Business as usual: Listening to the unconscious of collaborative practice

“The power of the commons is to point to a way to view what’s broken in sociality, the difficulty of convening a world conjointly, although it is inconvenient and hard” — Lauren Berlant

Our research seeks to direct attention towards the inconveniences, the frictions and the unspoken of collective practice. How can these be brought to light in a way that is generative and transformative? What are the conditions that enable group dynamics to be made conscious and how can the associated labour be fairly distributed? We are particularly interested in the subconscious desires for consensus, harmony, positivity, politeness and smoothness that attempt to hide the “messed up yet shared and ongoing infrastructures of experience” (Berlant).

Business as usual study group

We will be hosting a series of study/reading group sessions, both online and in person.

The first three sessions will explore anger in groups and collaborations: the ways it is made use of, suppressed, distributed, experienced, and transformed.

Session 1: Mid-August, in-person in Berlin Session 2: September 11, online Session 3: October 25th, online