The Pelion Summer Lab (PSL) for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities (PSL) convenes an interdisciplinary group of graduate students, researchers, academics, artists and cultural producers for a ten-day period of intensive exchange and exploration regarding the pressing problems and questions of our worlds.
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The Pelion Summer Lab (PSL) for Cultural Theory and Experimental Humanities (PSL), founded in 2017, is an initiative of the Laboratory of Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly in Volos, Greece. So far, we have conducted four successful summer labs - Democracy & Dissent (2017), Liminal Lives & Para-Sites (2018), Data & Power (2019) and After/Lives in 2022 (after a hiatus of two years due to the pandemic). We are pleased that we are supported again this year by the Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN).
Our use of the term lab, rather than school, is deliberate. In our mountain village perch and refuge, in the optimistic early days of Greek summer, we actively work to blur traditional academic borders and hierarchies between research and teaching, students and professors, the university and the local community. We integrate social research and critical theory as organically as possible with experimental methodologies and artistic practice, while placing emphasis on the creative production of the participants themselves. The format of the PSL is designed to bring participants into meaningful contact with innovative critical thinkers and researchers, as well as with each other.
Faculty seminars and directed readings are interwoven with screenings, making activities, hikes, critical games, performative exercises. The core program is enriched by a number of other activities: hikes in the countryside, swimming at the gorgeous local beaches, visits to nearby villages, attendance of local cultural events and, of course, eating and talking late into the night. The cohort is tasked from the first day with the challenge to stage a public experiment based on the theme of the lab on the final afternoon of the lab (followed by the annual reunion dance party).
The atmosphere at PSL is simultaneously intellectually rigorous and friendly, intense and chill: both an antidote from the stress we may carry with us from the normal academic semester and a platform for making unexpected connections and discovering new pathways for the research, writing, art and activism we hope to do in the future. Each of our unique labs has attracted stellar faculty and participants from Greece and around the world, creating enduring networks of collaboration and friendship. We cannot wait to see what PSL 2023 will bring forth!
