On the Wednesday (feb 28th) lecture and workshop with Bettina Schwalm (Creating Real Worlds that don't Exist) you will be introduced more thoroughly to the working with imaginary worlds as critical and creative tools.

The setting up of fictional scenarios and the enactment of different roles within these scenarios is a creative and critical method that can be used as a vehicle for developing new knowledge, as well as finding new potential solutions to real challenges, and be productive of radical innovation. 

On Ficto-Criticism

'Fictocriticism resists the peremptory dictation of the institutional superego or the policing of the academic discipline in order to listen more attentively to the range of tones and styles (from tirade to intimidation, from severity to seduction), to the precise and specific modes of the maintenance of authority that was not, after all, monolithic. It was not by chance that feminist writers of the seventies and eighties (Cixous, Irigaray, Marini , Wittig and the numerous Canadian experimental writers, both francophone and anglophone, inspired by them) were so prolific in devising new fictocritical forms (note 2). For the heterogeneity of fictocritical forms bears witness to the existence of fictocriticism as a necessarily performative mode, an always singular and entirely tactical response to a particular set of problems - a very precise and local intervention, in other words.' Anna Gibbs, http://www.textjournal.com.au/april05/gibbs.htm

Scott Brook, ‘Does anyone know what happened to ‘fictocriticism’?: Toward a fractal genealogy of Australian fictorcriticism’ in UTS Review, 8.2 (2002). 

Gilles Deleuze , ‘Literature and Life’, in Essays Critical and Clinical, New York: Verso, 1998.

Anna Gibbs, Fictocriticism, Affect, Mimesis: Engendering Differences, University of Western Sydney, TEXT Vol 9. No. 1, April 2005. http://www.textjournal.com.au/april05/gibbs.htm

Helen Flavell, Writing-Between: Australian and Canadian Ficto-cricism, PhD manuscript (Murdoch University, Western Australia, 2004),

Hélène Frichot with Julieanna Preston, Michael Spooner, Sean Pickersgill, Zuzana Kovar, Ceri Hann, Megg Evans ‘An Antipodean Imaginary for Architecture+Philosophy: Ficto-Critical Approaches to Design Practice Research’ in Footprint, special issue, Architecture Culture and the Question of Knowledge: Doctoral Research Today, Issue 10/11, Spring 2012. http://www.footprintjournal.org/issues/current

Stephen Mueke , ‘The Fall: Ficto-Critical Writing, in Parallax, 8:4, 2002