March - April 2014

Research and education have long abided by the technologies of measurement. We now need to direct the evaluating practices back to their proper purpose and scope, and again take charge of the true challenge: practicing values.

Extract from the Transvaluation manifesto (pdf).

This course is part of a larger project that was set up in 2013 by a group of concerned academics, all involved in the creative disciplines. From a series of small scale meetings, the core group will now broaden the discussion to other interested researchers by means of three initiatives: a course, a conference and a book.

The course creates an investigative space for PhD students, post docs and senior researcher to engage with a core theme of transvaluation and the poetics and politics of values, challenging the current formation of knowledge. It contests norms of indicator-driven evaluation of research, so amplified through the Bologna process, and thus challenges academic cultures responding to such systems of evaluation. Alternatively, it searches for visionary, utopian and maybe ‘impossible’ approaches. It also challenges the participants to step outside the safe routines of practice, professional identity and the comfort of reproducing what you already know. Instead it trusts the competence among artists, and architects to constantly remake, reconfigure, recompose and reinterpret complexities through the material, through worlding.

Together with philosophers we will also encourage the abilities to think the impossible through speculative utopian thinking. Thus, with a hands-on approach to the craft and criticism of research, the course advances through the formation of our individual and shared curiosities towards the (re-)formulation of values and future learning needs, allowing different topics, concepts, themes and perspectives of research to collide and combine in an emergent, open-ended flexible structure of known and unknown. By connecting poetics and politics of value with worlding and speculative utopian thinking we start to shape the new university where knowledge is not driven by evaluation indicators, but by true curiosity, speculative thinking and the making of values. This is what we mean by transvaluation.

The course is an advanced profile doctoral course within ResArc, Swedish Research School in Architecture, in collaboration with the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg, and in contact with the National Artistic Research School.

For details, see the course programme (pdf).