Overview
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. We aim to create an atmosphere that is simultaneously intellectually rigorous and friendly, intense and chill: both an antidote from the toxicities we may carry with us from the normal academic semester and a platform for making unexpected connections and discovering new pathways for the research and writing we all hope to do in the future.
Our choice to use the term "summer lab", and not "summer school", is deliberate. PSL is part of our broader philosophy to bring the laboratory model into the humanities, blurring the borders and hierarchies between research and teaching, students (of different levels) and professors, the university and the local community. Toward this aim we aim to integrate as organically as we can the 'seminar' part of the summer school with the 'experimental' aspect, while placing emphasis on the creative intellectual production of the participants themselves.
More specifically, jointly-taught, faculty-led seminars will be interwoven with screenings and performances, as participants engage in a methodologically-focused, collaborative 'experiment' work that will be presented in a public event on the last day of the lab.
The core academic program will be enriched by a number of other activities: hikes in the countryside and visits to nearby villages, screenings and audio events, attendance of local cultural events (such as concerts or village festivals), eating adventures and, of course, the PSL 2017/2018 reunion and closing dance party!
The working language of the lab is English.
**Details of the 2020 PSL program will be announced at the beginning of the new year.
Our choice to use the term "summer lab", and not "summer school", is deliberate. PSL is part of our broader philosophy to bring the laboratory model into the humanities, blurring the borders and hierarchies between research and teaching, students (of different levels) and professors, the university and the local community. Toward this aim we aim to integrate as organically as we can the 'seminar' part of the summer school with the 'experimental' aspect, while placing emphasis on the creative intellectual production of the participants themselves.
More specifically, jointly-taught, faculty-led seminars will be interwoven with screenings and performances, as participants engage in a methodologically-focused, collaborative 'experiment' work that will be presented in a public event on the last day of the lab.
The core academic program will be enriched by a number of other activities: hikes in the countryside and visits to nearby villages, screenings and audio events, attendance of local cultural events (such as concerts or village festivals), eating adventures and, of course, the PSL 2017/2018 reunion and closing dance party!
The working language of the lab is English.
**Details of the 2020 PSL program will be announced at the beginning of the new year.
