Give Your Thoughts and Win
Give Your Thoughts and Win
Thinking Culture | School of Culture & Creative Arts | College of Arts & Humanities
Date: Wednesday 17 April 2024
Time: 17:30 - 19:00
Venue: Jim's Bar, Queen Margaret Union
Category: Academic events, Student events
Speaker: Shona Macnaughton | Hannah Proctor
Website: thinkingculture.gla.ac.uk/event/give-your-thoughts-and-win/
Artist Shona Macnaughton presents an alternative pub quiz where the answers will never be correct and everyone can lose. ‘Give Your Thoughts and Win’ is a new performance which compares staff engagement structures of the present, with the radical democracy of feminist social movements. Many will be familiar with workplace wellbeing surveys. They are part of an internalised culture of transparency which generates easily reproduced and understood statistics. Yet a collective mass of figures is not a collective. What alternatives have there been of aired grievance culture? Turning the survey inside out via feminist methods of acknowledging misery and rage, following recent research into modes of politicised address within women’s health publications of the 1980s – Jim’s Bar will host a questionnaire and renactment of historical and contemporary materials, in an attempt to concoct a new work/life balance together.
As part of the event we will be joined by writer Hannah Proctor who will discuss her new book, in the context of the themes of the evening, talking about the differences between workplace burnout and burnout from strikes and organising and proposing some alternatives to neoliberal well-being discourses developed by activist groups at different historical moments. Burnout: The Emotional Experience of Political Defeat (Verso, 2024) explores emotional experiences of political defeat, disillusionment and depletion in historical perspective. Hannah researches and teaches at the Centre for the Social History of Health and Healthcare at the University of Strathclyde where she holds a Wellcome Trust University Award.
Shona Macnaughton is an artist who embodies various state, institutional and labour structures as performance. Her work focuses on how political processes are reflected in language and design, exploring histories of free marketisation and individualisation as enacted by neoliberal aesthetics- on work, public space, healthcare, housing, and art institutions. Shona has performed and exhibited nationally and internationally in visual art venues, theatres, public space and online platforms. Each performance responds directly to its site, including a self-reflexive parody of the artist’s position in a given situation, which unfolds in disorientating interactions with audiences.
This event is presented by Thinking Culture, a cultural programme supported by the School of Culture & Creative Arts, University of Glasgow.