Idleness - CMCW Research Day Event

Time:: 10:00
Date:: 24 January 2024
Venue:: Avenue, Building 65 (LTA)

Event details

We warmly invite staff, postgraduates and undergraduates to attend the IDLENESS research day, hosted by the Centre for Modern and Contemporary Writing (CMCW). Brilliant colleagues will deliver papers, panels, roundtables and performances on the subject of idleness.

10am: Welcome and coffee

10.15–11am: Day dreaming
A panel on dreams, trauma and the imagination in Holocaust literature and film
• Anoushka Alexander-Rose, Emily-Rose Baker and Devorah Baum

11am–12.15pm: Not working
• Kristen Schuster-- More than human leisure
• Isaac Fravashi-- Cut-up and unwork
• Mike Bastin-- The “lying flat” movement: younger Chinese generations and idleness
• Fares Moussa-- Everything we do is one heroic effort towards being more idle

12.15–1pm: Lunch

1–1.30pm: Repeating yourself
A participatory performance-presentation on animating idleness
• Louise Siddons and Adam Procter

1.30–2pm: Being lazy
A panel about the academic working day and the nagging spectre of laziness
• Joanna Nissel, Isaac Fravashi and Joey Jones

2–3.15pm: Wasting time
• Nicky Marsh-- Purposelessness
• Ranka Primorac-- Ezeulu’s goatskin bag: idling plots and African realisms
• Rhys Lawrence-- Spatial-ghosts: new nature writing’s failure to adapt to modern ecology
• Jess Payn-- “Loitering in flirty talk”: the promise of idle intimacy in Isherwood’s A Single Man

3.15–3.30pm: Break

3.30–4.45pm: Nothing gained
• Amin Mostajir-- Courage through idleness
• Matt West-- Quit Quiet Quite: A path of renunciation
• Toby Litt-- Zazen: A beginner's guide to sitting doing nothing
• Sarah Hayden-- Fallow in the field