The last presentation in our 2014-15 Geography Colloquium Series will be given by Sallie Marston, Professor of Geogrsphy School of Geography and Developement, The University of Arizona. Downloade the flyer here, 
Sallie Marston [pdf]
“Imagine the Impossible”: Science, Art, Transversality and the Cultivation of Creative Subjects
This paper considers the UCLA Sci | Art Nanolab’s interdisciplinary summer school program. This two-week intensive course brings artists and scientists together to provide an educational opportunity for high school students that combines art and science to prepare students for the changeability of the 21st century job market. Through attention to the practices and prevailing narratives about different forms of creativity, as well as the objects produced in the course of the program, we explore how the Sci | Art Nanolab opens up moments of inventiveness, innovation and imagination in its goal of producing creative and intellectually flexible subjects. To understand the production of such subjects, we turn to the work of Felix Guattari and his three ecologies. Guattari seeks in the micro-politics of subjectification a way out of the manifold crisis – in the environment, in the individual and in the socius – brought about by what he calls Integrated World Capitalism. We explore the art-science projects the students formulate, design, and construct, in light of the cultivation of imaginaries and insights akin to the new social and aesthetic practices Guattari calls for. Thus these creative practices become the means to answer two fundamental political questions: where are the dissenting/creative subjects of today? How are they being produced? We find answers to these questions in the production of subjectivity via Nanolab’s linking of art and science.
