Reminder- The Deadline for 300-word Abstracts is 24th June
Symposium
Creativity & Risk: Practices Of Learning To Leap Into The Unknown
Friday 6th September 2019, School of Performance
and Production, University of South Wales Cardiff, Cardiff Campus, ATRiuM
Call deadline: June 24th
“Encouraging creative risk-taking
among tertiary learners is evidently a complex pursuit. There is a clear need for educators to feel comfortable in allowing their students space and autonomy to take risks”. Dr. Phoebe Hart (2017)
This symposium critically examines the ways in which film and media production courses build appetite for risk-taking in their students' creative practice, from ideation
development to audio-visual realisation and though to post-production. Encouraging students to take risks can be especially challenging when students
feel pressured to prioritise the development of their perceived employability. With a risk-averse
attitude of a generation of students whose exposure to opportunities for creative exploration has become increasingly limited, many students arrive at university with little awareness of how applicable speculative
play can be.
Research by the likes of P. Paulus (2000), S.Yuhyung, E.Chanyoung (2014)
suggests students tend to be more open to risk-taking challenges in groups than individually. So, what teaching strategies might we encourage that can exploit this understanding? Might gender have a bearing on
how mixed groups of creative producers embrace risk-taking? In the multicultural setting of higher education, risk can mean different things to different students, so what flexible models of provocation can be designed to accommodate diverse interpretations
of risk-taking? In what ways might risk-taking in one’s own creative research inform innovative pedagogy and vice versa?
Themes for presentations may include:
Teaching creative risk
Application of research to experimental curriculum development
Experimentation and ethics
Media audiences
Creative risk and media industries
The symposium will enquire into how practitioner/educators working across a range of platforms, including broadcast, cinema, gallery and on-line presentation, in documentary and fiction filmmaking, digital performance,
set-design, animation embed risk in practice.
We welcome different approaches to research on risk-taking including education theory, film history, psychology and sociology, experimental film practice, philosophy
-- aesthetics and ethics.
We invite proposals for contributions to this symposium in the form of practical workshops, paper presentations, performances, screenings or oral papers that address the symposium theme from either theoretical
or empirical perspectives.
Registration fee £25 covers tea/coffee, lunch and wine reception.
We also have travel bursaries to facilitate postgraduate and non-affiliated artists/researchers attending the event, so please note on your proposal if you would like to be considered for a travel
bursary.
Please send proposals (300 words approx.) outlining the aim and form of presentation, along with a short biography to the symposium conveners: Inga Burrows ([log in to unmask])
and Deirdre Russell ([log in to unmask])
Keynote speaker John Giwa-Amu runs production company Red and Black Films. The company’s first feature, Little White Lies, won two BAFTA Cymru Awards & was BIFA nominated.
The Machine, selected from over 6,000 films, premiered in Tribeca and won three BAFTAs Cymru. The Party, directed by Sally Potter starring Cillian
Murphy won the Guild Prize at Berlin 2017, a BIFA and grossed $3.5m theatrically.
John has won the BBC Talent Award, is a Breakthrough Brit honouree, named a
Future Leader by Screen International & graduated from Inside Pictures.