The Propositions programme is a discursive setting for filmmakers, artists and researchers across disciplines to expand on their work, demonstrating research, contexts and perspectives as a means to dig deeper into the questions, ideas and complications encountered through the creative process. Historicising shared experiences often marked by marginalisation, Propositions invites reflections across sonic and textual forms.

Launching his new book Disablement in the Age of Ambivalence, Tom Campbell is joining us in conversation to collectively explore disablement in the context of Zygmunt Bauman’s solid and liquid modernity. This discursive event explores how shifting historical formations — from institutional classification to neoliberal marketisation — generate continuous yet changing forms of invalidation, placing disablement at the centre of modern social organisation.

In collaboration with Special Collections, a live event series and podcast that rethinks how we understand the archival, Ashley Holmes will be presenting Dub Epistemologies: Luton Carnival in the 2000s. Part of a series of hybrid talks and live video essays that treat sound as both archive and method, Ashley proposes active, critical listening as a way of knowing. This hybrid performance listens across screen, street, and sound system, delving into personal collections of music, records and online footage and audio related to Luton Carnival.

Ashley Holmes will be in conversation with Kathryn Elkin and Lauren Velvick of Special Collections as part of this event.