fail LARP: 
speculative queer-y-ing of failure

Facilitated with Liam Healy, Associate Lecturer, Tutor, and PhD Candidate, Goldsmiths, Center for Pedagogical Innovation, Wesleyan University, May 2019

​

Starting with Jack Halberstam’s assertion that success in a heteronormative capitalist society equates to specific forms of reproductive maturity and wealth accumulation, this workshop explored the possibility of failure, getting lost, breaking, mis-using and un-becoming to think about speculative possibilities in education. Given the ways failure is often understood, for example in training, or rote-learning, where failure is associated with, well, failure… We attempted to ’stay with the trouble' of past failures, and make tentative steps to shift and re-evaulate what failure might be. We did not aim to fix these failures, but sought other ways to notice and tune into these. Participants came with a memory of a failure and these were used as the basis of the workshop.

​

This was part of the series, Design Strategies across the Curriculum. Using a collaborative studio model, I developed and facilitated a series of workshops (2017-2019) for faculty at Wesleyan University that explored design teaching methodologies and learning competencies in the context of liberal arts education. At the workshops faculty explored how they might integrate design pedagogies into their teaching to foster creative confidence, collaborative practices, and contextual thinking.

​