PLANTING BLOOMSURY
Join us for a guided sketching workshop exploring the plant lives once shared with the Bloomsbury Group and those that continue to quietly shape the UCL campus and its surroundings today...
Planting Bloomsbury
The Multispecies Heritage Co-Lab
Anthropologists and social scientists are increasingly working with multispecies worlds, speculative ecologies, and human–animal entanglements. But do these ideas travel beyond our seminars and conference rooms?
This workshop explores how to make multispecies research legible, engaging, and relevant to people outside our immediate niche—practitioners, policymakers, conservationists, designers, urban planners, and anyone else who might actually use (or be moved by) the knowledge we produce.
Through engaging activities and collective brainstorming, we’ll experiment with ways of communicating our work without diluting its complexity or abandoning its weirdness. Bring your microbes, molluscs, metaphors—and your best attempts at translating them.
Noticing Otherwise...
Participants from previous workshops shared their drawings and sensory pieces, reflected on how these practices have engaged with more-than-human worlds.
Building on these explorations, the workshop introduces speculative, art-based approaches to understanding human–nonhuman relations. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s (2015) arts of noticing, we experimented with ways of attending to the overlooked, the ephemeral, and the entangled—temporarily setting aside human-centred frameworks to attune to other forms of presence and relation.
The session concluded with a cyanotype workshop, where participants created light-sensitive prints using natural materials found around Bloomsbury campus.
Approached as a process of co-creation with light, time, and matter, cyanotype becomes a way of tracing encounters rather than representing them—inviting reflection on how more-than-human forces shape what becomes visible.
