Director of Fundamental Questions
The question for October was ‘Does history paint or record?’
This is a 3 year residency with a Lincoln based cultural programme called Mansions of the Future. The project has been gifted a beautiful building opposite the main station, to create a public space for art and activity in Lincoln.
The first stop was to introduce the Mansions of the Future to some of Lincoln’s schools. I teamed up with actor and film director Bonnie Wright to deliver a session on storytelling, followed by a series of 6 philosophy sessions to 2 groups of year 7’s (11-12 year olds) at Pembroke Academy. We held philosophical inquiries using the CoPI process, as well as using physical activities such as The Dividing line’ where the young people could pose questions for the group, then ask different people why they might be agreeing or disagreeing. Questions the groups covered over the 6 weeks included;
Can you buy love? Can you buy life? Would you swap lives with someone else in order to feel their pain? and If you did, then would you want your old life back?
Can art communicate feelings or do you have to go through the same experience as someone else to know how they feel? Is it a choice to hate someone?
In July as part of DIY culture summer school Culture is a Verb, delivered by Tom James I ran a walking /philosophising session. In September 2018 we held a philosophical inquiry with the One Hundred Project, around the marking of 100 years of women’s suffrage in the UK. The 1918 law granted the vote to those women with property over the age of 30, but it was another 10 years later in 1928 that the law was extended to include all adult women. The conversation explored how assumptions around gender, age and status (including ownership of property) can shape judgements about our capacity for decision-making.
Most recently we held a series of 6 public philosophical dialogues in the wonderful and welcoming house that Katrin Bohm has created. The space really added something to the sessions. The participants were diverse and the inquiries were stimulating. Running alongside the dialogues, we delivered a training in collaborative conversations for a group of Lincoln teachers and practitioners keen to introduce philosophical inquiry into their work with young people in the city.