The Utopia Workshop Ltd
Adult Community Education and Arts
directed by Robin Sivapalan, an adult education organiser based in London
The Utopia Workshop's programme for educators and leaders in any field living in Kingsbury and the surrounding areas of northwest London.
March - October 2027
£420 minimum fee
Groupwork: in literature, philosophy, history, psychoanalysis, theatre & education, with a special focus on France.
The programme involves 6 months intense exploratory reading and discussion, working through three (of eighteen) curated reading lists concurrently in well-facilitated, self-managed groups; 2 months collectively producing a play in conjunction with public educational workshops.
An affordable way for passionate local educators to belong to an advanced dialogic learning community in the humanities.
"One of the most wicked destructive forces, psychologically speaking, is unused creative power. If someone has a creative gift and out of laziness, or for some other reason, doesn't use it, the psychic energy turns to sheer poison. That's why we often diagnose neuroses and psychotic diseases as not-lived higher possibilities." -Marie-Louise von Franz’s book Shadow and Evil in Fairy Tales
Sous les feux d'artifice:
in the clair-obscur of Europe's lost library, gathering
Programme
1. C18 Enlightenment: the long century casting its even longer shadow
A pivotal century of emulation and revolution in scientific and religious thought, literary expression and social and industrial organisation. Europe, in the name of Reason, enlarges its envergure across the world's surface and the interior terrain of the human mind. A constantly re-written chapter defined by the political rivalry and intellectual symbiosis of Britain and France.
2. 'Utopian Thought in The Western World': a folie à deux festschrift to fantasy
Standing strong, still today, at 912 large luminous pages, 'Utopian Thought in The Western World' was the magnus opus of Frank E. Manuel, a giant of history and philology, co-written with his wife Fritzie over a quarter of a century. It won several prestigious awards, and features exhilarating psychological portraits of utopian thinkers and a closely woven tapestry of Utopian ideas through the renaissance to th 19th century, and their Greek and Biblical wellsprings. The writing is full of personality and flair - their favourite word is felicitous - and their varied approaches to people and periods have an intelligence that makes their subjective choices and their especia homages intrinsic to the delight of their edifice.
3. Go tell it on the mountain:
God's verbs, the nation's Biblia, and the endless exegesis
The most widely distributed book in the world, translated into 6-10 times as many languages as its nearest rival (Le Petit Prince), the main character - Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh - displays a dubious, but always compelling, range of personality traits / mood disorders. Demanding adulation from an immense supporting cast of actors, mere mirrors, off-shoots of a creation he always was gnarly about. Then Jesus, inscribed in the Greek. A centuries old education the art of interpretation with real world and literary ramifications - it's a must read before you give up the ghost.
4. Soul-analysis: Freud and friends and their epigones
From the performative hysteria at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris to the intimacy of his consulting room-cum-womb-tomb, Freud's staking out of the field of psychoanalysis - and the talking cure - is surely the greatest achievement of the C20. A psychological drama itself as movement, with Freud's tight steer over practice, publication - and excommunication - determining the destiny of the field, reflecting the ongoing conflict between medical and philosophic approaches to the mapping the psyche - and, no doubt, enacting his inner conflicts too. Someone who saw his work as that of an artist as much as a doctor, the encyclopaedic scope of his writings - a circle of learning - has won him devotees among eminent historians and literary critics who borrow these tools to make the past and the text, speak the unspoken, more than they knew they were saying.
Facilitation
Need an external facilitator to help plan and deliver a participatory event with activities that will help your group explore an issue and make decisions creatively?
The Utopia Workshop Library
founders, foundations
adult education for another world
Contact us
E-mail: robin@theutopiaworkshop.co.uk