Dr Nicholas Ferguson

My teaching spans the registers of art, visual culture, spatial politics and research methodology. I have written, taught and assessed across foundation, undergraduate, masters and PhD programmes in the UK. I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and between 2016 and 2020 I served as external examiner for the Critical Studies component of BA Computer Games Art, University of the Creative Arts (UCA). I have led on the design of Fine Art, Critical Studies, Research and Writing Methods and Visual Thinking Courses. At the level of leadership in the field, my contributions include mentoring colleagues, support with degree validations, and presentations within the faculty focused Centre for Learning and Teaching.

Three primary concerns in my praxis are reach, interdisciplinarity, and enquiry led approaches to knowledge. Between 2017 and 2020 I sought to develop a blueprint for community centred, practice led, pedagogy, one that would set agendas in the way the arts are made accessible and academic disciplines speak to one another. The project, Air Matters Learning from Heathrow, hosted at Watermans Arts, comprised an exhibition and public programme that brought together artists, academics and professionals from across multiple institutions and which spanned multiple worlds – acoustic science, geology, architectural history, political philosophy, history, transport policy. To this extent, it sought to take art out of the often-closed circuit of academy, gallery, and art markets, and bring it into conversation with wider fields of interest.

Courses taught

• Museum and Gallery Studies MA
• Fine Art BA (Hons)

My doctoral thesis, Indifference. Art, Liberalism and the Politics of Place (2015), examines the legacy of classical liberal thought in contemporary art commissioning. Through a series of cross readings between philosophy, aesthetics and political geography, it traces a relationship between place making art practices and classical liberalism's conceptualisation of the way territory might function in a market society. In tandem with this enquiry, and by way of methodological tool, the thesis develops a philosophy of indifference. It contends that indifference, alongside disinterestedness and objectivity, should be understood as part of an historical attempt to develop a critical modern subject that might transcend the self and disrupt both public and private power. By extension, it asks whether the artist's indifference to place might contribute to an artistic strategy to negotiate and contest the cultural forces that market place for the consolidation of private advantage.