Dr Duckie graphic by Zed @ They Them Studio
As readers of this blog will know, over the past few years I did a PhD with the legendary queer performance collective Duckie, which makes me Dr Duckie (quack).
I got immersed in their various community projects (with older people, homeless people, young queer performers and more) and then framed these projects as examples of what I call homemade mutant hope machines – emergent, adaptive and autonomous forms and processes that routinely generate hope in the possibility of better worlds – and start to bring them into being.
Academically, the research straddles queer futurity, performance studies and fun studies. In practical terms, it promotes ‘hope-machine thinking’, a conceptual framework with pragmatic applications far beyond Duckie’s work. It holds potential use for anyone who values chosen family, collective care, material support, participatory performance, queer fun and mutation – perhaps especially at this deeply uncertain time, when the stakes of queer civic engagement continue to rise.
We want the ideas to be as accessible and engaging as possible so we’ve made a Dr Duckie website, with nifty design, where you can…
Get an overview of the ideas
Watch a smartly edited hour-long talk recorded at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern last year (more on the talk here)
Download the PhD thesis itself for free as a PDF or ebook
and share your hope machine.
The Dr Duckie site is here:
Design is by Zed @ They Them Studio; video filming and editing is by Orlando Myxx; and Catherine Silverstone at Queen Mary University of London supervised the research.
There’s no particular game plan beyond sharing the ideas. Before the pandemic, we were developing a Dr Duckie stage show and hope-machine workshop formats; a show feels trickier now, of course, though workshops could still work.
So have a rummage – if you like what you see, feel free to share – and if you think hope-machine thinking might be helpful to something you’re involved in, you can drop me a line at drduckie@duckie.co.uk.
