Student as Producer at British Conference for Undergraduate Research 2012

British Conference for Undergraduate Research 2012 was held on the 19th and 20th of March 2012 at The University of Warwick and was organised by Institute for Advanced Teaching and Learning. It was open to all and featured spoken papers, lectures, poster presentations, performances and workshops delivered by undergraduate students presenting their own work, as well as discussion on developing undergraduate research in UK universities. Prof Mike Neary ran a speed networking session for the students and gave the closing keynote.

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth hangs open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage hurling it before his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.

— Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History” in Illuminations (1940).

Student as Producer is based on a number of intellectual projects, including critical social theory. Walter Benjamin (1892 -1940) was a central figure among a group of critical social theorists writing in Europe in the first half of the twentieth century. His article, Author as Producer (1934), is a key text for the development of Student as Producer

Author: Mike Neary