Unsecuring Infrastructures Open Call

How might an encounter with contemporary art change what becomes visible within your own field of research?

For Unsecuring Infrastructures at AND Festival 2026, we are inviting PhD and postdoctoral researchers to join a small interdisciplinary research group in Barnsley.

Barnsley is a former coal town now designated as the UK’s first government-backed Tech Town, with a programme exploring how AI and digital technologies can support public services, education, local businesses, skills and infrastructure. The festival’s commissions bring this technological transformation into contact with industrial memory, public space, identity, ecology and possible futures for the town.

Building on Unsecurities Lab, an interdisciplinary research initiative at Lancaster University exploring contemporary art as research infrastructure, the workshop uses an experimental method called Distributed Critique, developed at AND since 2019. The method includes composing a specialist audience around contemporary artworks, treating the festival as a shared research environment.

Participants of Unsecuring Infrastructures will attend the festival from Saturday 26 to Sunday 27 September. 

You will encounter selected commissions together and use them as starting points for facilitated discussion, speculative thinking and collective research. You will join a core group with expertise in critical and responsible AI, digital materiality, surveillance, media archaeology, speculative fiction, planetary social thought, cultural policy, artistic research, publishing and experimental technology, including Daniel Rourke, Kwasu Tembo, Rose Butler, Martin Zeilinger, Oonagh Murphy, Nigel Clark, Nathan Jones and Mark Wright.

For this open call we are particularly interested in researchers working in areas including AI and data engineering; civic infrastructure; local government and public policy; planning and geography; industrial history and heritage; education and the future of work; environmental systems; public services; community research; memory and place. We also welcome fields whose relevance might emerge unexpectedly through the artworks.

The conversations will generate concepts, diagrams, scenarios and critical propositions. These will feed into a Festival Knowledge Synthesis publication, bringing together the concepts, diagrams, scenarios and critical propositions generated through the workshop.

Participants will:

• Attend the in-person workshop in Barnsley on 26–27 September 2026. 

• Experience selected festival commissions with the group and contribute actively to facilitated discussions.

• Produce a short 500-word response for the Festival Knowledge Synthesis, a co-authored publication led by Lancaster University and Liverpool John Moores University.

• Have the option to develop their contribution into a 2,000-word article for peer review and publication in December 2026.

The workshop is free. You are encouraged to seek travel and accommodation costs from your institution. Independent researchers can apply for a bursary of up to £250 towards these costs. Please let us know in your application if you need bursary support.

How to apply

• If this connects with your research, please fill out this form by Sunday 23 August
• If you have any questions before you apply, please contact us at hello@andfestival.org.uk

Unsecuring Infrastructures for AND Festival 2026 is developed by Lancaster University through Unsecurities Lab, an interdisciplinary research initiative exploring how contemporary art can function as research infrastructure, initiated by Dr Nathan Jones at Security Lancaster. This edition is presented in partnership with Liverpool John Moores University’s Institute of Art and Technology (IAT) and Experimental Technologies Lab (ETL), led by Dr Mark Wright.