Critical Poetics research group hosts writing workshops at this year’s UNESCO Creative Cities network in Katowice

The academics have taken last year’s successful Re:Vision workshop series to Krakow

Image courtesy of Jo Dixon

The Critical Poetics Research Group at Nottingham Trent University have this month travelled to Katowice, Poland, to deliver four workshops as part of their Re:Vision project. The group includes BA (Hons) English lecturers Sarah Jackson and Dan Cordle, as well as academics Jo Dixon and Becky Cullen.

The group delivered four workshops as part of this year’s UNESCO Creative Cities Network annual meeting ‘Creative Crossroads’, which took place in City of Music Katowice. The cross-disciplinary workshops, inspired by literature, music, visual arts and film, explored a diverse range of issues from surveillance culture to nuclear technologies.

After the previous success of the Re:Vision series, which was hosted at Nottingham’s Broadway Cinema in 2017, the group were encouraged to continue their work. The workshops were open to local participants from the public and were open to all abilities, including people with no previous experience of writing.

The series aims to explore our contemporary experience through literature and film. It offers new opportunities for writing and thinking creatively and critically about current issues. The themes of the workshops included; locating ‘home’ in a globalised world, exploring nuclear futures, surveillance culture and connections between the human and non-human environment.

Dr Sarah Jackson told us: "It was an honour to be invited to UNESCO Creative Crossroads in Katowice. Inspired by contemporary themes from migration to the mobile phone, our ‘Re:Vision’ workshops encourage writers of all levels to find new ways to think, talk and write about our changing planet. In Katowice, we were delighted to work with writers from Canada, Italy, Australia and Poland and look forward to continuing cross-cultural conversations through collaborative writing projects later this year."

Feedback from workshop participants referred to a 'positive atmosphere' and 'inspiring, deep discussions'. They reported that they particularly enjoyed the writing exercises, and that they found the use of different art forms (music, text, image and film) especially productive for inspiring new writing and cross-cultural debate. They commented on the enthusiasm of the workshop leaders and described the group discussions as 'helping to open my mind to others' perspectives'.