I am a photographer, writer, researcher and publisher with a curiosity about everyday things and the ordinary places in which I live and work. Much of my activity emerges through a serial publication, the Pam Flett Press, which explores the visual, verbal, audio and temporal possibilities of the ‘essay’, and via the opportunities for production that arise in dialogue with creative and critical friends. Whilst my practice lies at the intersection of writing, photography, design and print, conceptually and critically I am an avowed generalist, committed to making unexpected conjunctions between disciplines.

Having graduated in Combined and Media Arts, from what was then Sheffield City Polytechnic, I developed a broad interdisciplinary approach to practice, pedagogy and research, going on to teach Graphic Design, Fine Art, Photography, and Historical and Critical Studies on a range of UK undergraduate and postgraduate courses. I worked for 18 years at Nottingham Trent University, where I held the role of Course Leader for the large interdisciplinary Fine Art provision, before returning to Sheffield Hallam University to join the Visual Communication subject group. I am a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.

My particular interest and expertise lies in the possibilities of independent publishing and distribution for artists, designers, activists and academics; this relates to a broader concern for the role of pedagogy, research and creative practice in relation to contemporary neoliberal agendas. I have spoken about aspects of this work at events such as Loughborough University School of the Arts’ Researcher Essentials: Publishing and how to get Published; Art, Politics, and the Pamphleteer, Peoples’ History Museum, Manchester and Challenging Pedagogies, Paradox Fine Art European Forum Biennial Conference, University of Granada, Spain.

Critically, I am focused on ideas of ‘the everyday’ across a range of academic and creative disciplines such that my work has explored non-professional or amateur modes of production; informal messages graffitied across urban surfaces; littered chewing gum, and brownfield sites or so-called areas of terrain vague. This attention to overlooked objects, spaces and practices has involved my drawing on the work of French writer Georges Perec, about whom I have written for Species of Spaces: A Transdisciplinary Conference on the Work of Georges Perec, at Teesside University and its subsequent publication, as well as participating in a reading group with colleagues from Geography at Sheffield University in preparation for my presentation at an interdisciplinary symposium there on Perec’s Geographies / Perecquian Geographies.