Techne January Congress 2025: Techne for Living and Making

Revisiting the founding principles of the technē Doctoral Training Partnership the UAL curated
congress in January 2025 will reconsider the notion of 'technē'.

technē, arises from the ancient Greek word to describe craftsmanship, craft or art, and was also applied to the human ability to realise intentions and organise actions through making, doing and performing. In our technological culture it relates to notions of expertise, technical knowledge, and the shaping of our life-world. technē and its corelate technologies, are never solely tools, never simple prostheses, surrogates, or mediators, rather they need to be understood as often material and embodied, entangled with "the knots we call beings", with what it is to be human (Haraway 2008: 250).

Whilst such knots and such knowledges are central to arts and design, and to living and living well, they have historically been overlooked by epistemological institutions. As such, this conference reconsiders the value and development of thinking through making, craft, technique, and technology in practice research
in arts, design and humanities contexts. 

This congress seeks to critically explore imaginative practices of world-building, which contest previous understandings of “human” practices of crafting and cultural production, resituate the technē of diasporic and indigenous practices, and examine the critical debates in contemporary posthumanist theory in the context of creative processes (eg. Zakiyyah Jackson’s discussion of Wangechi Mutu’s collages, 2020). Expanding practice research to other disciplines and to living, we probe how technē makes a difference in the world, for, technés are dynamic and engendered in relation to others and to worlds, so how we craft and who is crafting, matters.

We ask:
• How might we utilise the concept of technē to explore the methods, implications and outcomes of arts practice, through both contemporary and historical means?
• How is craft, crafting, and skill, skilling, located and manifest in contemporary research?
• How does technē inform and shape practices for living: our bodily affordances, social constructions and ultimately our crafting of the worlds we live in?
• How does technē give us lenses to explore the intersections between human and non-human realms, revealing the techniques, knowledges and expertise of other organisms?
• What are the intersections and ethics of embodied, material and digital technologies?
• What are the ecologies, politics and economies of making beyond manufacture?