We have three academic partners for Sentient Performativities. The learning centres on the Dartington estate in SW England, and two research centres at Bath Spa University: the Creative Corporealities research group and the Research Centre for Environmental Humanities.
Dartington Trust is a centre for learning, arts, ecology and social justice based on a 1,200 acre estate near Totnes. We offer a new model for transformative learning at our two higher education faculties, Schumacher College and Dartington Arts School. Our short course programme offers inspiring, transformative experiences in a truly stunning location. We attract exceptional tutors to help guide your personal development, understanding and practical skills, in the fields of arts, craft, ecology, wellbeing and beyond.
Dartington Arts School
The Arts school is a new faculty of Dartington Trust, a centre for learning, arts, ecology and social justice based on a 1,200 acre estate near Totnes, offering a distinctive portfolio of new postgraduate arts degrees inspired by the experimentalism and innovation in art practice that has animated this place for almost 100 years.
The Arts School’s predecessor, Dartington College of Arts, was recognised nationally and internationally for its radical and inventive approaches to arts pedagogy, embracing practice-based and interdisciplinary research, and prioritising context as a core factor and ‘material’ in art-making processes.
Dartington Arts School draws on this rich international heritage and its extraordinary estate location to provide a dynamic and responsive context for contemporary study. Dartington is a distinctive learning community where students and tutors learn in dialogue with each other and with the place itself. We offer learning on a small, friendly scale with intensity and rigour. As a testbed for enacting new visions and models, Dartington has a uniquely values-driven vitality to offer to its learners.
Schumacher College
Schumacher College is an international college for ecological studies offering postgraduateand undergraduate programmes, research degrees, short courses and a horticulture residency. We focus on interactive and experiential education to develop practical skills and strategic thinking required to face 21st century challenges. The College has a rich history as a trailblazer in ecological learning, and is this year celebrating its 30th birthday.
Sentient Performativities links in particular with the Movement, Mind & Ecology MA, which explores the intersections of embodied practice, environmental philosophy and ecological thinking The first of its kind, the MA programme encourages you to use your own physical engagement with the world to reshape your understanding of place, nature, self and society, with the help of world-renowned experts from a wide range of physical pursuits.
Bath Spa University
Creative Corporealities is an interdisciplinary research group exploring the body as a source of creative material and notions of embodiment in cultural contexts. It responds to a contemporary revision in notions of humanity, felt both viscerally and intellectually, for which the predominant answer is embodiment and creativity. We are practitioners and academics working across a wide range of disciplines, based at Bath Spa University, with research themes accommodated under the banner of the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries. Creative Corporealities concerns itself with embodiment as a source of creative practice, with its own causalities and politics. We develop and observe disciplinary practices that engage and affect a body that is generative of creative processes.
The Bath Spa Research Centre for Environmental Humanities draws together scholars from across the University, including conservation biologists, geographers, anthropologists, philosophers, historians, literary critics, creative writers, film-makers, and visual and performance artists, in pursuit of new insights and creative responses in the face of deepening socio-environmental concerns and crises. Our aim is to foster multi-, inter- and transdisciplinary research projects and public engagement activities that bring methodologies and understandings from the arts and humanities into dialogue with social and natural sciences to find ethical, creative, historically informed and culturally sensitive solutions to today’s pressing environmental problems.