A Working Document for Reading Groups.

Through the Ends of Knowledge network, we will be running many different kinds of events – but also, given the network’s research focus, we hope to conduct self-reflexive investigations into the kinds of event which the contemporary university produces.

For a long time, I’ve been interested in how the reading group acts as both a gathering for knowledge (and knowledge’s “producers”) but also, significantly, a location of respite within humanities and social science disciplines. The reading group is often positioned as a discursive vantage point from which the intellectual work of coming together can occur. This can be in ways that feel relieving, or which feel like they are attending to some threatened art/technique of researching that the contemporary material conditions of the university compel its researchers away from.

Structuring conditions: we are so exhausted all the time, so threatened by the possibility of personal and professional failure. One of the ways that academics mitigate this risk is to implicitly train ourselves in the art of regulating the possibility of encounter. How, day-to-day, do we survive transformation? What floodgates do we set up to re-route the flow of new knowledges which could, might, should unseat hard-earned expertise?

The reading group, then, is where we come into triangulated contact with three porous-fluid objects (the text, each other, ourselves). Hardened, we find it hard to bend, to lean towards the unlearning which even the humble reading group requires of us.

This, often, contributes toward those difficult early moments of any reading group session where some hard-to-define unthinkingness permeates a stifled atmosphere. There is a tendency to view these silences as disasters for the individual or, worse, an opportunity for the individualist. I’ve made the mistake of telling students that “I don’t believe in awkward silences, only silences where you internally scream “this is awkward!”” I think these days I would say something closer along the lines to that groupwork really is groupwork, that the art of reading together is something like co-composition, that the responsibility for conversation lays across the filaments of our body-minds and on no one in particular.

‘Clean set-up’ is a technique used by practitioners of facilitation, which can sometimes help groups drawn from those with diverse backgrounds to come together in productive ways. I was taught it by Mary Robson, who holds the unique position of an ‘in-house Creative Facilitator’ at the Institute for Medical Humanities at the University of Durham. It’s a way of setting up communal ground rules, gaining a sense of where people are coming from and what they want, and (if all goes well) creates a nice, non-directive vibe to help put people at ease.

I used a variation of it at the start of our first ever Ends of Knowledge reading group session, which was held on the Thursday 20th October 2022, 5pm-6:30pm (BST).

I asked, in turn, several questions – inviting responses from the group.

 The answers to these questions, offered in response and in relation to our first reading group session form something of a first draft of guidelines to conduct our Ends of Knowledge encounters. It will change and adapt as our network changes and adapts and transforms.

1. What do you want this reading group to be like, and what do you want this reading group to be for?

• To gain greater understanding of the medical humanities.

• To understand more about the critical turn of medical humanities.

• For the group to be friendly.

• To learn and explore about how disciplinary gaps and points come to exist.

• Engaging with how medical humanities is going on the ground.

• To be inspired by the readings, especially their relation to chronicity.

2. What can you do to help the reading group be like this, and achieve these goals?

• To be respectful of each other’s ideas and opinions.

• To be open-minded.

• To gain awareness of the hidden curricula (which was learnt about from Noreen Masud’s work).

• To really attend to how knowledge is located in the university.

• To trace how different perspectives come to be.

3. What can I do, as reading group chair, to make sure we all work towards making the reading group like this?

• To continue bringing interest readings to our attention.

• Create space for new thoughts.

• Be relaxed.

• Listen carefully to what everyone has to say.

This is a beginning – more a set of enactive instructions (like code or a recipe or some manual for a ritual) than a plain set of replicable knowledge. I’m very grateful to our first Ends of Knowledge reading group attendees for setting such a wonderful tone for our first conversations.

As ever, more soon.

Jamie.

This is the photograph used for the cover of the book Ideas Arrangements Effects: Systems Design and Social Justice by Design Studio for Social Intervention (DS4SI). Link here: https://www.ds4si.org/bookshop/ideas-arrangements-effects-systems-design-and-social-justice-paperback-book

The photograph is by Judith Leeman, whilst the illustration of Ideas —Arrangements — Effects which is attached to this blog post thumbnail is on p. 19. All of the book’s illustrations are by by Ayako Maruyama and Jeffrey Yoo Warren.