Spark – gatherings of pedagogical minor gestures

Spark Journal call for responses to: Gathering Pedagogical Minor Gestures Experimental Pedagogies Research Group (EPRG) – guest edited special issue – Spring 2026

Spark is an open-access online journal for university teachers, researchers and students that explores all aspects of teaching and learning in arts, design and communication. Spark is published by the Teaching, Learning and Employability Exchange at UAL. Submission guidelinesfor Spark.

This issue will celebrate the sometimes overlooked or under-recognised ‘minor gesture’ in our teaching and learning environments. It will surface and honour our various events and actions of pedagogical practice, as efforts of creative response and care. This is an opportunity to extend and share explorations which reimagine the ways in which learning might be encouraged and become emergent. This issue will be an experimental space for others to experience ideas and attempts that subvert, disrupt or intrigue.

We ask how differently we might gather and share our various actions of our creative pedagogical practices beyond the usual ‘academic’ journal article. How we have enacted or perceived something which has brought about a response or change or effect in a learning environment – and how can we express and celebrate our pedagogical attempts and realisations? Our call seeks other forms of creative response: including image(s) (still or moving), sound, structure, provocations, poetry, narratives / transcripts, dialogues / interviews,  inconclusive ‘essays’; staff, student and co-produced, collaborative events / artefacts; or any other contribution you would like to make.

This Spark special issue aims to encourage UAL staff and students to:

  • Go beyond the normative (traditionally academic) in a journal contribution, showing other, differently accessible ways of creative contribution  
  • Expand the possibilities of showing creative pedagogical work, which include the workings-out and efforts instead of focussing on successful outcomes 
  • Explore the ideas and actions connected with minor, gestures, access to learning, demonstrating impact or associated issues 
  • Consider the accessibility of any ideas we present, so that a a contribution should include considerations of how this work might be accessed  

Peer-Review process

Considerations of the ‘peer-review process’ are a key aspect of this EPRG special issue, whereby contributors are already peers, and review is an aspect of the value of engagement. Review will be collaborative, transparent and timely. This should be experienced as engaged, formative feedback: where the peer review process encourages development of the contribution.

Deadline for submissions: 31 OCTOBER 2025 

Further questions or to discuss an idea for submission: email Mark Ingham (m.ingham@arts.ac.uk) or Jonathan Martin (j.r.martin@chelsea.arts.ac.uk) 

Examples of works that might be useful in thinking about your response.

Tyehimba Jess’s OLIO

Olio is one of the most inventive, intensive poetic undertakings of the past decade . . . The result is a work both historical and musical, scholarly and sculptural.”—Boston Globe

Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart’s The Hundreds (2019)

The Hundreds by Laurent Berlant and Kathleen Stewart is an assemblage of one hundred hundred-word poetic prose musings on the affective complexities of life in the contemporary United States. In each hundred, the authors bring their expertise in literary, cultural, and anthropological theory to take a more creative and tentative approach to theorizing affect, one that is always open-ended and unfinished, one that projects a situated voice, refusing to claim itself as all-knowing or morally authoritative

https://socialtextjournal.org/theorizing-affect-through-everyday-fragments-a-review-of-the-hundreds-by-lauren-berlant-and-kathleen-stewart/

Darren Raven’s fabulous Lecture-Zine

Lecture-Zine is a daily series provoking/prompting playful creativity, thinking and debate. https://www.instagram.com/drnraven/?igsh=d3lkMDdkYzU0ZGh3&utm_source=qr#

And his Wyndham Summaries https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Hjhi_k_plGF6nyr5isAJZeYexuVZzYph72bA4KPNgx0/edit?tab=t.0

Experimental Typography (Visual Essay): Spread 6 / 1997 / SML Graphic Design

One of the interesting genres in complex designs is layering. By creating layers of different interpretations of a unified idea, designers re able to emphasize its importance the same way a musician would compose repetitions and variations on the same theme.

Visual essay as critical instrument (Paul Bailey)

This research investigates and experiments with the visual essay as an instrument to recognise non-normative sensibilities, mentalities and disciplinary imaginaries for, and from, contemporary practices of graphic design.

https://schoolofartsgent.be/en/research/visual-essay-as-critical-instrument

Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age by Kenneth Goldsmiths (2011)

Can techniques traditionally thought to be outside the scope of literature, including word processing, databasing, identity ciphering, and intensive programming, inspire the reinvention of writing? The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist.

The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR)

The Journal for Artistic Research (JAR) is an international, online, Open Access and peer-reviewed journal that disseminates artistic research from all disciplines. JAR’s website consists of the Journal and its Network.

JAR provides a digital platform where multiple methods, media and articulations may function together to generate insights in artistic research endeavours. It seeks to promote expositions of practice as research. In JAR artistic research is viewed as a developing field where research and art are positioned as mutually influential. Recognising that the field is ever developing and expanding, JAR remains open to continued re-articulations of its publishing criteria.

https://www.jar-online.net/en

The Experimental Publishing Compendium

The Experimental Publishing Compendium is a guide and reference for scholars, publishers, developers, librarians, and designers who want to challenge, push and redefine the shape, form and rationale of scholarly books. The compendium brings together tools, practices, and books to promote the publication of experimental scholarly works. Read more

The Open Book Futures Experimental Publishing Group and the Centre for Postdigital Cultures’ Post-Publishing research strand are presenting a seminar series for for those interested in experimental scholarly book publishing throughout 2024 and 2025. Read more and register.

https://compendium.copim.ac.uk

 Doing Rebellious Research In and Beyond the Academy

The ways in which research and scholarship are co-produced, coperformed and proclaimed as particular kinds of knowledges and truths in and beyond the academy is radically changing. The capacity to write rebelliously, in varying registers and voices, tempos and volumes, as featured across this book, is boundaryless. In this edited volume, we ask new questions which simultaneously trouble and open up what the ‘product’ and ‘performance’ of academic work, words and worlds might come to be. At the heart of this book, we move between departing radically from academic writing to arriving at a new academic endeavor and transaction between reader and text driven by the invitation to open rebellion in academic research and writing.

When you open this book, you are immediately invited to remember the moment when you did something truly and utterly rebellious: something so unruly, undutiful, and ungovernable that, once you had begun, there was no turning back. From there, you are encouraged to reflect on your ‘writing, life’ and ‘fly the coop’ in Cixousian style. ‘Take pleasure in jumbling the order,’ this book entices – change the furniture, dislocate and disorient things and values, break them all up and down, empty structures, and feel, dream, perform the gestures that jam the system. It is to this moment of rebellion we wilfully embrace, embody, and allure in this collection of unique chapters.

Curious Rituals

“The curious habits described in this book can be seen as ingredients with which technological objects are domesticated by people, integrated into their own daily routines. Fixing strategies, nervous tics, device juggling or courtesy postures, to name just a few, are not only peculiar interaction habits, they reveal how people normalize so-called “futuristic technologies” or what seemed magical and complex at first. They highlight the ingenuity users employ to repurpose and adapt digital technologies to their own context. One should see these insights as constant design patterns in the evolution of technological products and services.”

https://curiousrituals.wordpress.com

Post-qualitative research: origin, references and permanent becoming

by Juana Mª Sancho, Fernando Hernandez, Lourdes Montero, Juan de Pablos, Jose I. Rivas and Almudena Ocaña, entitled Caminos y derivas para otra investigación educativa y social, by Editorial Octaedro(2020)

This new form of positioning invites us to rethink and re-situate our own practice in relation to educational research

“A post-qualitative position of research, always multiple and crossed by a theoretical diversity, that does not have a single face nor is articulated in a single proposal and that cannot be described in an orderly way in a research handbook.”

The post-qualitative drift. ( Source: Estibaliz Aberasturi Apraiz ) https://reunid.eu/en/2020/09/16/post-qualitative-research-origin-references-and-permanent-becoming/

Research re-imagined

As academics experiment with the graphic novel form, their research is reaching – and influencing – new audiences.

https://universityaffairs.ca/features/research-re-imagined

“I think it hits you in a very different place than text [alone],” she says. “And I think if you allow it to do that, you come away more empathetic to what you’ve read.”