Please see below. An interesting event on the collaboration between social scientists and artists in which, Lucy Kimbell, one of our blog members is involved. If you happen to be in London, make sure you attend and please post your thoughts afterwards.

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Tactical Play
A one-day colloquium for social scientists and artists about playful enquiry as a tactic for research
Birkbeck Institute for Social Research
1 July 2009, 09.30am–5pm
Room GO1, Clore Management Centre, Birkbeck, University of London

Speakers include: Anne Douglas (Gray’s School of Art, Aberdeen); Lynn Froggett (University of Central Lancashire); Pat Kane ( author of The Play Ethic); Lucy Kimbell (Clark Fellow in Design Leadership at Said Business School, University of Oxford); Justin McKeown (artist, Spartaction.com) and Christian Nold (artist, Softhook.com). Convened by Sophie Hope and Elaine Speight.

Informed by discourses of cross-pollination between art and social science, this colloquium will discuss the role of “play” as a tactic for social change within reflexive and performative social science methods and socially engaged art processes.

Positioning playful enquiry as both a method and meeting place between the disciplines, the event will seek to address the following questions through the presentation of case studies and open discussion:

- In what way do the essential characteristics of one discipline offer possibilities for “play” within the other?

- How is research through performance, fiction, collaboration and conversation employed by each discipline and what are the individual motivations for this?

- At what point does playful enquiry meet “hard edged” research, and what are the academic implications?

- In what way is “play” a politicised method, and how can members of each profession use it to antagonise the frameworks in which they operate?

To book a place go to: http://www.bbk.ac.uk/bisr/news/tacticalplay

Cost (includes vegetarian lunch): £35 standard, £15 students.

Numbers are strictly limited, please register early.

i would like to congratulate you for thinking out of the box to present your research, i am thinking already how this could be used for movie screening and how that can enhance the overall experience of watching a movie in a theater