Making Meaning through the Miscellaneous

Name: Making Meaning through the Miscellaneous
Start: 2025-03-30T11:00:00+01:00
End: 2025-03-30T12:30:00+01:00
Location: Crescent Arts Centre, 2-4 University Road, Belfast BT7 1NH

Schedule

Sun Mar 30 2025 at 11:00 am to 12:30 pm

UTC+01:00

Location

Crescent Arts Centre, 2-4 University Road, Belfast BT7 1NH | Belfast, NI

Join us and create your own commonplace book using a selection of textual and visual materials and ephemera
This workshop will introduce you to the historical practice of commonplacing. In times gone by, people collected, recorded and extracted meaningful fragments from the world around them and placed them into a physical book. These books are as various and idiosyncratic as the people who created them and are characterised by a fragmentary, nonlinear form. They provide a way to combine and digest quotes, maxims, remedies, excerpts and newspaper clippings in one place and to do so in bits of time, around other obligations.
Join Leonie Hannan and Liza Thompson to begin creating your own commonplace book using a selection of textual and visual materials and ephemera. Together, we will unleash commonplacing’s creative, collaborative and political possibilities in the twenty-first century. By transporting this centuries-old habit into a contemporary context we will speak to three timely issues:
Time : under neoliberalism, our time is reconceived in terms of productivity and profit. Time is also gendered and relates to the presence of caring responsibilities. As commonplacing can be done in small pockets of time, it can create a sense of possibility and become a mode of resistance.
Resistance : Drawing upon Howard Caygill’s On Resistance: A Philosophy of Defiance (Bloomsbury, 2013) we will consider commonplacing as a method of thinking about the self as an important site of resistant living.
Materiality : The workshop draws upon ‘object-oriented ontology’ - viewing material things as having ‘life’ and the ability to act in the world. The physical compiling of a commonplace book also relates to, and contrasts with, the everyday practices that take place online e.g. following, tagging and collecting diverse media. We will explore the difference it makes when we make connections in a physical format.
Workshop leads:
Leonie Hannan is an historian at Queen’s University Belfast who researches the way ‘ordinary’ people in the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries built communities of learning and made knowledge. She is a specialist in life-writing, gender and material culture.
Liza Thompson is a senior publisher at Bloomsbury working in the field of philosophy and critical theory. She has delivered many book projects on themes relevant to this workshop, including the Why Philosophy Matters and Object Lessons book series.
Age 18+