Centre for Material Thinking

The CMT was launched in 2021 with a talk by the California-based dance scholar Professor Carrie Noland on the work of Merce Cunningham. You can watch the recording on our Events page. Still very much in the shadow of the Covid-19 pandemic, many of our talks were hosted online out of necessity, but this was also with a view to increasingly accessibility and engaging with a wider international audience (bearing in mind that Aberystwyth is quite hard to reach for many people!).

We are committed to creating a dialogue between academic and non-academic audiences, and our events are open to anyone and everyone. We continue to host online, in-person and hybrid events, run practical workshops and commission artists and writers to respond to the theme of materiality.

We bring together artists and scholars from a broad range of disciplines to explore how new modes of representation might elicit a greater awareness of human and non-human entanglements. We aim to open up a space for thinking about how material comes to matter in a range of socio-cultural and eco-political contexts.

What is material thinking? We don’t have the answers, but we invite you on our journey to find out …