Book launch : Textual Actants (Infrastructure) w/ readings and discussion

Adam Walker will be joined in conversation by Susannah Thompson, Laura Haynes, and Nell Osborne, who will also give readings of their work.

See below for speaker biographies.

Textual Actants is a reflexive exploration of the things which hold things together, be they lengths of steel, programming protocols, recognised authors, or narratives of self. It pivots from the steel I-beam, and a pilgrimage to the steelworks in Wallonia that first made them, to the on-screen ‘I-beam’ cursor by which we navigate digital text. Via the supposed blankness of deserts and the techno-utopian imaginaries of Silicon Valley, six interweaving texts attend to the slippery shifting relations of textualities and materialities, and where bodies and subjects (and authors and readers) sit within these.

Running order:

4:00pm Welcome and Introduction

4:15 - 5:00pm Readings

5:00 - 6:00pm Discussion and Q&A

6:00-7:00pm Refreshments, informal conversation.

‘You won’t read this and Adam Walker hasn’t authored it. Instead, and together, you’ll be in this book, mapping, systematising and modelling—forming it from the material world’s governances, its archives and philosophies of such. This is a generous work for thinkers who will notice a baton being passed, and roll up their sleeves.’
Roy Claire Potter

‘Proceeding by drift and detour, by breakdown and rearrangement, in prose at once spare and restless, Walker takes us through deserts both material and imagined, through post-industrial ruins and mirrored dreamscapes, through the infrastructures that hold our texts and the texts that hold our infrastructures. The result is a lucid derangement: a meditation on art, labour, history, and exhaustion, where nothing stands alone and nothing quite falls.’
Frank Wasser

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SPEAKERS

Adam Walker is an artists and writer. Their practice is research-led, critically and reflexively considering structures of inequality, not least their own complicit position amid these. Text sits at the centre of their practice, including its extensions into digital terrains as code and data. Interruption and impropriety are sought: subtexts and counter-texts that interrupt dominant textual flows. The works are sometimes written, other times they spill into performance, moving-image and digital forms, and have been exhibited, performed, published and commissioned by institutions including the Serpentine, ICA, Tate and Tyneside Cinema. Their monograph Art, Labour, Text and Radical Care was published by Routledge in 2023.

Susannah Thompson is an art historian, writer and critic, and Professor of Art History and Criticism at Manchester School of Art, MMU. Her research follows three (often interconnecting) paths: feminist art history; Scottish art; art writing and creative criticism. Recent projects have focussed on Scottish women artists who write, including Maud Sulter, Cordelia Oliver and Joan Eardley. Alongside her academic research, she has worked as a freelance art writer and critic since 2000, publishing features, reviews and articles in the specialist press including Artforum, Art Review, Burlington Contemporary, Flash Art, MAP, Modern Painters, Sight and Sound, Variant and many more, and for artists, museums and galleries. Current projects include a catalogue essay on the work of Scottish painter Steven Campbell, an article on artist-led publishing in Scotland from the 1980s, and a monograph on the work of Maud Sulter.

Laura Haynes is a writer, editor and academic. She was co-director of MAP magazine (2011 – 2024) and at The Glasgow School of Art is leader of the studio-based interdisciplinary MLitt Art Writing programme, where she also edits The Yellow Paper: Journal for Art Writing. Laura’s writing and research is concerned with autotheory and biomythography as poetics for critique. Publishing internationally, and across various forms, her work is published in journals including MuseMedusa: Revue de Littérature et D’Art Modernes and Journal for Writing in Creative Practice, and magazines and presses including Sternberg, Freelands Foundation, Nothing Personal and MAP. With Susannah Thompson, she was co-editor of ‘Art Writing, Paraliterature and Intrepid Forms of Practice’, a special issue of the Journal for Writing in Creative Practice. She is currently working on her first novel, The Quick.

Nell Osborne is a poet, novelist and researcher of feminism and experimental writing. From 2018–20, she co-ran the Manchester-based experimental feminist reading series No Matter, commissioning new work from writers including Anne Boyer and Lisa Robertson. She completed her doctoral research at The University of Manchester, focused on writers including Ann Quin and Kathy Acker. She co-edited Gestures: a body of work, a cross-disciplinary anthology on gesture and feminist practice (2025). In 2024, she published the poetry pamphlet Thank You For Everything (Monitor Books). In 2025, she published her debut novel, Ghost Driver (Moist Books). Daisy LaFarge calls Ghost Driver ‘addictively morbid, comic and discomfortingly familiar’.

Refreshments will be available.

Copies of Textual Actants (Infrastructure) will be available for purchase.

This event is hosted by the Visual Culture Research Group, and made possible with support from AHEAD (Arts and Humanities Engagement and Dialogue).

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Host or Publisher Manchester Centre for Linguistics Research