As part of the PhD Seminar Series we will be joined on 14 October 2026 by the Radical Friendship and Listening and Reading Group, run by a group of doctoral researchers from other national and international institutions. Details of the session they will host for us below.

Overview and Structure

Anchored in the methodology collectively forged in the Radical Friendship and Listening and Reading Group, this session invites students to enter into a friendship with the group itself, thinking and working alongside it. The session creates conditions for students to assemble as peers and comrades, engaging with one another, with non-human relations, and with artworks and texts in ways that are responsive and experimental.

Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s scholarship into how bodies and spaces leave lasting impressions, the listening and reading group approaches friendship as a material, atmospheric, and political practice. Students are invited to consider how relations endure, shift, or dissolve, how connections persist beyond immediate encounters, and what traces remain – imprinted memories that linger from exhibitions, collaborative work, and shared durational processes.

Our practice is guided by:

The exploration of what makes a friendship radical – whether with each other, non-human relations, artworks, texts, across geographic and cultural boundaries, or through ethical, emotional, and political engagement
Staying in relation across difference – we do not seek consensus or sameness; we practice staying-with the complexities, uneven histories, and political ruptures that shape our interactions
Listening as praxis – emphasising listening as a political act that respects opacity and withholding, countering the demand for immediate resolution
Assembling a practice of solidarity – cultivating collective care and action within the contemporary, polarised conditions we find ourselves

Objectives of the session:

To explore how alternative ways of gathering can reshape how we relate to other subjects and non-humans opening up more reciprocal and productive ways of collaboration
To identify the political and ethical possibilities of friendship, including the conditions that enable its radical potential and its role as a site of solidarity, and collective care
To understand the temporality and spatiality of friendship, specifically how unexpected encounters and shared spaces allow for moments of radicality
To articulate a practice of radical friendship in contemporary contexts, including how it can be mobilized both as a form of care and as a political tool of exclusion
To understand affect as politically charged, identifying alternative or overlooked affects that are not only produced by social relations but also help shape them

Methodology

The workshops draw from:

Transnational feminist and decolonial approaches to care and relation
Socially engaged art practice
Embodied, affect-based, and memory-informed methodologies
Collective reading, listening, and thinking together
Durational and iterative engagement, allowing practices to unfold across time
Collaborative and relational pedagogy, fostering dialogue across difference

Sessions will move through:

Reflective prompts
Open discussion
Listening practices
Embodied exercises

Accessibility Note – While the workshops are informed by philosophical, theoretical, and critical texts, no prior knowledge is required. These works act as thinking companions, sharing atmospheres that guide the group’s explorations of radical friendship and the lingering affects of the exhibition. Activities are curated to be responsive to difference, fostering brave spaces where students with diverse ways of sensing and thinking can participate, experiment, and reflect together.

Structure and approach for the session

In this session, we will work with a selection of texts, artworks, fragments, and questions that have accompanied the Radical Friendship Listening and Reading Group across its 2026 series. Thus, we will be responding to an unfolding archive, approaching them as traces of an ongoing collective process: materials that have gathered associations, disagreements, memories, and new questions through being encountered together.

Introduction

The session will begin by introducing the Radical Friendship group and sharing elements of its developing archive and mappings. Opening questions might include:

What might make a friendship radical?
What happens to our understanding of friendship when we think beyond the human?
How much do we need to know another being in order to move alongside them well?
Does friendship require mutual recognition or reciprocity?
How might friendship hold irreducible difference without attempting to overcome it?
What forms of attention are involved in learning another being’s ordinary?
What material practices – routines, spaces, infrastructures, gestures of care – allow relations to endure?
What remains when a relationship is temporary, interrupted, or changed by distance?

Activity 1: Citation Circle

Students engage with a small selection of quotes and moving images specifically from or in dialogue with the novel Demian (1919) by Herman Hesse. The novel follows the main character Emil Sinclair, a young boy raised in what is described as a Scheinwelt, a composite word meaning “world of illusion.” So he struggles to exist between two worlds: the show world of good and the world of evil. The story’s turning point occurs when he meets Max Demian. Demian reinterprets the biblical story of Cain and Abel in a completely new way.

The group is invited to:

Read aloud excerpts slowly, noticing what resonates or lingers
Trace atmospheres, tensions, and relational dynamics emerging from the material
Observe how citations enter into relation with each other and with their own embodied experience – forming unexpected alignments, frictions, and openings

Selected excerpts

“Yes. I believe, then,” he continued, “‘that this story of Cain can be interpreted differently. Most of the stories we are taught are valid. and authentic but it is possible to see them from another angle than that of the teachers’ and it gives them much more sense. You can’t feel satisfied with this Cain for example and with the mark on his forehead as they explain it to us. Don’t you agree? Someone may certainly kill his own brother in a quarrel, and he may panic afterwards and eat humble pie. But that he should be marked with a special “sign’ for his cowardice that acts as a kind of protection and inspires fear in everybody else is strange indeed.” (Chapter 2, 34).

“These thoughts went round and round in my head. It was a stone dropped to a well, and the well was my youthful soul. And for a long time this matter of Cain, the murder and the ‘sign’ formed an outlet for my attempts at recognition, my doubts and criticism.” (Chapter 2, 35).

“Now, I am fond of you or interested in you and I would like to discover what it’s like inside you. To do this I have already taken the initial step. I frightened you. You are therefore in a nervous state. How has that come about? You don’t need to be afraid of anybody.” (Chapter 2, 42)

“All I could do was to nod. It was like a voice which could only emanate from myself. A voice, indeed, that knew everything better and more clearly than myself.” (Chapter 2, 43)

Activity 2: Close Reading and Listening

From here, participants will be invited into a shared practice of close listening and reading. This activity will stay particularly close to two texts that open questions of friendship with the non-human: Marie Theresa’s experimental, poetic storytelling piece Dear Salvador and Donna Haraway’s Children of Compost.

Dear Salvador, written as a letter to a twenty-two-year-old cat cared for temporarily in Canada, considers companionship, care, leaving, memory, and the ways relations with animals gather people, places, routines, and forms of belonging around them. Haraway’s speculative writing extends questions of friendship and kinship beyond the human, asking what it might mean to make kin across profound difference and describing friendship and play as practices through which relations are continually formed.

Participants will spend time with particular passages, listening deeply to words, images, rhythms, hesitations, resonances, and points of friction between the texts. Alongside close reading, there will be an invitation to notice how the texts are encountered bodily: where attention gathers, where something catches or resists, how a sentence changes the atmosphere of the room, and what it might mean to listen to how a text breathes alongside the bodies present.

Participants may respond through discussion, silence, non-verbal responses, listening, writing, drawing, movement or simply spending time with a passage. They are welcome to pause, step out, return, or withhold a response. The emphasis is on creating conditions in which different modes of attention and participation can coexist, allowing affects to gather slowly rather than requiring consensus, resolution or immediate legibility.

Activity 3: Leaving & Listening Practice

Ending with a short grounding exercise (feet on floor, breath, posture). A brief excerpt is read aloud, and students are invited to share three words or phrases that linger. This reinforces listening and solidarity as ongoing, shared and embodied practices, extending beyond the workshop and the exhibition.

An open invitation

These same materials – “Dear Salvador” and “Children of Compost” – will also form the basis of the October 2026 online meeting of the Radical Friendship Listening and Reading Group, which will take place after the PhD session. While these two texts provide a focus for this particular encounter, the group’s wider practice is always relational, with multiple texts, artworks, fragments, and questions continuing to gather around one another across different sessions.

PhD students will be invited to join the October online gathering if they wish. Those who would like to become more actively involved will also be invited to co-facilitate the session alongside Marie Theresa, carrying questions and resonances from the PhD workshop into the wider Radical Friendship group.

The invitation also extends beyond this particular gathering. Participants who are interested in continuing with the group may join future online sessions and, if they wish, host a gathering themselves, bringing a text, artwork, fragment, question, or other material they would like others to think with, in relation to radical friendship. In this way, the PhD session becomes not only an introduction to the group, but a possible entry point into its ongoing collectively shaped practice.

Background of Current Radical Friendship Listening and Reading Group

The Radical Friendship Listening and Reading Group meets monthly online, bringing together participants from across the world. Each session is assembled around a text, artwork, fragment, or other resonant material shared by the host. Encounters are open-ended: participants may join or leave as they wish, and there is no expectation to contribute at any particular moment. Over time, the group has begun building an archive of the shared texts, and visual fragments, preserving the “threads” and “textures” that arise in each gathering.

The group was formed to hold and cultivate connections emerging from academic, artistic, and everyday encounters – often unexpected, fleeting, yet deeply generative. Drawing on transnational feminist practices and the work of Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, the group approaches friendship not as a fixed or harmonious state, but as something continually made and remade through collective attention and care.

For Harney and Moten, study names what we do with one another in and against the structures of the university: lingering in conversation, thinking and feeling together without the demand for immediate productivity, measurable outcomes, or legibility. The group treats radical friendship as a fugitive form of study – a way of gathering that does not aim to consolidate a “we” or resolve differences, but to remain in relation across uncertainty, discomfort, and uneven histories.

Radical friendship, in this context, is a practice of staying alongside one another while allowing space for opacity, silence, and partiality. It is a listening without extracting, spending durational time with texts, artworks, and fragments, and attending to the subtle resonances they generate. In the atmospheres of increasingly polarised and hostile environments – both within academia and on the world stage – the group asks how we might remain in relation differently, cultivating small undercommons of attention, care, and shared air that endure without requiring resolution.

Facilitation

The workshops have been structured by three members of the Radical Friendship Listening and Reading Group, while remaining deeply collaborative, drawing on the group’s participants from across the works – including Canada, South America, Central America, Europe – and from a wide range of disciplines, academic contexts, and artistic practices. The workshops mirror the exhibition’s collaborative ethos, reflecting the diverse perspectives and collective creativity that shape the MA Digital Media projects across their specialised strands.

Marie Theresa Crick is a Visiting Lecturer, interdisciplinary artist, and PhD candidate in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, currently based in Ireland. Her practice explores breath, memory, and relationality through transnational feminist and embodied methodologies, working across film, sound, philosophy, and socially engaged workshops. Her research focuses on Irish Catholic maternal shame, migration, and transgenerational trauma, developing breath-led approaches attentive to silence, rupture, and ethical relation. https://www.mtcdigitalcreative.co.uk/

Her work has been presented across academic, artistic, and community contexts in Europe and Canada, including Western University’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. She presented at the 10^th Annual Memory Studies Association Conference (2026, Buenos Aires). Her sound work for Radio Elsewheres (re.03) was recently exhibited at Art Windsor-Essex (2025). She is contributing as an artist to one funded project in Germany, the 2026-27 Kreuzungen- Intersections festival.

Mara González González is a doctoral candidate at the Centre for Theory and Criticism at Western University. She graduated with honors from Universidad de Monterrey (UDEM) with a Bachelor’s in Philosophy in 2020. Her research engages with Memory Studies, Trauma Studies, and Critical Beauty Studies. In November 2021, a sample of her poems was published by Los Libros del Perro in the anthology Novísimas II: Reunión de poetas mexicanas.