Edinburgh’s Collective gallery kindly hosted one of our Digesting Politics meals, which rounded off their summer school, Ground Meets Horizon. The full reading list for the summer school is here.
The five day summer school and its guest speakers, including Angela McRobbie and Emma Hedditch, explored the role of art, artists and institutions within political action and activism, and the tensions and possibilities within this.
We held a workshop before the meal in which we read a text by Beatrice Warde, which explores the power of the printed word and written text as opposed to the loudspeaker. Then we read and dissected the day’s newspapers, discussing how to think critically about the news and how we might be able to challenge how we are presented with it, or interact with those who create it. Keep it Complex presented who owns and runs the newspapers, and introduced some prominent journalists. With the students, we took the newspapers apart, and the students shared opinions on stories they found pertinent.
Then we all made salad together!
For the first time, we used our new stickers, designed to eliminate awkwardness, which read: “feel free to talk to me”, “I don’t want to talk right now”, and “I’m fine, even though I’m not talking or smiling”.
The leftovers were kindly taken by the Edinburgh Student Housing Co-operative.
