2nd December 2026, 1pm-2pm

This talk explores what becomes perceptible when anxiety is understood not only as an individual psychological condition, but as something produced through our relationships with the environments we inhabit. Drawing together everyday aesthetics, practical aesthetics, and theories of affect, the paper explores how atmospheres, rhythms, and institutional pressures shape educational experience. It argues that creative and aesthetic practices can cultivate forms of attention that make these often intangible conditions perceptible, communicable, and available for collective reflection. I position my own poetic writing, photography, and artmaking, produced during a period of institutional uncertainty and proposed redundancies, to explore the idea of anxiety as embodied, relational, and environmental rather than simply internal. Ultimately, the paper asks how creative practice might help us attend differently to the educational environments we cultivate and begin to imagine how they might become more humane and liveable.

Bio: Dr Matthew Isherwood is currently a Lecturer in Creativity and Arts Education at the University of Exeter. His research brings aesthetics and arts education into productive conversation, exploring how aesthetic experiences cultivate attentiveness, sensibility, and relational engagement with the world. His work draws on the educational philosophy of Maxine Greene, particularly her idea that aesthetic education helps us become more awake to everyday experience, more open to difference, and more attentive to possibilities that might otherwise remain unseen. This informs his broader interest in education as a process of cultivating creativity, critical thinking, empathy, and reflective awareness in the arts. His current research and creative practice bring together aesthetic education, arts-based inquiry, dialogue, and transdisciplinary learning to explore how encounters with art, others, and everyday environments can cultivate sensibilities that encourage different ways of noticing, understanding, and engaging with an increasingly complex world.

Chair: Prof. Penny Hay

Book here: https://www.ticketsource.com/booking/select/kmzoanxrawml