Locke, Lana (2025) No room! Of course there's room. European Journal of Cultural Studies, 28 (5). pp. 1455-1462. ISSN 1460-3551
| Type of Research: | Article |
|---|---|
| Creators: | Locke, Lana |
| Description: | This article is an adaptation of a workshop provocation given at the University of the Arts London (UAL) Education Conference in July 2023, which I set up as an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ ‘Mad Hatter’s’ table. I dressed the table on theme and equipped it with props, as a set to share with fellow educators a focus group project I had undertaken with students on overcrowding in their college art studios. I held up the lack of room in the studios as a social justice issue for exploration, first, as the inflation of numbers and knock-on impact of overcrowding of studios felt by students was acknowledged as result of over-recruitment to the course during and post pandemic; and second, exploring the question of whether minority students are most impacted; including those who are less confident to claim space due to factors such as accessibility, language barriers, financial issues and lack of peer support within the course. By putting workshop participants in the position of taking a seat at a fictional table space, loaded with caricature, I sought to provoke a creative dialogue around positionality and our relationship to shared space, while contemplating anonymised transcripts of the focus group dialogue that had taken place with students around a different table earlier in the academic year. The workshop gave reference to the ideas of Nirmal Puwar regarding positionality and the negotiation of space; and to Mikhail Bakhtin when considering student utterances in the focus group dialogue. |
| Official Website: | https://journals.sagepub.com/home/ecsa |
| Keywords/subjects not otherwise listed: | Alice in Wonderland, art spaces, art studios, painting studios, college art studios, critical race theory, intersectional discrimination, intersectional feminism, over crowding, radical democracy, space invaders, utterance, white fragility |
| Publisher/Broadcaster/Company: | SAGE |
| Your affiliations with UAL: | Colleges > Camberwell College of Arts Colleges > Chelsea College of Arts |
| Date: | 5 October 2025 |
| Digital Object Identifier: | 10.1177/13675494241274433 |
| Date Deposited: | 04 Nov 2025 10:45 |
| Last Modified: | 04 Nov 2025 10:45 |
| Item ID: | 25036 |
| URI: | https://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/id/eprint/25036 |
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