Responsible AI Divides) funded ‘Shared Post-Human Imagination’ research investigating responsible AI in the context of media production.

ARIEL is a hub for intellectual exploration and exchange between academics of all disciplines and artists of all genres in the creative and cultural industries. ARIEL is a collaboration between UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and UCL School of Creative and Cultural Industries (SCCI).

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