Towards a Bibliography of Critical Publishing: Inaugural lecture by Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb, Basel Academy of Art and Design

Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb, Professor of Critical Publishing at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) and Head of the Make/Sense PhD programme of the HGK Basel, will give her inaugural lecture entitled ‘Towards a Bibliography of Critical Publishing’ on Thursday, 12 March 2026, at 6.30 p.m.

The global rise of authoritarian regimes exposes a crisis of publicness. Anti-democratic agendas rooted in nationalism and hostility toward vulnerability thrive in media environments that address participation at the level of individuals, fragmenting shared political imagination and action.

In her inaugural lecture, Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb frames critical publishing as an urgency to act. What forms of critique can respond to this crisis? The lecture approaches this question through bibliography-making, understood as going beyond producing reference lists to building infrastructures of orientation. These shape what becomes visible and valued, how resources circulate, and how directions might be shifted. They gather what is necessary for intellectual and political survival and share the costs of that work.

The lecture approaches this question through bibliography-making, understood as going beyond producing reference lists to building infrastructures of orientation. These shape what becomes visible and valued, how resources circulate, and how directions might be shifted. They gather what is necessary for intellectual and political survival and share the costs of that work.

Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb develops this approach through her work with the magazine Brand-New-Life and the Distro Library at Infospace Basel. Drawing on feminist and reparative frameworks, this work explores how critique can be sustained through shared reading and collective practice, and which forms remain effective amid authoritarian power relations.

Contributing to this thinking, Laura Pregger and Gabriela Aquije Zegarra draw on plant relatives’ knowledges and mutual aid strategies to share an embodied spring rehearsal informedby Reciprocity, Interdependence, and Boundaries (RIB), nourishing the bibliography through radical tender literacies.

Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb has been Professor of Critical Publishing at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM) at HGK Basel since 1 January 2025. At HGK Basel, Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb is mainly involved in research and teaching in the Bachelor's programme in Process Design and the Master's programme in Transversal Design at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures (IXDM). She is also head of Make/Sense, the PhD programme at HGK Basel.

Prof. Dr. Lucie Kolb's inaugural lecture will take place in room D 1.03 next to the auditorium of HGK Basel and will include an aperitif.

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