TCCE is delighted to announce its summer symposium: Refresh, Reboot, Retool: new imaginaries for challenging times. Bringing together academics, artists, creatives, policy-makers and people from other sectors, Refresh Reboot, Retool: new imaginaries for challenging times sets out to create a space in which to encourage, debate, conversation, play, knowledge exchange and co-creation about some of our most important contemporary challenges including: politics, diversity, identity, place and environment.

Contributors will include:

Event Chair: Colin Grant (Author and Historian)

Alice Black (Director, Design Museum)

Ruth Catlow (Co-Director, Furtherfield)

Emma Dick (Middlesex University)

Duckie

Greenwich Welcomes Action Group

Nick Makoha (Poet),

Professor Toby Miller

Kasia Molga (Artist)

Nick Makoha (Poet),

Mark Prest (Curator and Founding Director, Portraits of Recovery)

Michaela Jones (National Recovery Community Development Officer, Scottish Recovery Consortium)

Caroline Russell (London Assembly Member, Green Party)

The BeatFreeks Collective - Free Radical

Tony White (Author)

More information

At a point where our futures feel arguably increasingly uncertain and volatile, and where atmospheres of anxiety are pervasive, Refresh, Reboot, Retool: new imaginaries for challenging times provides a space to take time to talk, take stock and reflect on how we might imagine and indeed create conditions for positive change. With plenary sessions, panel discussions, workshops and a walk, this event sets out to act as a space where questions on the creative possibilities as well as the civic duties and responsibilities of institutions and organisations can be mooted.

Furthermore it invites us to consider how we might sensitise ourselves to the needs of seemingly diffuse and disparate, yet intensely related issues and concerns, such as identity and environment? How might we do this better and what is that we need in order to do so? Knowledge, imagination, generosity, tenacity, new ways of working/seeing or hearing, abilities to affect or mobilise change, abilities to reset, withdraw and reboot? Such are the questions that will be attempted. We cordially invite you to join us but we can only guarantee that we will leave with more questions than we start with.

After the symposium, delegates are invited to stay with us for the launch of TCCE’s new report Revealing Collaborative Values that documented our recently completed project, National Academics and Creatives Exchange (The Exchange), funded by ACE and HEFCE between 2015 - 2017.

TCCE (and its previous iteration LCACE) works at the forefront of curating events, festivals, projects and collaborative initiatives that bring together research, the arts and other fields as appropriate around issues of mutual concern and possibility. Refresh, Reboot, Retool is a window into our work, seeking to enquire how best, by working together and sharing our knowledge, skills, networks and creativity, we can achieve positive change.

Download the symposium programme here.

Evelyn Wilson and Suzie Leighton, Co-directors TCCE