Techne Congresses
Techne organises two residential congresses per year, which are designed and run by each member institution in turn. These events are primarily for Techne-funded students, although other doctoral students may be welcome to attend. Please direct any queries to techne@rhul.ac.uk.
The next Techne Congress is taking place in June 2025 and is being hosted by University of Westminster. Further information about this event will be circulated over the coming months.
Past Congress Information:
January 2025: 'Techne for Living and Making' - Hosted by the University of the Arts, London.
Revisiting the founding principles of the technē Doctoral Training Partnership the UAL curated congress in January 2025 reconsidered 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 reconsidered the value and development of thinking through making, craft, technique, and technology in practice research
in arts, design and humanities contexts.
This congress critically explored imaginative practices of world-building, which contested previous understandings of “human” practices of crafting and cultural production, resituated the technē of diasporic and indigenous practices, and examined the critical debates in contemporary posthumanist theory in the context of creative processes (eg. Zakiyyah Jackson’s discussion of Wangechi Mutu’s collages, 2020).
June 2024: 'The Scholar's Voice' - Hosted by the University of Roehampton.
The scholar’s voice is a term that is used to encapsulate professional identity, as well as to refer to the originality and authenticity of the communication of ideas. The identity of the scholar is bound up in the development of communication and engagement – in writing, in speaking, in dialogue, in movement and presence, in creative practice, and in teaching – in other words, the authorial voice. It is there in how scholars present themselves to others too, and within the corporeality of their voice – the embodiment of their voice in physical presence.
Yet it is important to recognise that the scholar’s voice is curated and mediated by several converging practices, behaviours, actions and non-actions. This Congress explored these ideas and issues, featuring panels, lectures workshops and more.