Collapse as a Condition of (Un)Knowing: A Research Workshop

 

A Research Workshop with Jonathan Alexander, Juli Carson, Ashley Hunt, and Mark Minch-de Leon. Organized and facilitated by Annika Haas.

To join the workshop, register here. 

 

About the Workshop

Collapsing climates — cultural, political, and meteorological — have become a shared, yet unevenly experienced condition of the contemporary poly-crisis. Deconstructive approaches to humans’ effect on the Earth’s ecosystem such as Bernard Stiegler’s Neganthropocene, underscore the close links between collapsing climates and the ideological paradigms that powerfully impact our capacities to survive — or live critically within it. Yet the experience of collapse, as both material and affective conditions of life on this planet, remains a question of positionality. Related injustices are mounting among different geopolitical and climatic regions, within their stratified societies and irreparably damaged ecologies. 

The workshop focuses on cultures of knowing which are equally affected by collapsing climates. This concerns the struggle for evidence and testimony, the reality of epistemicides alongside the expansion of computational, neocolonial information infrastructures, as well as the difficulties to engage with various embodied, ancestral and relational ways of knowing (through) damage and pain as well as destruction, disaster and death in the context of the Westernized university.  

The workshop also confronts persistent ideas that dominate the anticipated horizon of collapse and its imaginary counterparts — such as repair, wholeness, restoration and reproduction, archival preservation, technological solutionism, securitization and straightness — with the experience of unknowing, discomfort and failure that surround what Jack Halberstam terms as the "gritty, dirty, messy, disorderly” unworld to come. This unworld becomes tangible not despite, but through collapse and its diverse temporal, epistemic as well as affective layers encompassing disappointment, delusion, dissociation as well as despair. Engaging with these layers and their aftermaths, the workshop explores possibilities and forms of imagining an otherwise that may point towards ways of “living and thinking and feeling otherwise, through the brokenness." 

Organized in parallel with the exhibition The Unworld To Come. Imagining an Otherwise…, on view at the Contemporary Arts Center Gallery through April 4, 2026, this workshop engages the artworks by Marwa Arsanios, Virgil B/G Taylor, Ashley Hunt, and Natascha Sadr Haghighian as a point of departure for collective inquiry. Structured through joint writing exercises, shared research, and conversation, the workshop convenes participants to think through collapse as a lived, uneven, and contested reality that shapes how knowledge is produced, felt, and withheld.

Workshop Program

Saturday, 12:00–6:00pm
Contemporary Arts Center Gallery, UC Irvine

In addition to participating in discussion, attendees are invited to engage in a process of written reflection and note-taking, guided by minimal prompts throughout the workshop.

12:00–2:00 PM
Welcome, introduction, and writing exercises in the exhibition

2:00–2:30 PM
Refreshments

2:30–3:45 PM
Screening: Kaleidoscope
Juli Carson in conversation with Ashley Hunt, followed by Q&A

3:45–4:00 PM
Coffee break

4:00–5:15 PM
Knowing (Through) Damage and Destruction
Contributions by Jonathan Alexander and Mark Minch-de Leon
Moderated by Annika Haas

5:15–6:00 PM
Writing exercise, sharing round, and closing discussion

Contributor Biographies

Jonathan Alexander is Chancellor's Professor of English and Informatics in the School of Humanities at the University of California, Irvine.

Juli Carson is Professor of Art, Theory, and Criticism in the Department of Art and Director of the University Art Galleries at the University of California, Irvine.

Annika Haas is Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Hildesheim in the Research Training Group 2477 Aesthetic Practice, funded by the German Research, and a Visiting Scholar in the Department of Art at the University of California, Irvine.

Ashley Hunt is an artist, writer, and Co-Director of the Photo and Media Program at California Institute of the Arts (CalArts).

Mark Minch-de Leon is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Director of the California Center for Native Nations (CCNN) at the University of California, Riverside.

Credits

The workshop takes place within the framework of The Neganthropocene: Empire/Money, Science/Politics, Art/Intervention, a three-part research project by Juli Carson and collaborators under the umbrella of the University of California Climate Action Arts Network (UC CAAN), a systemwide initiative that brings together researchers, scholars, students, and community partners to address the climate crisis through the arts. UC CAAN is supported by the University of California Office of the President’s Multicampus Research Programs and Initiatives (MRPI).

Organized and facilitated by Annika Haas, Visiting Scholar, Claire Trevor School of the Arts, UC Irvine (Spring 2026), with support from the German Research Foundation (DFG), RTG 2477 “Aesthetic Practice,” University of Hildesheim, Germany.

Parking

Park in the Mesa Parking Structure, 4000 Mesa Rd., Irvine, CA 92617

Directions: From University Drive, turn onto Mesa Rd. Then turn right into the second level of the parking structure.

You may park on any level. However, we suggest you park on Level 3 for easy access to the pedestrian bridge located just to the right of the Level 3 elevator and staircase. Once you cross the bridge, the Contemporary Arts Center is located to your right. 

Inquiries
For more information, please email Sasha Ussef, Associate Director of the University Art Galleries, at sussef@uci.edu.