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ARIEL - UCL's Centre for Creative Practice Research presents: On Circular Writing
08 May 2026, 12:00 pm–1:00 pm
Join Tom Western (UCL Geography) for this ARIEL Friday Lunchtime Discussion on the possibility of circular writing – as form and texture, as motif and thematic.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Organiser
-
Institute of Advanced Studies
This talk discusses the possibility of circular writing – as form and texture, as motif and thematic. It narrates the circle and the circular, circularity and circulation, as matters of creativity and of resistance. I stage a gathering of circularities –Édouard Glissant’s circular nomadism, Etel Adnan’s spherical mental world, Lola Olufemi’s circle-as-method, Aimé Césaire’s non-vicious circle, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s indigenous circularity, Fred Moten’s rotary perception, Lauren Berlant’s roundabout movement – all of which articulate an anticolonial poetics of relation and openness in the face of spatial and political enclosure. And I ground these ideas in Athens, Greece, where a set collective geographies turn Athens away from its status as imagined Euro-civilisational origin point, remaking the city through its relations with other Mediterranean cities, and looping together to find ways out of the linear histories and geographies of empire. Circular writing, I will argue, can become a textual experiment in relating, inventing geographies that are capacious enough for multiplicity, intimacy, proximity, and togetherness.
All welcome but please register to attend: https://ariel-circular-writing.eventbrite.co.uk
ARIEL: UCL’s Centre for Creative Practice Research
ARIEL is a hub for intellectual exploration and exchange between academics of all disciplines and artists of all genres in the creative and cultural industries. ARIEL is a collaboration between UCL Institute of Advanced Studies (IAS) and UCL School of Creative and Cultural Industries (SCCI).
About the Speaker
Tom Western
Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at UCL Geography
His work builds creative geographies that seek to imagine futures beyond the colonial past and present. Tom works primarily in Athens, where he’s involved in various forms of collaborative research and movement building. He has recently published work in the journals Social Text, Society and Space, The Journal of Creative Geography, and Migration and Society; and his first book, titled Circular Movements, will be finished in 2026. Tom regularly produces spatial art-research pieces – gathered together on his website undercartographies.city – that offer illuminations of Athenian histories, geographies, movements and relations.
More about Tom Western