Date: March 28, April 25, May 23

Time: 14:00 - 17:00 

Location: The Old Library at the Clockhouse (37 General Foulkesweg) 

Through three-part workshop series, we will look into thinking beyond abstract reasoning in the head. The workshop series is particularly aimed at WUR masters who are currently thinking about and designing their thesis project. We will explore themes connected to your work as a young researcher; personal values and emotions and your positionality within academia. Through different embodied exercises, the workshops aim to provide spaces where you can develop the capability to remain connected to that which is deeply felt throughout your master's thesis journey.

The workshop series is inspired by Donna Haraway’s tentacular thinking and Eugene Gendlin’s Focusing. We will engage with Focusing as a philosophical and experiential practice that allows us to turn our attention inward, toward a bodily felt sense of a situation and allowing new meaning to emerge from it. Through this practice, rather than analysing a problem with thought alone, Focusing will invite you to notice the unclear, bodily sense of an issue. This practice will be the basis as we look inwards while remaining always in relation to the world, attentive to our tentacular connections across beings and systems. We will look into the values that guide your research and your position as a student within higher education, through the student-supervisor dynamic.