The Oxford-Uppsala cluster: second convening

A creative exercise.

Oxford colleagues from the Oxford-Uppsala Culture & Creativity Research Cluster visited Uppsala at the end of April. This was a reciprocal visit following the visit which Uppsala researchers made to Oxford in November 2024  – click here to read about it.  

The intensive three-day programme developed and hosted by Uppsala’s CIRCUS Director Claes-Fredrick Helgesson and his colleagues cemented and developed our close partnerships across disciplinary boundaries. We participated in a series of creative exercises designed to disrupt and challenge our usual practices and place us in different spaces.  We developed shared ideas and potential projects which engaged broadly in the relationship between creativity, culture, the arts and technology. 

The visit made deliberate use of different university spaces to challenge and disrupt our perspectives. The immersive experience in the university’s historic scientific sites (the Observatory and the Anatomy Theatre, site of dissections) proved particularly challenging, educative and at times even uncomfortable, placing us outside our traditional ‘comfort zone’.  

Conversations on Creativity vol. 1: Monstrosity 

We worked together to edit, arrange and illustrate our co-written pamphlet Conversations on Creativity vol. 1: Monstrosity. The volume, which draws together generically diverse short form pieces centred on the theme of monstrosity, has shown how creative/critical boundaries become porous when colleagues feel liberated from the expectations of conventional academic formats. The pamphlet, to which our ten scholars from Uppsala and Oxford have contributed, experiments with a range of forms, some of them analytical, others narrative, poetic, and personal/autobiographical. This dimension of the shared creative process was explored in a mediated conversation in the Humanities lecture theatre run by Matthew Reynolds and Claes-Frderick Helgesson on what creativity means within an academic context and how it can be expressed by both orthodox and unorthodox means.

The completed pamphlet will be published in June. It explores a rich range of subjects, particularly the boundaries between the human and the non-human, from traditional mythology (mermaids, the Great Silkie, witches) to the monstrous relationships between humans and machines, extending to a conversation with different AI models asking them to contemplate their own ‘monstrosity’. 

The Cluster members at the University library collections

To support and inspire this work the Uppsala team put on a tour of the beautiful and historic University Library.  A display of illustrations from early modern text books on monstrosity (some of them making for uncomfortable viewing) provoked us into further thought on the relationship between the human, the scientific and the monstrous. Prof. Maja Bondestam gave us a fascinating lecture on her work on monstrosity.  

Future plans 

The visit gave time and space for cluster members to identify and hone in on synergies between their research areas. Current research areas identified for future development are projects that include amateur female creativity in the long eighteenth century, more-than-human narratives, and the role of AI in creativity.  We are currently exploring the potential within these research relationships for further incremental grant capture and will update in due course on the next stages as they emerge.