Format as Infrastructure: Ann Cvetkovich on Lauren Berlant

What can scholarly writing learn from contemporary forms such as creative non-fiction, lyric essay, graphic narrative, or mixed media?Part lecture, part discussion and part group-writing workshop, this event will draw from Cvetkovich's ongoing research projects, including a book on the current state of LGBTQ archives and the creative use of them by artists.These models will serve as a point of departure for collective writing exercises done in the real time of the workshop.In particular, we will focus on the list, series, or collection as models for writing practice.Questions to be pursued include the following: How can one organize an archive or a collection of objects, photographs, texts, or other artifacts in multiples or series to serve as the basis for research and writing?What do various forms of writing-at the level of both sentence and structure-do to represent, describe, or remediate data or evidence, and how can such work place pressure on conventional models of data and evidence?How can developing a writing practice not only address methodological and intellectual/theoretical questions but make it easier to get work done?We will write periodically throughout the event, by ourselves (with our objects) and collaboratively, with each other.