MFA Thesis writing course with Ted Byfield

Location: 3rd Floor MFA Hub
Course times:
Feb 8th 14.00-17.00
Feb 9th 9.00 - 12.00

This workshop is for students in the early stages of writing their MFA thesis, and is open to anyone in the MFA program. Our goal will be to step outside of familiar, sometimes frustrating processes and, as the poet René Char put it, to 'cultivate your legitimate strangeness.' Over two intensive days, we will work in flexible and evolving groups to build simple and practical strategies for identifying your strengths and weaknesses — and learn reflexively to work independently where you're strongest and to collaborative where you're not. The results will not be standardized; instead, each student will make substantial progress toward writing a thesis that is both personally satisfying and academically solid.

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Ted Byfield is an independent writer and researcher. For thirty years he has worked internationally across the fields of art, activism, design, education, publishing, and new technologies -- as an artist, director, advisor, organizer, and editor with a wide range of civil society entities, foundations, and academic and public-interest entities. He has worked as an editor for Cambridge UP, DIA Center for the Arts, MIT Press, the New Press, Oxford UP, Pantheon/Schocken, Pluto Press (UK), Random House, Serpent's Tail (US), Verso, and Zone Books, among many others; he co-edited README (NYC: Autonomedia, 1998) and co-author of Open Education: A Study in Disruption (London: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014). He was co-editor of ICANN Watch (2001-2010) and has served as a co-moderator of the mailing list since 1998. For fifteen years (2000–2014) he served on the faculty of the New School University's Parsons School of Design, where his research focused on transparency issues in academic governance. More recently, he co-founded the Open Syllabus Project, a quickly growing research network dedicated to transforming university-level syllabi into a large-scale resource for quantitative and qualitative analysis. He is currently writing a cultural history of images of information (forthcoming, Bloomsbury Academic, 2019)