UCL English X UCU Teach-Outs
Felicia Hu reports on the English Department’s teach-outs organised during UCU strike action.
During the UCU strikes that took place between 25th November and 4th December, UCL staff members and guest speakers held a range of daily teach-outs. The UCL English Department organised a series of four teach-outs over the two-week strike period.
The first, titled “Why We Strike”, took place on 26th November at the Malet Place picket line and featured a series of talks on the strike action by Paul Gilroy (UCL), Matthew Beaumont (UCL), Esther Leslie (Birkbeck) and others. The second teach-out took place on 28th November, also at the Malet Place picket line, featuring a series of poetry readings by Dai George, Luke Roberts, and Will Harris, who each read a mixture of their own original material alongside poems by other writers. The floor was then opened to the audience to step up and read poems of their own choosing.
On the impact of poetry during strike action, UCL English lecturer Nicholas Spengler, quotes W.H. Auden’s In Memory of W.B Yeats and comments: “I think he’s thinking about poetry as a political tool, sure, but also more broadly this idea of a way of happening, as a way to bring people together, as a way to ask people to pay attention”.
UCL English faculty members Francesca Brooks, Eric Langley, and Owen Holland volunteered with a variety of poems ranging from Ann Carson’s “Cannot” to Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ozymandias”. This teach-out was run in cooperation with Poetry on the Picket Line, a group of non-professional poets that stand on various picket lines and read poetry for entertainment and in solidarity with various strike movements. Chip, from Poetry on the Picket Line, also volunteered with “A Higher Education” which was composed at a different picket line. The group have a published anthology titled Poetry on the Picket Line. Proceeds from this go to support future strike action and picket lines.
Photography by Felicia Hu
Francesca Brooks, who was instrumental in the organisation of these teach-outs, described how, while she was a post-graduate student at King’s College London, she saw teach-outs and was inspired by the energy in them. “I thought it’d be a good way of getting the students involved in the conversation rather than it just being us, alone, sometimes talking to science and engineering students, but actually being able to turn the picket line into a kind of performance space where you can come and hear us talk about why we’re doing it and reflect on the bigger, broader issues”.
The third session took place on 2nd December at Saint Pancras Church House and focused on Revolutionary texts. The two hour teach-out included four talks on a variety of writings. Paul Davis, the department tutor at UCL English, delivered a lecture on John Milton’s revolutionary writings. On evoking literary legends such as John Milton during modern revolutions, he declared “Let’s break the academic glass Paradise Lost usually rests behind and wield it.”
The second talk was led by Harry Chancellor, a PhD student at UCL, and was about prophetic writing during the 17th century as a tool for radical movement. This teach-out also featured a talk on Make Rojava Green Again, a text about the ecological revolution in North Syria by UCL BA English students Xara Zabihi Dutton and Matthew Sardegno, and finally a talk on Angela Davies’ ‘Are Prisons Obselete?’ by Maria Düster, a BA History and Politics of the Americas students, and Sofía Kourous Vázquez, a BASc student.
Xara Zabihi Dutton commented on the involvement of undergraduate students in activities like these: “Really talking to your professors and developing good personal relationships with them can lead to your involvement in really exciting learning experiences that happen during the strike that are really impromptu”. Likewise, Sofía Kourous Vázquez said: “What’s so amazing is that during strikes these teach-outs happen where professors and students can interact in a completely different way and there’s a mutual respect there which you don’t get normally”.
Photography by Felicia Hu
The fourth and final teach-out took place at the British Museum on 4th December with Eric Langley, Francesca Brooks, and UCL English PhD candidate Sam Caleb each delivering a talk centered around an artefact in the museum. Eric Langley, standing in front of the gates of Shalmaneser III (858–824 BC) from Balawat shared an excerpt from his father’s diary which mentions the time he took Eric to see the Gates at the museum and spoke about the process of looking at objects in a museum and how that connects to reading literature.
Francesca Brooks led a talk about the Franks Casket, a small whale-bone casket from the 8th century featuring both depictions of Germanic myth and Christian stories. Sam Caleb, standing by the Elgin Marbles, read a passage from the first volume of Peter Weiss’ ‘The Aesthetics of Resistance’, describing a frieze that previously covered the outer walls of the temple of Pergamon, but can now be found in the Pergamon Museum in Berlin.