Peter J. Woods

Peter J. Woods is a scholar and artist from Milwaukee, WI with a deep interest in experimental music, DIY arts communities, and communal knowledge production.

As an artist, Woods is best known for his solo work that exists at the intersection of noise music, performance art, and expanded cinema. He has toured the US extensively for over a decade and collaborated with artists including Olivia Block, Tatsuya Nakatani, Christopher Burns, Amanda Schoofs, Alex Kmet (of Climax Denial), Andrew Weathers, Jason Soliday, and more. Woods also runs the FTAM productions organization, a record label and concert promotion organization that hosted the Milwaukee Noise Fest, the Experimental Education Series, and the Noise Knowledge Consortium. He recently served as the chair of the music committee at the Jazz Gallery Center for the Arts.

As a Scholar, Woods critically investigates, first, what and how people learn through creative production and, second, how cultural contexts and culturally situated technologies both enable and restrict that learning. Through this work, he employs a wide range of methodologies (ethnographic research, object studies, text analysis, design-based research, and arts-based research in particular) to investigate various educational contexts that range from informal arts communities to formal mathematics classrooms. This line of research intentionally addresses issues of equity within these learning ecologies by challenging historically situated traditions and practices that restrict agency and reinscribe oppressive social forces. He is currently an Assistant Professor of Learning Science at the University of Nottingham.