What is the relationship between doing, learning, transmitting, building, creating, memorializing and understanding when these activities are placed in relation to each other, and all with human action in general, immersed in the world?

What do we learn about “ways of doing things” and their repercussions at the level of the individual subject or the social collective when, instead of considering them watertight, we articulate them with each other?

These are the fundamental questions that will guide the International Colloquium “Ways of Doing”.

In the Western tradition, “making” means imposing a form, or a pre-conceived project, on a raw material, which is considered inert. This is what British anthropologist Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen, Scotland), among others, calls the “hylemorphic” model. In fact, for Aristotle, all things resulted from the combination of matter(hilé) and form(morphé). And it is in this line of thinking that we still mostly find ourselves today.

But it is possible to look at things differently and try to understand more closely how the relationship between human beings and the materials and resources of the ecosystems that surround them has been going on for as long as we have existed. Learning, from those who know and in practice, to observe, listen and handle, to experience textures and identify smells, to analyze intrinsic characteristics and foresee the results of interactions, becomes a long process of training, of refining the senses and the gesture, of knowing the materials, the techniques and the circumstances. This interaction, whether occasional or repeated, results in learning processes and the construction of knowledge. The use of “know-how” to “make knowledge”, in intimate relationship with the world to which we belong, and which constantly makes us, as we constantly make it, transforms this interaction into a reproductive chain of production and application of knowledge.

This Colloquium therefore calls on all disciplinary areas that can contribute to a reflection on this problem of doing, knowing how to do, dealing with materials and available resources, paying attention to their specificities, to the active way in which they intervene in our ways of acting, thinking, generating and transmitting knowledge. Through case studies or theoretical reflection, the aim will be to stimulate transdisciplinary readings, capable of highlighting not only the deep affinities between academic areas, but also their interrelationship with non-scholarly forms of knowledge, highlighting the processes by which we human beings create things, create environments, create worlds, at the same time as we are created by them.

Guest speakers

Kapil Raj (EHESS, Paris) – Opening Lecture (still to be confirmed)

Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen, Scotland) – Closing Lecture)

Program:

https://waysofmaking2018.wixsite.com/making2018/programa