Proposals should be submitted by 20th October 2025 to ebb.pisa2026@gmail.com
Please submit an abstract of 200–300 words (for individual papers or workshops)
along with a short biography (max. 100 words per participant).
These qualities define the essayistic not only as a literary practice but also as a way of thinking and teaching
Essay Writing Workshops (90 minutes)
The Pedagogical Potential of the Essay
● The pedagogical affordances of the essay: teaching critical thinking, reflective writing, and active learning
● The essay as a method for fostering analytical, creative, and civic engagement in education
● The essay as a method of inquiry
● Teaching the planetary essay: fostering ecological consciousness through reflective writing
Bio: 80 words (127 with names)
Artistic Essaying Research and Pedagogy Group is part of the Society of Artistic Research, Special Interest Groups (SAR SIG).
This research group aims to develop an international collective of researchers and educators concerned with the potential of essaying in the context of artistic research. And how experimental multi-media and hybrid forms of essaying may exist as practice-led artistic research and praxis. Then, how these praxes may inform pedagogical approaches.
At its core, the group is intended to be diverse, inclusive, accessible, interdisciplinary, cross-disciplinary, and even off-disciplinary to encourage tangential and lateral associations and pathways through individual and collaborative praxis.
Names:
Emily Huurdeman (PD candidate, Fontys, NL) she/her
Bio 100 words
Jo O'Brien (PhD Candidate, University of Applied Arts, Vienna // Lecturer,
Emily Carr University of Art + Design, Vancouver) they/them
Jo O’Brien is an artist, educator, and researcher whose work explores the queer-crip potential of confusion as a framework for making access. Their artistic research practice includes material and social forms of art-making, access-oriented pedagogy, and community building in the University context. Jo’s work is often collaborative, and their pedagogical research has been supported through fellowships and grants. Their doctoral project at the University of Applied Arts Vienna examining the relationship between legibility and illegibility, confusion, and community is supported by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Jo is also a Lecturer in the Faculty of Culture and Community at Emily Carr University of Art + Design.
Peter Thomas (PhD candidate, Middlesex University, London, UK)
Bio 100 words
Ana Cristina Pansera de Araujo (PhD Candidate, University of Basque Country)
Bio 100 words
What happens when the essay becomes something we fold, cut, photocopy, staple, distribute, exchange, annotate—and build together?
This workshop proposes zine-making as an essayistic method: a way of thinking-through-handling, writing-through-assembling, and sharing-through-fragmentation. Rather than treating the essay as a linear argument or solitary reflection, we will approach it as a social practice—a gesture of communication, transmission, and embodiment. Zines—imperfect, provisional, resistant—allow language to circulate not as closed thought but as conversation-in-motion, where doubts, contradictions, and temporary answers coexist without needing resolution.
Participants will be guided through a collective process of composing essay-zines. The session will oscillate between reflection and production, asking:
-
How do we produce the world through language, and how does language produce us?
-
What happens when critical thinking is assembled rather than argued?
-
Can the essay be something that moves between hands rather than stays in one voice?
Instead of asking “what is the essay?”, this workshop asks: what can the essay become when its structure is unsettled and its authority redistributed? Can it hold vulnerability, discontinuity, contradiction? Can it become a tool for intimacy rather than academic isolation?
The production of the zine is not the goal of the workshop, but a tool—an excuse—for further dialogue. The workshop embraces the essay not as form but as practice: something we do with others, not just about something.
Zineing becomes essaying—thinking aloud, thinking together, thinking otherwise.
Essaying is now hip but that isn’t a reason to pay it attention, or to resist it
Its easy-to-digest form misrepresents what we’re talking about
This stuff is called an essay because of the ‘first person industrial complex’. It fits genre conventions of the publishing industry.
There’s a spectrum of essaying.
Where do we position what we do on this spectrum?
Why are we doing it now?
The essay situates individual experience within broader social, political, and philosophical frameworks, bridging the subjective and the collective while acknowledging the tension between the personal and the public.
The essay is a self-reflexive form that favours dialogic thought. It allows for the development of an individual voice that remains open to exchange, seeking affinities and navigating tensions rather than reinforcing fixed positions
Zine topicical?
colling - topic methaphors?
characteristic
Roulation?
Polleroid - objects - pen - tape -
collecting the appraoches
Tools for essaying for artistic research?
Present a collected toolbox for educational approaches for essaying process in the context of artitisc research / methods sig group
Sensorial ways of knowing?
Critical reflection?
Zine: practical method
We are a collective of artistic researchers exploring essaying as a research methodology.
Our workshop will explore applications for essaying beyond its traditional home in text.
As artistic researchers, we are interested in the potential of the essay in relation to different knowledges: sensual, visual, spatial, performed and embodied knowledges.
The workshop will be a practical exchange of essayistic educational tools for research, centring on the making of a zine.
Participants will be introduced to a range of essayistic methods for research and asked to reflect on their own essayistic practices.
We will put these into practice throughout the workshop.
We will collectively create a zine as a document of our essaying during the workshop, a collection of tools and responses for us to share with the wider conference.
Essaying Relationships – Jo
What essaying offers to me is a way to explore the relationships between points, rather than the points themselves; it’s about parsing relationships and in-betweens. A strategy that I use to amplify this potential begins by looking like a somewhat standard “mind map” or “thought web”. The various “points” are put in relation to one another, often through lines, fields, or varied proximities. Rather than beginning to work from this map though, I instead further develop the map by writing a sentence or two about the relationship between each set of points. The aim for me is not to force a particular connection between the two points that will align with a presupposed outcome, but to see what connections arise from the relational tension.
The essay has a long legacy of contradiction. On the one hand it is a highly conventionalised educational form, (apparently) unambiguous and objective, and built on formalised skills which can be assessed. On the other hand, the essay is a pluralistic means of experimentation and dialogue, used to publicly explore subjectivities, doubts, intellectual convictions, and personal expression. Historically speaking the essay has evolved as a genre of writing, but the essay has also been adopted by many different artistic disciplines, giving rise to video, audio, somatic, and performative essays. This adaptation across multiple disciplines has turned the essay from a discreet, purely written production into a cross-disciplinary methodology of essaying. [bridge to zines]
Using essaying as a methodology of critical, dialogic, and public engagement, our workshop will guide participants in collaboratively producing an essayistic zine. During the workshop we will create, collect, and coallate the physical, verbal, and visual traces of our discussions to create the [word for original copy] of the zine. The evening following the workshop, our collective will make the production run of the zine, bind it, and have it ready for release during the conference.
The essay, even in its more democratized forms, is still most often conceived of as the written production of a singular author.
We are a collective of artistic researchers exploring essaying as a research methodology.
Our workshop will explore applications for essaying beyond its traditional home in text.
As artistic researchers, we are interested in the potential of the essay in relation to different knowledges: sensual, visual, spatial, performed and embodied knowledges.
The workshop will be a practical exchange of essayistic educational tools for research, centring on the making of a zine.
Participants will be introduced to a range of essayistic methods for research and asked to reflect on their own essayistic practices.
We will put these into practice throughout the workshop.
We will collectively create a zine as a document of our essaying during the workshop, a collection of tools and responses for us to share with the wider conference.
Option 1: one shared topic in a large group Option 2: one shared topic in 4 small groups Option 3: 4 individual approached in a large group Option 4: 4 individual approaches, 1 approach/group, 4 groups
The essay filrm
Thimothy corrign
3 components:
- testing subjectivity
- experienteal encounters in a public area
- figuration of thinking
Corrigan, Timothy. (2011) The Essay Film: from Montaigne, after Marker, The Essay Film: from Montaigne, after Marker. New York: Oxford University Press.
What happens when the essay becomes something we fold, cut, photocopy, staple, distribute, exchange, annotate—and build together?
We are a collective of artistic researchers exploring essaying as a research methodology. As artistic researchers, we are interested in the potential of the essay in relation to different knowledges: sensual, visual, spatial, performed and embodied knowledges.
The essay, even in its more open forms, is most often conceived of as the written production of a singular author. Historically speaking the essay has evolved as a genre of writing, but the essay has also been adopted by many different artistic disciplines, giving rise to video, audio, somatic, and performative essays. Simultaneously, the voice of the individual author has also yeilded to collective understandings and collaborative working.
This adaptation across multiple disciplines has turned the essay from a discreet production into a practice (and methodology) of essaying.
This latter sense of the essay, as an improvisational, democratized tool of dialogue aligns formally and conceptually with the history (and contemporaneity) of the zine.
This workshop proposes zine-making as an essayistic method: a way of thinking-through-handling, writing-through-assembling, and sharing-through-fragmentation. Using essaying as a methodology of critical, dialogic, and public engagement, our workshop will guide participants in collaboratively producing an essayistic zine. Participants will be guided through a collective process of composing essay-zines. The session will oscillate between reflection and production, asking:
- How do we produce the world through language, and how does language produce us? (change)
- What happens when critical thinking is assembled rather than argued?
- Can the essay be something that moves between hands rather than stays in one voice?
During the workshop we will create, collect, and coallate the physical, verbal, and visual traces of our discussions to create the [word for original copy] of the zine. The evening following the workshop, our collective will make the production run of the zine, bind it, and have it ready for release during the conference.
Essay core characteristics map:
- Participants chose a topic/object (on...)
- Cluster topics/objects, chose one topic/object per cluster (3-4 participants)
- Do phase (30 min.):
Caretaker (moderator) makes sure different knowledge perspectives are addressed. Please think about how you want to capture these ways of knowing (essay).
- How does (topic/object) sound?
- How does (topic/object) feel?
- How does (topic) look?
- How does this (topic/object) move?
- How do I experience the(topic/object)?
- How did I personally experience this (obect/topic) in the past? (anecdote)
- How does the (topic/object) relate to references? (theoretical)
- How does the (topic/object) relate to other concepts)
- Etc. Please add
- Share fragments and experiences (30 min.)
- What was/is the interaction?
Artistic essaying
Collective
Essaying method tool
un-formal
performative
What happens when the essay becomes something we fold, cut, photocopy, staple, distribute, exchange, annotate—and build together?
We are a collective of artistic researchers exploring essaying as a research methodology. As artistic researchers, we are interested in the potential of the essay beyon tekst. We explore the use of different knowledges: sensual, visual, spatial, performed and embodied knowledges.
The essay, even in its more open forms, is still most often conceived of as the written production of a singular author. Historically speaking the essay has evolved as a genre of writing, but the essay has also been adopted by many different artistic disciplines, giving rise to video, audio, somatic, and performative essays. This adaptation across multiple disciplines has turned the essay from a discreet production into a practice (and methodology) of essaying.
The essay has a long legacy of contradiction, often delineated by the boundaries of the academie. On the one hand it is a highly conventionalised educational form, (apparently) unambiguous and objective, and built on formalised skills which can be assessed. On the other hand, and in contrast to the formalised academic essay, the essay can also be a pluralistic means of experimentation and dialogue, used to publicly explore subjectivities, doubts, intellectual convictions, and personal expression. This latter sense of the essay, as an improvisational, democratized tool of dialogue aligns formally and conceptually with the history (and contemporaneity) of the zine.
This workshop proposes zine-making as an essayistic method: a way of thinking-through-handling, writing-through-assembling, and sharing-through-fragmentation. Using essaying as a methodology of critical, dialogic, and public engagement, our workshop will guide participants in collaboratively producing an essayistic zine. Participants will be guided through a collective process of composing essay-zines. The session will oscillate between reflection and production, asking:
- How do we produce the world through language, and how does language produce us? (change)
- What happens when critical thinking is assembled rather than argued?
- Can the essay be something that moves between hands rather than stays in one voice?
During the workshop we will create, collect, and coallate the physical, verbal, and visual traces of our discussions to create the [word for original copy] of the zine. The evening following the workshop, our collective will make the production run of the zine, bind it, and have it ready for release during the conference.