Abstract

Tentacular Pedagogy. This is a creative-critical -civic-community-centered, joined-up approach to HE teaching, learning and being drawing on the octopus to fight the white elephants of the ivory tower in and beyond a time of poly-crisis. See related article on Society for Research in Higher Education here.

Session and activities

Headline talks are moments in the programme designed to bring us together around shared questions and critical themes shaping teaching and learning. Creating space for collective reflection, provocation and dialogue; offering a common point of departure to connect ideas, practices and conversations across creative education. 

Speaker Bio

Kai Syng Tan (she/they, @kaisyngtan) is an artist-academic-advisor-author-agitator. Tentacular and hyperactive, they are an experienced academic developer and teacher (PFHEA, having taught in 200 universities worldwide), trans-disciplinary research innovator (including working on three books entangling creativity, futurity, anti-oppression, leadership with neuro-queering), creative practitioner (San Francisco International Film Festival Golden Gate Film Award; Biennale of Sydney) and curator of activities ranging £0-£4.8m (including the 75th Anniversary of the 5th Pan African Congress Celebrations to mark Black History Month that reached 18.2 million people worldwide, and the opening and closing ceremonies of Asia’s Paralympics praised as ‘game-changing’ by disability groups). Firsts include: making Singapore’s first “political film” that was confiscated and banned (2001); being the first artist-in-residence at the Social, Genetic and Developmental Psychiatry Centre to lead a project that went on to win a National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement Culture Change Award (2018); being UK Adult ADHD Network’s first ever Creative and Cultural Consultant (2018-2023), and as the first creative researcher on an Editorial Board of the Royal College of Psychiatrists to help drive change on clinical education and training (2021-now). Their book Neuro-Futurism and Re-Imagining Leadership: An A-Z towards Collective Liberation (2024) introduces 26 love-led strategies to reframe ‘leadership’ as a trans- disciplinary, (co-)creative, diversified, decolonised, neuro-queered practice of change- and future-making. Networks founded includes the 480-member Neurodiversity In/& Creative Research Network. A curatorial project Karama: Expressions of Resistance from Gaza (2025) with UK and Palestinian community leaders was praised as ‘moving’ and ‘fantastic’. By day, Kai is Associate Professor in Arts and Cultural Leadership at the University of Southampton.