Emma Cocker is a writer-artist and Associate Professor in Fine Art at Nottingham Trent University, UK. Her research enquiry unfolds at the threshold between writing/art, involving diverse process-oriented, dialogic-collaborative and aesthetic-poetic approaches to working with and through language. Cocker often works in collaboration with other artists on durational projects, where the studio-gallery or site-specific context is approached as a live laboratory for shared artistic research. Cocker’s writing has been published in Failure, 2010; Stillness in a Mobile World, 2010; Drawing a Hypothesis: Figures of Thought, 2011; Hyperdrawing: Beyond the Lines of Contemporary Art, 2012; On Not Knowing: How Artists Think, 2013; Choreo-graphic Figures: Deviations from the Line, 2017; The Creative Critic: Writing as/about Practice, 2018; Live Coding: A User's Manual, 2023, and in the solo collections, The Yes of the No, 2016, and How Do You Do?, 2025. Cocker is co-founder of the international Society for Artistic Research Special Interest Group for Language-based Artistic Research. See also https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2985-7839

Reading Group: Affect




In partnership with If I Can't Dance I Don't Want to be Part of Your Revolution,  I will be hosting a series of reading group discussions at Site Gallery in Sheffield, for exploring a number of texts relating to the notion of AFFECT. Often used interchangeably with the experience of feeling or emotion, this term can also describe an individual’s capacity to affect others and in turn to be affected by them. Affect was a key concern underpinning the citywide festival Art Sheffield 2010 – Life: A User’s Manual. The reading group forms part of the wider programme of events relating to the forthcoming solo exhibition at Site by Jeremiah Day. 


There will be more information about the reading groups here.


Background to the reading group.

If I Can’t Dance’s Reading Group is a gathering of artists, critical thinkers, writers and various other readers from in and outside the field of contemporary art, who come together once a month to discuss new topics and directions in performative art practice and their relation to social and political issues. If I Can’t Dance’s current field of research is the notion of affect, which can be read in the light of our continuing investigations into the construction of subjectivity and the politics of identity. It builds on those intellectual paradigms such as performativity, theatricality and feminism(s), all of which have emerged from the activity of If I Can’t Dance over the last years

If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution produces art works and thematic programmes. Departing from a spirit of open questioning and long term enquiry with artists, If I Can’t Dance is dedicated to exploring the evolution and typology of performance and performativity in contemporary art.