#SSASS

KEYWORDS

queer theory, decolonial thought, process philosophy, literary studies

DESCRIPTION

What is an event? For whom does an event amount to a provocation while others are left unmoved, debilitated, cold? How do some situations and encounters animate and provoke learning while others do not? How do sensitivities, receptivities, and empathies–human or otherwise–transform, or not, with respect to architecture, circulations of bodies through spaces, energetic and pheremonal transfers, the atmosphere of a room? What affective, embodied, and relational states arise when events do not, or, alternatively, when an event lingers without yet settling into a new ordinary?

This seminar works through “animations and provocations” by focusing on the vital place of the event in and around affect theory. We will look carefully and collectively at a few crucial theoretical statements on the event, especially in connection to history and material relations that extend far beyond the human. We are especially interested in relationships between the event (along with quasi-events and non-events), affect, and a variety of politics–queer, antiracist, decolonial, and nonanthropocentric, to name just a few. We explore the emergence and obstruction of sensing, attuning, registering, accounting, intuiting, experimenting, inflecting, gesturing, learning, creating, and accounting. We engage histories of racism, coloniality, hetero- and homonormativities, and violence to assess whether and how situations become events and what sensibilities, orientations, and modes of being and becoming are made possible or shut down.

This seminar emphasizes that there are multiple pathways into and out of the event, and that the event lies along multiple pathways of its own. We thus consider whether and how the workshop itself can become an “event” and, if it does, what kind(s) of event that may be. This seminar compels participants to acutely reflect on the unpredictable, uncontrollable conditions of our encounter to ask how we create and emerge from the event of the meeting itself. We will be sensitive to how the seminar itself entangles, inflects, differentiates, intensifies, augments, and challenges their engagement with the question, “What is an event?” Put differently, we hope to weave together our individual dalliances with the concept of the event into a collective autotheoretical event.

The seminar meets over three sessions. We will first engage a predetermined set of readings. Based on our discussion, we will then select material for the remaining sessions. During and between our meetings, small groups will engage a participant-created cache of brief statements, literature, and media on the event. Based on their research projects, interests, and questions, the groups will produce short provocations concerning affect and the event. Before we meet, participants will need to submit two things: 1) a text (of any kind) for our event-full cache, and 2) a question about the/an event.

These questions may be modeled on the following samples, which we offer here as provocations that might begin to animate our collective thinkingfeeling:

NATHAN’S QUESTIONS: Whitehead sees pretty much everything as an event. Other thinkers distinguish between events and some kind of pre-evental conditions of possibility, so that while everything could be event, events only sometimes emerge. What do we get out of one or the other of these approaches?

The event that interests me the most, at least now, is the one Wynter calls the production of Man, which is, I think, a great shorthand for a complex nexus of colonialisms, emergent capitalist and industrialist modes of production, and a shift in the form of the state. Part of this event, for me, involves capturing study in schools, and linking those schools closely with (humanist) state politics.

So how can we think about education as in some sense always being part of the politics of humanization, precisely because it is part of the “event” of Man. And how we can we seize on the possibilities, if there are any, of reorienting educational events such that they can set us moving away from Man? (I tend to think here of Puar’s riffs on delinquency and Halberstam’s on failure.)

CHAD’S QUESTIONS: How do notions such as impasse, stuckness, obstruction, abandonment, and the wake provoke a retheorization of the event? How might the durational quality of some histories and ordinaries make the event very rare? How might modes of endurance, decay, abandonment, and social death be situated with respect to affect and the event?

Alongside Nathan’s interest in reading the production of Man as an event is Christina Sharpe’s notion of “the weather” in which racial slavery is a singularity–something of a dynamic forcefield that generates spatial and temporal distortions, holding black bodies in its wake for centuries. We might also think of colonial invasion as another event; while Patrick Wolfe holds invasion to be a “structure not an event,” we might operate with other notions of the event to account for the elasticity and dynamism of settler colonialism.

Placing the event at the heart of antiblackness and settler colonialism may complicate and enrich imaginations of antiracist and decolonial politics. Whether an event marks a disruption or reorganization of antiblackness and settler colonialism may not be so clear. If so then Nathan’s questions concerning the reorientation of educational events become more pressing. The place of affect would be accentuated in efforts to move away from Man. What modes of sensing, processing, intuiting, speculating, and experimenting might become valuable/crucial?

FORMAT
Participants will read some essays before the event, and engage other texts/events between sessions as determined during the workshop. They will also write, individually and/or collaboratively, during the workshop.

BIOS

Nathan Snaza teaches literature, gender studies, and educational foundations at the University of Richmond. He is the author of Animate Literacies: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Humanism (Duke UP, 2019) and co-editor of Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies (Peter Lang, 2016) and Posthumanism and Educational Research (Routledge, 2016).

Chad Shomura is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Colorado Denver. He researches and teaches in political thought, feminist and queer theory, and Asian American, Indigenous, and black studies. He is working on two major research projects: The Bad Good Life, which develops a notion of impasse to describe how dominant formations of race, sexuality, and coloniality manage to endure the powerful efforts of marginalized subjects to live otherwise; and a manuscript that reimagines the human, life, and time in the Anthropocene.

KEYWORDS

queer studies, trans studies, disability studies, decolonial and transnational feminisms, affective labor, feminist philosophies of care

DESCRIPTION

How do marginalized queer and trans subjects orient themselves affectively toward both care labor and care ethics? Pulling together strands from multiple, though rarely intersecting, areas of inquiry – queer and trans engagements with affect studies, feminist care ethics, and post-Marxist literature on affective labor – this seminar will tease apart, weave together, unravel and knot up these fields in order to make sense of how we feel about the multivalent forms of affective labor we perform, from diversity work to nightlife to community building to therapy to sex work to knowledge production to historical recovery to the reconfiguring of reproduction and kinship systems.

Feminist theorists of care have yet to substantively address queer and trans forms of care labor, centering women’s domestic labor within heteronormative households, naturalizing a set of values from such labor, then extrapolating and exploring the deprioritization of those values in the public sphere (Berg 2014). Domestic and transnational feminist examinations of care labor, relatedly, rely on a logic that undergirds theories of the relations of gender and care labor, which Martin Manalansan frames as “domestic = family = heterosexual woman = care and love” (2008).

In this workshop we think instead about what care labor and ethics look like if we start from different set of locations and relations. We begin from the intricately interconnected spaces and places where trans and queer care labor occurs: the street, the club, the bar, the clinic, the community center, the classroom, the non-profit, and sometimes, yes, the home—but a home that be a site of rejection, shunning, abuse, and discomfort. What happens if we decenter the emphasis on the domestic and the reproductive that has so long informed theorizations of care, and begin instead by investigating networks of mutual aid and emotional support developed by trans femme communities subject to transmisogyny, transmisogynoir, and multiple, interlocking forms of institutional marginalization and structural violence? Or when we investigate caretaking labor involved in forms of historical recovery that piece together trans and queer intergenerational memory and knowledge production in the face of mechanisms of elision, erasure, and absence? The terrain of what constitutes care shifts radically once such decentering occurs. For queer and trans subjects, this is often less about exporting the feminized values of care associated with the white, bourgeois home to the public sphere than it is about seeking ways to make the multivalent and necessary care hustle that structures so many trans and queer lives more sustainable, especially as we’re often actively engaged in inventing or piecing together the units – domestic, familial, intimate – that are just assumed a priori in much literature on care labor and care ethics.

Marxist feminist reframings of low-paid, feminized as “affective” offer a starting point from which we can exert some tension on the relations between “care” and “affect.” What is the difference between “care labor” and “affective labor”? Furthermore, queer and trans engagements with affect are often motivated by critical responses to affective labor. Ahmed’s “feminist killjoy” (2017) and “affect alien” (2010: 158) emerge, in part, from a radical critique of diversity work, while Cvetkovich’s account of depression as a public feeling is linked to forms of fatigue associated with the labor of building coalitional political resistance (2012). Putting these studies of affect into conversation with the literature on care and affective labor allows us to think through our feelings about our enmeshment in networks that coercively and unevenly extract care labor.

The workshop takes queer care labor in its politicized form as a pedagogical tool. We draw on histories of feminist consciousness raising, disability studies, and queer artistic practice by envisioning the workshop as an investigation of and preparation of a performance score (Macarthur and Zavitzanos 2013). Participants will investigate our individuated and collective feelings about the forms and impacts of trans and queer care labor, and experiment with theorizing what such feelings inform us about contemporary forms of structural, political, and interpersonal expropriation and maltreatment. How can we care for trans and queer care laborers? How can we construct more just systems and institutions that center care and interdependency while simultaneously understanding care as work, and not as determinative of, or coextensive with, the affective orientations of trans and queer care workers?

FORMAT

Participants will be given a packet of readings in advance of the seminar. We will ask participants to write a short “care score” they develop from fieldwork or experience before the workshop: this is a document of the bodymind’s engagement in care for a given period of time. During the workshop, participants will engage in three projects. In the initial session, we use group discussion to engage with the readings and develop research questions. In the second session we work in small groups with our scores and relevant literatures to produce collaborative presentations. Participants are invited to work on the care scores and presentations between meetings, but this is not required.

BIOS

Aren Aizura is an Assistant (soon to be Associate) Professor in Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies at the University of Minnesota. His work has appeared in numerous journals, including  Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Medical Anthropology: Cross-cultural studies in health and illness, Asian Studies Review, and ADA: A Journal of Gender, New Media and Technology. With Susan Stryker, he co-edited the Transgender Studies Reader 2(New York: Routledge, 2013) and is also the co-editor of a special issue of TSQ, “Decolonizing the Transgender Imaginary” (1:3-4, 2014). His first book, Mobile Subjects: travel, transnationality and transgender lives, was released by Duke University Press in 2019.

Hil Malatino is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Philosophy and a research associate with the Rock Ethics Institute at Penn State University. They are the author of Queer Embodiment: Monstrosity, Medical Violence, and Intersex Experience (University of Nebraska Press, 2019), and you can find their essays in Hypatia, TSQ, Angelaki, and The Journal of Medical Humanities, among other sites. They are currently researching, writing, and teaching at the juncture of trans studies, feminist science and technology studies, and affect theory, focusing on the relations between trans experience and negative affect.

REFERENCES

Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living A Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press.

Ahmed, Sara. 2010. The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press.

Berg, Heather. 2014. “An Honest Day’s Wage for a Dishonest Day’s Work: (Re)Productivism and Refusal.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 42 (1): 161–77. doi:10.1353/wsq.2014.0006.

Cvetkovich, Ann. 2012. Depression: A Public Feeling. Durham: Duke University Press.

Macarthur, Park and Zavitzanos, Constantina. 2013. “Other forms of conviviality: The best and least of which is our daily care and the host of which is our collaborative work.” Women and Performance 23: 1, 126-132.

Manalansan, Martin. 2008. “Queering the Chain of Care Paradigm.” Scholar and Feminist Online 6 (3).

KEYWORDS

visual culture, witnessing, spectatorship, aesthetics, feminist theory, media theory, trauma studies, ethics, political theory

DESCRIPTION

Violence is pervasive, cutting across thought, life and the world itself. Emergent and intended, saturating or episodic, structural and situational, slow and swift, domestic and geopolitical, ecological and intimate: violence takes shape at multiple scales, in countless encounters and through myriad forms.  Sometimes violence is brutally evident, while other times, it is almost imperceptible; of course, these uneven distributions of sensation are often a function of privilege.  Consider: Who is most likely to experience violence directly?  And to have their suffering mediated? Who, on the other hand, is most likely to encounter violence as media text? Or, for that matter, as object of scholarly inquiry?

No matter the form it takes, however, violence is inherently affective because it is always relational, situated, and embodied.  Now—and perhaps it was always so—violence is increasingly linked with mediation, or the processes by which we live in, with and through the technological in all its forms. For example, police body cameras ostensibly protect citizens, but can become the relays by which publics come to witness police violence, even as they open those encounters to apologetics on behalf of the perpetrators and the spectacularization of victims’ suffering. More broadly, we might say that violence itself mediates relationships between people, obscuring common vulnerabilities, ethical bonds, and forms of intersubjectivity. Violence, we suggest, cannot be thought without tandem consideration of affect and mediation.

Consequently, this seminar attends to the convergence of affect, violence and mediation in the everyday and the extraordinary, the planetary and the personal, the militarised and the corporatized, the fleeting and the enduring. What modes of thought might we marshal to think violence without abetting, perpetuating, or doing violence? What specific conceptions of affect and mediation are needed to apprehend the textures of violence? To what texts, bodies, events, and objects should we attune ourselves?  With what senses can we apprehend violence?  How might an examination of violence open onto the potential for renewal and repair? What ethics of care might emerge? And—ultimately, ambitiously—how might critical inquiry lead to the reparative work of making less violent worlds?

In addressing these and other questions that we generate together, this seminar will seek to map the affective structures, registers and forms that mediated violence and violent mediations take. Are affect theory’s canonical concepts (like autonomy, relationality, virtuality) sufficient to the task, or do we also need to seek out alternatives from other traditions—radical, decolonial, queer, marginal—or invent our own? Throughout, we will be alive to the specific, embodied and nuanced ways in which the modulation, amplification, diminution and resonance of affect shapes and textures both violence and mediation.  We will consider the means by which various actors instrumentalize affect as violence, and how mediation can function to amplify or reduce the harm that results. We will ask about the potential for affective engagement with violence we do not experience directly, and also query the limits of empathy and compassion.  We will seek to understand how all this coheres across different forms, sites, institutions and practices, whether state, corporate, ecological, interpersonal or aesthetic.

Together, we will both disentangle and weave, or re-weave, a host of themes and concepts that proliferate through scholarship and creative practice at the intersection of affect, mediation and violence: death and life; suffering and healing; care and ethics; witnessing and spectatorship; onto-, necro- and biopower. In our discussion, reading and writing, we will be especially attentive to questions of method, and will resist the reflexive urge to impose abstract concepts on our objects of study.  While recognizing the value of theoretical ways of knowing complex phenomena, we suggest that the task of responding to violence cannot always wait for our epistemological frameworks to expand and catch up: consequently, we will pay close attention to what is going on in the texts, bodies, sites and events themselves. Indeed, the potential violence of critique-as-method will be an important undercurrent to our time together, and we will seek to develop methodological interventions alongside our conceptual ones. Moreover, even in recognizing the need to name various forms of violence and oppression, we also want to insist on the importance of a reparative, constructive intellectual practice.

Three seminar meets in three sessions. In the first, “Affect,” we explore our key concepts of through engagement with a set of readings, situations, objects and practices of analysis.  Here, and throughout, we will emphasize the intersubjective, and hence essentially affective, quality of violence.  Our approach will be tempered by an awareness that mediation often functions ambivalently or even paradoxically: simultaneously bringing us proximate to and distancing us from sites of violence.  Then, in “Mediated Violence” we consider how mediation can extend the affective networks that violence creates, and whether that capacity might be leveraged toward strategies of resistance, response and repair. In “Violent Mediation,” we investigate the extent to which mediations themselves might become a form of violence, as by muting or obscuring the affective dimensions of violence.  Rather than prescribe particular objects, practices or sites of analysis, we invite participants to bring their own so that we can shape and direct our lines of inquiry together. Our own interests in drones, trauma, power and witnessing in war and culture (Michael), and visual culture, media history and theory, militarism, ethics, and the development of new methodologies for the study of all these things (Rebecca) should represent just a few concentrations among many.

FORMAT

Before the seminar, participants will read a handful of texts and bring two artefacts of their choosing: an instance of Mediated Violence and another of Violent Mediation. Participants are invited to interpret “Mediated Violence” and “Violent Mediation” however they like. In keeping with this ethos, we will also encourage participants to bring suggestions for short texts so that we can collectively generate a further set of readings. Between sessions, participants will further investigate their (and other) artefacts to develop a collaborative archive of affect, violence and mediation. During sessions, we will discuss, think and respond collectively and individually to theoretical, aesthetic and other provocations to investigate the convergence of affect, mediation and violence.

BIOS

Michael Richardson is an Australian Research Council DECRA Research Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Media at UNSW Sydney whose work addresses the intersection of affect and power. His current project examines drones and witnessing in war and culture. He is the author of Gestures of Testimony: Torture, Trauma and Affect in Literature (Bloomsbury 2016) and co-editor of Traumatic Affect (CSP 2013).

Rebecca A. Adelman is Associate Professor of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC).  She works at the intersections of visual culture and militarized violence, with particular interest in questions of affect, imagination, and ethics.  She is the author of Figuring Violence: Affective Investments in Perpetual War (Fordham UP, 2019) and Beyond the Checkpoint: Visual Practices in America’s Global War on Terror (U of Massachusetts P, 2014).

KEYWORDS

post-truth, theories of affect, Whitehead, the non-/unconscious, critical art performance

DESCRIPTION

Theoretical lectures, seminar discussions and practice based workshops exploring an affect-orientated critical art performance pedagogy. Convened by reader and academic, Dr. Tony D. Sampson and multimedia artist and lecturer, Mikey Georgeson. In this purported post-Truth era the processes by which we make judgements and decide are, it would seem, increasingly lost in the indeterminacy and resonations of social media fuelled rumour, conspiracy and fabrication. The current wave of political nationalist madness similarly partakes in the calculated clouding of political concepts, spreading of Trumpian Big Lies (Connolly, 2017), and downright faking of digital news content. The truths that we search for on Google can, as such, become distorted by shady behavioural analytics, misplaced in so-called “data voids” (Golebiewski & Boyd, 2018), and disappear down algorithmic rabbit holes.

In the glut of media assumption and the desperate grasping of explanatory theoretical straws to understand this post-Truth condition, we have seen a marked intervention by the two opposing Ps. Indeed, on one hand, there is the persistence of the positivist’s pursuit of brutal facts (e.g. Dennett, 2017), and on the other, there has been a revival of the postmodernist’s representational implosion of truth (e.g. Hanlon, 2018). However, far from providing an explanation of the experience of post-truth these theories have arguably produced an inescapable impasse (Connolly, 2017, Sampson, forthcoming).

The main aim of our jointly proposed three SSA Summer School sessions (lectures, seminar discussion and performance-based workshop activities) will be to prompt participants to feel, act and think-through how affect theory might provide a pathway beyond this theoretical impasse. To begin with, the introductory lectures will draw on a range of theories, including (but not limited to) A.N. Whitehead’s aesthetic ontological methods (a proto-affect theory), so as to inspire, generate and work through a series of novel seminar questions. The seminars will therefore encourage participants to discuss familiar affect theories and practices, but also motivate them to push past some of the theoretical mainstays of affect (i.e. that conscious decisions always arrive late) to consider how nonconscious decisions and judgements are perhaps arrived at through e.g. unconscious user experiences (Clough, 2000, 20018), collective impulses and what Whitehead describes as the aesthetic lures of possibility.

Workshop objectives and outcomes will include the planning, support and implementation of a series of participant-led critical art performance activities that will further prompt and provoke new responses to post-truth from an affect theory perspective. These performances might include ways of looking beyond the logical inconsistences of positivism and postmodernism, but more crucially they will explore the speculative, sensational, affective toning of experience, and luring and contaminating nature of rumours, conspiracy, cloudy concepts, fabrication and Big Lies.

Finally, our proposed contribution to the Affect Summer School Seminars will provide participants with an affect orientated appraisal of their performance work and consideration of ways in which future approaches can be developed on.

FORMAT

A combination of lecture-discussions, philosophical making of conceptual personae and aesthetic figures (Deleuze and Guattari, 1994) and an experimental, affect-orientated critical art performance pedagogy. Opening contextual lecture by Tony followed by seminar discussion on main themes and examples of critical art performances (3 hours). Planning workshop on performances with Mikey and Tony (2 hours). Participant performances, appraisal and discussion with Mikey and Tony (3 hours).

KEYWORDS

critical theories of race, decolonial thought, food ethics, rhetorical theory

DESCRIPTION

In the Netflix series Ugly Delicious, the Korean American chef David Chang explores the stories and sentiments around the question of food and identity for people of color in the United States. This journey necessarily involves tracing the country’s colonial, imperialist, and racist history of immigration. In the episode entitled “Fried Rice,” for example, Chang mentions how the sense of shame shaped his relationship to cultural/ ethnic identity, saying that “There are foods that I grew up loving, but I was embarrassed to publicly love”; negotiating Korean immigrant identity required developing ambivalent feelings about the culinary culture of his own. As the title suggests, the show reveals how the aesthetic (and perhaps ethical) values of food and culinary practices are determined largely by racial politics. It is through the affective workings of shame and disgust that racial politics embed itself in both cultural objects, such as food, and the messages that circulate around them.

In this seminar, we reflect on how racial embodiment is constructed via the twin forces of affect and rhetoric. We are interested in examining the ways in which affects “naturalize” the process of racialization and its internalization. Although affects never function merely as a vehicle for discourse, we acknowledge that racial affects have facilitated the dissemination of colonial-racist narratives, which depict indigenous peoples or peoples of color as uncivilized, ‘backwards,’ immoral, unintelligent, and unhygienic. The affective politics of race operates on a set of reactive emotions to white normativity that feed one another; racial shame or self-contempt introduced to the communities of color, and fear or disgust toward them circulated amongst whites, on the other. Because these affects get passed on without revealing their origin, i.e., white supremacy, it is often extremely difficult to combat the tacit assumptions that continue to support these artificial ontological separations.

These macro-level politics embed themselves in the intimate sensation of everyday life. Consider racial shame, for instance: Frantz Fanon’s encounter with a white boy’s utterance “Look, a Negro!” describes a moment of racial interpellation, where shame drives him to constitute himself as the black subject, racialized and over-determined by the history of colonialism and slavery. In the US context, racial shame is critical in the process of self-revision to assimilate to white norms. As David H. Kim observes, shame associated with racial embodiment is peculiar in that it is not the result of failed agency or embarrassment, but “the inward resonance of a suppressive social order,” i.e., “a result of coming into a world in which one is in some sense a failed subject well before arriving in it.” In this sense, racial shame not only locks a person of color into the colonial past, but also forecloses future possibilities of becoming otherwise.

While shame speaks loudly to racialized bodies in its constitution, disgust often shows itself in disguise. It masks itself as it transforms the object of disgust as an object of fear or danger, whether it is an economic threat or a danger for public health, As Sara Ahmed notes, food is significant in the discussion of disgust because it is a matter of taste as well as of sensation. She argues that through disgust, “bodies recoil from their proximity” — proximity felt as an exposure on the skin surface. For example, we could consider the ubiquitous ‘No MSG’ signs in Chinese restaurants that signal alignment with normative standards of food purity, claiming the authority of science while actually relying on tacit expressions of racial disgust.

The seminar also invites conversations on racial affects and racial embodiment that go beyond the reflections on shame and disgust; we would like to think collectively about the key affective elements constitutive of the racialization process in general, and how they function differentially for people of color and for whites. Also, we hope to look at how racial affects develop/ transform throughout the process of subject formation — from disgust to shame, from shame to guilt, or from shame to melancholia. The following are some of the questions we would like to discuss:

• How does rhetoric maintain normative ideas of racial and ethnic ‘authenticity’? What effects does this reductive understanding have on the body itself?
• What are the rhetorical structures that perpetuate racial shame and/or disgust? And what assumptions need to be in place to support these negative affects?
• How does the seemingly passive nature of racial affect serve to “naturalize” racialized perceptions (for example, how the feeling of disgust leads one to believe that the quality of disgusting must belong to the object)? How do we interrupt the habitual transition from affective responses to racial ascription?
• What are the ways in which racial affects support or resist the assimilationist ideology of white-identification?
• What movement practices might offer models for combating the impact of these shameful affects on marginalized bodies? For example, is there a way to consider the simultaneous neoliberalization of yoga practice in the U.S. and the healing potential of such as a practice in tandem?

FORMAT

Sessions will be focused on a shared set of readings and will allow time for participants to collaborate on their own research projects. There will be some pre-seminar readings. Participants are also expected to write a short reading response before coming to the seminar. The facilitators will develop an interdisciplinary glossary of racial affect and embodiment that will serve as a central hub for discussion.

BIOS

Jennifer LeMesurier is an Assistant Professor of Writing and Rhetoric at Colgate University. Her research centers on the rhetorical power of embodiment, whether in a composition classroom, dance performance, or protest. Her work can be found in Rhetoric Review, College Composition and Communication, and Peitho (forthcoming).

Boram Jeong is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado Denver. Her research focuses on the intersection of the formation of political subjectivity and theories of temporality. She is currently working on two research projects; the first, entitled Capitalism and Melancholia, examines the temporality of debt and the production of melancholic subjectivity; the second develops a philosophical reading of the writings of the ‘New Women’ in colonial Korea through the notion of ‘colonial temporality.’

KEYWORDS

sensory ethnography, sensuous scholarship, ordinary affects, sensory sociality/social sensorium

DESCRIPTION

Despite their ubiquity in everyday language, scenes are notoriously difficult to capture, let alone convey, in all their immersive affective dimensions. We start by asking what, exactly, is a scene. We then move to consider further questions around a scene’s composition, how it feels and how we can think about it, or—better still—how we can think with it. Specifically, how do scenes animate ephemeral encounters, giving unity and meaning to everyday life? What affects, both ephemeral and enduring, circulate within, between and across the various configurations we might recognise as scenes? What temporal and imaginal orientations might scenes gesture at and what modes of embodiment and relationality do they invoke in our experience of them? How might we apprehend the abundance of feeling, ways of relating and being within scenes? And how do we, as researchers, bring scenes to life in our ethnographic description of them. On the one hand, research methodologies need to capture something of the force of local feeling in ways that balance competing demands between evocation and representation, between mediation and interpretation. But on the other hand, we need to consider what exceeds or bypasses our modes of capturing, marking out scenes as sites of failure, surplus or loss. These questions are especially pertinent when we consider how such affects are enmeshed within the seemingly insignificant social interactions that form the backdrop of scene activity. Overall, this seminar series is concerned with ‘scenes’ as a process of world-making and –writing. We are interested in the process through which scenes are made to matter.

The seminar Scenes brings together the theoretical tradition of scene studies with recent work on the affective potentialities of the everyday. Since the early 1990s, the concept of ‘scene’ has gathered considerable significance as the means to interrogate how social configurations intersect with everyday cultural life. ‘Scene’, however, does more than name a category for analysis – to approach a scene conceptually requires flexibility in capturing the peripheral energies and affective relations in all their liveliness, as a complex yet ephemeral state of being in the world. Put another way, the cultural energies they produce suggests that scenes are affective spaces that exceed their own material infrastructure. At the same time, no scene can last forever, and they carry with them their own seductive feelings of instability and precarity. We will also explore how we can trace the affective moments that might be implied, but not necessarily expressed, at the time of scene encounters, and how we can follow these traces as they intersect within everyday itineraries that dissipate, not only with the close of each day but also at the end of more enduring engagements.

We work through the Summer School’s two defining themes by considering first, how scenes are an animation of both the continuity and transformation of social relations that form around cultural activity, and second, how they simultaneously function as a set of provocations borne of the particularity of historical and institutional settings that give it local meaning. As such, we need to consider the inter- and intra-affectivity of scenes, or how scenes make meaning alongside one another. Acknowledgement of scenes’ lifecycle is also crucial in these moments of scene recognition, but equally, consideration of what happens when scenes fade and what forms of retrospective animation or provocation are available or denied.

We aim to work through the conceptual value in approaching scenes as a perspective – and the methodologies we can harness to capture their affective dimensions. As the outcome of the series, participants would have gained the tools with which to activate their own scenes.

Seminars will be convened in three 2-hour blocks. At this stage, reading requirements are only an indicative list; the list will be finalised closer to the seminar sessions. Workshop participants will be required to bring a scene in mind to the seminars, ideally something they currently participate in or research – the more immersive their experiences of it, the better! This will be the scene that they will work with throughout the series. This requirement should be stipulated in the short paragraph listing the seminar to potential participants.

BLOCK ONE

This session will introduce participants to the theoretical work undertaken in respect to the concept of ‘scene’. This will be presented as an informal lecture on thinking with scenes; that is, an approach to scenes as a sensitizing concept that invokes a sensibility or orientation towards a phenomenon that can never be fully known at the outset. In the second half of the first block, participants will be asked to map the relationship of people, practices and places that constitute their scene as a social entity.

Theoretical-critical coordinates: This session sets up ‘scenes’ as a theoretical construct and an object of critical case study, and introduces a theory of writing as world-making.

Reading requirements:

• Straw, Will. 2002. “Scenes and Sensibilities.” Public 22/23:245-257.
• Woo, Benjamin, Jamie Rennie and Stuart R. Poyntz. 2015. “Scene Thinking: Introduction.” Cultural Studies 29 (3):285-297.
• Gibbs, Anna. 2015. “Writing as Method: Attunement, Resonance, and Rhythm”. In Affective Methodologies, Britta T. Knudsen and Carsten Stage, p. 222-236. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan.

 Pre- and post-activities: Participants will be asked to have a chosen scene in mind for this first session, including its constitutive parts, as well as pre-reading the selected texts.

BLOCK TWO

This session will move from the constitution of a social entity to how the connective sociality generated in scenes supports a social imaginary that can outlast otherwise ephemeral encounters. This will introduce participants to various ways that we sense, attune into, become/belong, intuit and invest in scenes. We also query the place of the self and the role of memory and retrospection in the passage of time and the movement of scene lifecycles. Participants will be asked to engage in the affective recall of their chosen scenes, and explore the processes by which they can bring them to life.

Theoretical-critical coordinates: Feminist and queer renderings of ‘experience’ will be interrogated (e.g. Joan Scott’s work on experience as evidence and José Esteban Muñoz’s argument that ephemera is evidence) through engagement with the various modes of affective knowledge/knowledge of affect (e.g. Ben Anderson’s affective atmospheres, Georges Perec’s infraordinary, Katie Stewart’s affective attunement, and Raymond William’s structures of feelings).

Reading requirements:

• Drysdale, Kerryn. 2015. “When Scenes Fade: Methodological Lessons from Sydney’s Drag King Culture”, Cultural Studies, 29 (3): 345-362
• Mattes, Dominik, Omar Kasmani and Hansjörg Dilger. 2019. “’All eyes closed’ – Dis/Sensing in comparative fieldwork on affective-religious experiences”. In Antje Kahl (ed.). Analyzing Affective Societies: Methods and Methodologies. Routledge.

Pre- and post-activities: Participants will be asked to read the selected texts before the session, and to start trying to write their own scenes after the session.

BLOCK THREE

This session will end more concretely on the methodologies we can use to bring scenes to life. We will use the written texts provided by participants in the last session to explore the different modes of affectively engaging in scenes as world-making and –writing. As a collective process we will consider the role of senses and the affective relationality they, too, provoke. What affects work on and through participants through these different modes of relating to the texts of scenes? How, for example, is reading a scene different from listening to one? At the end, participants will be invited to consider the session as its own form of scene-making to complement the ones they have already engaged throughout the series.

Theoretical-critical coordinates: Ethnographic techniques will be applied (including sensory ethnography, sensuous scholarship, and ordinary affects) within a broader critical interrogation of sensory sociality/social sensorium.

Reading requirements:

• Drysdale, Kerryn. 2018. “Intimate Attunements: Everyday affect in Sydney’s drag king scene.” Sexualities, 21 (4): 640-656.
• Kasmani, Omar. 2019. “Thin Attachments: Writing Berlin in Scenes of Daily Loves”. Capacious, 1 (3): 1-36.

Pre- and post-activities: Participants will be asked to read the selected texts before the session, and come prepared with their own scenes as text.

SUGGESTED READINGS

We also suggest that participants might like to read or be familiar with the following texts (please note that this list is indicative at this stage and will be finalised before the program is disseminated), though this is not a requirement for participation:

• Pandian, Anand and Stuart McLean (eds.) 2017. Crumpled paper boat: Experiments in ethnographic writing, Duke University Press.
• Perec, Georges. 2010. An attempt at exhausting a place in Paris. Wakefield Press.
• Stewart, Kathleen. 2007. Ordinary Affects. Duke University Press.

BIOS

Kerryn Drysdale is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Social Research in Health, UNSW Sydney. Her disciplinary background is in cultural studies with a particular focus on LGBTIQ social scenes, and her current research is around the intersection of sex and drugs (commonly known as ‘chemsex’). She has previously published on scene theory, intimacy and its affective dimensions, and sensory ethnography.  Kerryn’s first book, Intimate Attunements in Drag King Cultures: The Rise and Fall of a Lesbian Social Scene (Palgrave Macmillan), is due out mid-2019.

Omar Kasmani is a Research Fellow in Social and Cultural Anthropology at the Center Affective Societies at Freie Universität, Berlin. His work pursues ideas of be/longing, queer futurities, and the affects of intimacy the interstices of religion and sexuality. He teaches queer theory and religion in South Asia and has co-edited the volume Muslim Matter (Revolver Publishing 2016). His more recent writings include “Thin Attachments” (2019 Capacious: Journal of Emerging Affect Inquiry) and “Audible Specters” (2017 History of Emotions: Insights into Research).

KEYWORDS

queer studies, trans studies, history of emotion/contemporary and medievalist affect studies, history of the book studies, Geoffrey Chaucer, Peter Damian

DESCRIPTION

This seminar reaches back across time to animate affective pasts and provoke queer futures. Finding the past provocatively sexy and theoretically promising, we read premodern texts with an eye to unsettling sedimented affective expectations around the modern categories of sexuality and gender. We ask how the historical specificities of medieval forms of affect, feeling, and emotion provoke unexpected gender crossings, textual circulations, ecstatic journeys, and forms of embodied cognition and quotidian innovation.

Premodern textualizations offer a unique opportunity to reassess the importance of feelings—their physical and rational elements—because premodern subjects did not think about affects or emotions in the same ways that we do. As medievalists acknowledge in different ways, the word “emotion” did not enter English until the early modern period. Equally, affect’s Latin history gives the concept of affectus a distinctly rhetorical or religio-philosophical cast often at odds with the use of affect in contemporary theory. Historicizing premodern affect, feeling, and emotion, then, requires creating a certain degree of conceptual space between modern theories of affect and emotion where they might better do justice to the specificities of medieval representations of the cognitive and corporeal experiences that feelings involve.

At the same time, this seminar also explores that “something” that has been left out in a “history of emotions” approach to medieval affect, feeling, and emotion. “History” in such models is framed largely in diachronic terms that privilege a sequenced account of the external, socially recognizable forms of feeling. How feelings are put into play in history remains primarily concerned with the recoverable, objective social forms of feeling as they are expressed textually over time. The particular material contexts for individual performance of emotion, or the ways that a literary text might put feelings in play, or represent the play of affect, feeling, and emotion in different, more multiple and variable ways, or the intersections of difference (language, race, gender, class), thus have too often been ignored in previous medievalist discussions. Drawing on contemporary affect theory’s emphasis on the material, embodied contexts for feeling, this seminar explores alternative modes of historicization in order to make visible how premodern embodied forms of agency bring the individual and the social into contact in innovative and mobile ways. Paying attention to the intersections of affect and emotion in the premodern period, we ask such questions as: Can the body’s unprocessed feelings be represented? How do affects create communities? What would it mean to admit that different affects have particular histories?

We will pay particular attention to the regulating structures of affect and its discontents through an examination of a set of medieval texts that worry modern categories of sex and gender. Attention to movement and crossings point to moments of unauthorized desire, glimpses of refiguring the limits of pleasure, and the breaking of gender expectations. Specifically, we will explore how affect scaffolds into a system of regulation and how premodern texts point variously to rupture, constraint, desire, and death. Readings will include, on the one hand, didactic texts on sodomy, visionary accounts of ecstatic rapture and tales of gender crossing monks, as well as travel narratives filled with wonder inducing marvels, and on the other, texts that explore the private devotion and performative reading practices animating daily life in and the gendered social organization of the bourgeois and gentry households of the late medieval period. Each reading will be placed in dialogue with medieval and modern theoretical/critical texts. This seminar also takes advantage of the fact the medieval texts were quite literally written on flesh and endeavors to investigate the significance of the tactile sensation of writing on parchment, as well as the performative reading practices encouraged by manuscript culture and private devotion which cast the reader as both consumer and producer of textual knowledges.

This seminar will meet over three sessions. The first session will engage our first set of predetermined texts through a collaborative discussion that foregrounds ecstatic, religious, and devotional affect focusing on such texts as Peter Damian’s The Book of Gomorrah, Mother Juana de la Cruz’s Visionary Sermons, and Henry Suso’s Exemplar. This session will be paired with a reflection how the materiality of the page enhances (or diminishes) the affective force of the text. The second session will focus on the textual culture and affective economies of the bourgeois/gentry household in the late medieval period—texts such as the Parisian household book, The Good Wife’s Guide and three of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (the Miller’s, Wife of Bath’s, and Clerk’s Tales)—in order to explore the experimental nature of gendered and sexualized affect management in such contexts “before” modern heterosexuality.” The third session will bring these two sets of texts in conversation with each other and with the participants own projects. Before we meet, the seminar participants will be expected to submit a draft of their current project.

FORMAT

Participants will read primary sources and essays before the workshop. They will also write individually during the workshop. They will encounter different models for historicizing affect and emotion, consider the usefulness of contemporary affect theory and premodern literary/textual culture in doing so, and develop their own praxis with regard to their critical/theoretical projects.

BIOS

Libby is an Assistant Teaching Professor at Penn State University. Her research and teaching focuses on the intersections of sexuality studies, pre-modern history, feminist thought, and queer theory. Libby is currently working on two projects: “Mystic Assemblages and the Translation of Affect” which utilizes medieval mystic texts to investigate how ecstasy was stimulated through affectively charged writing and reading practices and “(Un)Natural Exclusions: An Affective Genealogy of Transphobia” that interrogates modern iterations of gender policing by examining what it “felt/feels like” to inhabit a body constantly bombarded by affectively charged calls that it reveal itself.

Glenn D. Burger is Professor of English and Medieval Studies at Queens College and The Graduate Center, CUNY, and Dean of Graduate Studies at Queens College.  He has edited Hetoum’s A Lytell Cronycle,  (with Steven Kruger) Queering the Middle Ages (2000), (with Holly Crocker) Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (University of Cambridge Press, 2019), (with Rory Critten) Household Knowledges in Late Medieval England and France (forthcoming University of Manchester Press). He is author of Chaucer’s Queer Nation (2003) and Conduct Becoming: Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (2017), as well as numerous articles on issues of gender and sexuality, affect, and conduct in medieval textual culture.

PRELIMINARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gender Crossing:

Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.

Barbezat, Michael D. “Bodies of Spirit and Bodies of Flesh: The Significance of the Sexual Practices Attributed to Heretics from the Eleventh to the Fourteenth Century.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 25, no. 3 (2016): 387-419.

Boon, Jessica. “At the Limits of (Trans) Gender: Jesus, Mary, and the Angels in the Visionary Sermons of Juana de la Cruz (1481–1534).” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 1 May 2018; 48 (2): 261–300.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994.

Gutt, Blake and Alicia Spencer-Hall. Trans & Genderqueer Subjects in Medieval Hagiography (forthcoming)

Mother Juana de la Cruz, 1481–1534: Visionary Sermons. Edited by Jessica A. Boon and Ronald E. Surtz. Translated by Ronald E. Surtz and Nora Weinerth.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003.

Sodomy:

Berlant, Lauren, and Lee Edelman. Sex, or the Unbearable. Duke UP: 2014.

Damian, Peter. The Book of Gomorrah

Mills, Robert. 2015. Seeing Sodomy in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Ecstasy and Affective Translations:

Beckman, Patricia Zimmerman. “The Power of Books and the Practice of Mysticism in the Fourteenth Century: Heinrich of Nördlingen and Margaret Ebner on Mechthild’s Flowing Light of the Godhead,” Church History, Vol. 76, No. 1 (Mar., 2007): 61-83.

Mechthild and Frank J. Tobin. The Flowing Light of the Godhead. New York: Paulist Press, 1998.

Altieri, Charles. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003.

Materiality and Textuality:

Kay, Sarah. “Original Skin: Flaying, Reading, and Thinking in the Legend of Saint Bartholomew and Other Works.” Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 1 January 2006; 36 (1): 35–74. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/10829636-36-1-35

Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004.

Brinkema, Eugenie. The Forms of the Affects. Duke UP, 2014.

Suso, Henry. The Exemplar

GLENN’S PRELIMINARY BIBLIOGRAPHY

The Good Wife’s Guide: Le Menagier de Paris A Medieval Household Book. Ed. Gina L. Greco and Christine Rose. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2009.

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales (Miller’s Tale, Wife of Bath’s Prologue and Tale, Clerk’s Tale).

Crocker, Holly A. “Medieval Affects Now.” Exemplaria 29 (2017): 82-98.

McNamer, Sarah. Affective Meditation and the Invention of Medieval Compassion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.

McNamer, Sarah. “Feeling.” In Oxford Twenty-First Century Approaches To Literature: Middle English. Ed. Paul Strohm. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009, 241-57.

McNamer, Sarah. “The Literariness of Literature and the History of Emotion.” PMLA 130 (2015): 1433-1422.

Karnes, Michelle. Imagination, Cognition, and Meditation in the Middle Ages. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.

Knuuttila, Simo. Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004.

Rosenwein, Barbara H. Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006.

Rosenwein, Barbara. Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600-1700. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2016.

Larrington, Carolyne. “The Psychology of Emotion and Study of the Medieval Period.” Early Medieval Europe 10.2 (2001): 251-56.

Perfetti, Lisa. The Representation of Women’s Emotions in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005.

Reddy, William M. The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Saunders, Corinne. “Affective Reading: Chaucer, Women, and Romance.” Chaucer Review 51.1 (2016): 11-30.

Saunders, Corinne. “Mind, Body and Affect in Medieval English Arthurian Romance.” In Emotions in Medieval Arthurian Literature: Body, Mind, Voice. Ed. Frank Bransma, Carolyne Larrington and Corinne Saunders. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2015, 31-46.

Somerset, Fiona. Feeling Like Saints: Lollard Writings After Wyclif. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014.

Stevenson, Jill. Performance, Cognitive Theory and Devotional Culture: Sensual Piety in Late Medieval York. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.

KEYWORDS

feminist and queer theory, film theory, religious studies, environmental humanities, Ara Wilson, Elizabeth Povinelli, Kathryn Yusoff, Yasmine Kassari, Sara Ahmed

DESCRIPTION

This seminar will engage feminist and queer conceptions of “intimacy” as analytical tools for addressing global power. We will ask participants to think deeply about the intimate press of globalization on human and nonhuman others, particularly 1) how inequalities produced by governments, capital and other normative power structures shape intimate relationships between humans, intimacies with land and nonhuman others, and troubling changes to our material bodies and 2) how shifts in global power structures in turn facilitate shifts in these intimate relationships. Through short readings before the summer sessions and two case studies we will discuss as a group, we will address intimacies in relation to settler colonialism, slavery, internal and external migration, environmental degradation, race, gender, sexuality, and religion. Together, we will cultivate a tool-box for unsettling conceptions of public/private, freedom/constraint, nature/culture, human/nonhuman, local/global, distance/proximity, embodiment, kinship, belonging, and desire.

QUESTIONS: What do we mean by intimacy? What does it mean to be intimate? Does intimacy as an affective encounter differently map onto public and private spaces, human and nonhuman others? What does it mean to be intimate with and in these spaces? How do shifting global power structures render these spaces plastic such that our relationships with them must also shift, flow and stretch?

Our questions are motivated by Elizabeth Povinelli’s engagement with love, carnality and corporeality and Ara Wilson’s use of intimacy as a tool of transnational analysis. Beyond their emphasis on love and intimacy in the context of globalization, neocolonialism and settler colonialism, Povinelli and Wilson press on the networks, relationships and (to borrow Wilson’s term) infrastructures that bind public to private, blurring the boundaries between them and therein transitioning normatively private affective states such as (presumably heterosexual) love (in the context of a nuclear family) into the public sphere. This transition, we posit, in turn embeds the affective and material imprint of global power on the various iterations of global intimacy we identify above.

We will approach these questions through the lens of two at once divergent and interconnected case studies: Kathryn Yusoff’s 2018 monograph A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None and Moroccan director Yasmine Kassari’s 2004 film Ragad. Yusoff’s evocatively transdisciplinary A Billion Black Anthropocenes considers anthropocene intimacies, particularly histories of investments that bind black and brown bodies to toxic exposure and violent extraction economies. Tracing struggles to define human and inhuman within slavery and colonial legacies, Yusoff demonstrates the different intimacies marginalized bodies form with the earth beyond the frames of normative anthropocene discourses and imaginaries.

Kassari’s Ragad (The Sleeping Child) opens with a wedding: Zeineb (Mounia Osfour) marries Hassan (Driss Abdessamie) only to watch him leave the next day en route to Spain without a visa in the hopes of finding a job; no one knows if or when he will return. In her visually rich story, Kassari narrates many ensuing changes, including gender-specific norms that determine women’s expected forms of labor and patterns of movement that no longer make sense in the men’s absence as they press against lived realities necessitated by their absence that defy these norms. Zeineb is pressed between local and global, proximate and distant: she must resist these norms because of the changing structures surrounding her (because of the simple fact that Hassan is no longer there) while she remains within patriarchal gazes that reject her embrace of them.These shifts reconfigure the shape of intimate relationships that now stretch across continents while they shift normative structures on which these intimacies are built.

Viewers observe these changes by absorbing the cinematic shifts that follow her wedding, including Kassari’s contrast between long shots and close-ups. These contrasts communicate information about Zeineb’s lived realities through affect and sensation rather than dialogue and, by extension, facilitate a felt understanding about the realities widely faced by rural women in Morocco’s increasingly global capitalist economy. Kassari’s cinematography creates the conditions necessary for us to sense shifts in social structures that function outside of most viewers’ knowledge and comfort. The affect conveyed by Kassari’s film form, then, facilitates an intimate relationship between Zeineb and us, even if the terms of that relationship remain tacit, felt rather than cognized, and a product of our own unique experiences rather than a concrete, experiential understanding of Zeineb’s material routines.

Participants will be asked to bring something from a current project they are working on that they are interested in engaging with our session discussions. On the second day, participants will break into small groups and discuss how our themes help them define, address, develop, modify, etc. their current project. Returning to our large group, participants will be welcomed to share suggestions for readings, media, projects, etc. that helpfully engage our questions. Together we will cultivate a common vocabulary and reading list for considering global intimacies.

FORMAT

• Session 1 (day 1): Theoretical scaffolding / skeleton: global intimacies.
• Session 2 (day 2): Case studies
• Session 3 (day 2): Creating a global intimacies toolbox

REQUIREMENTS

Participants will be expected to read the introduction to Povinelli’s The Empire of Love and Wilson’s “Intimacy: A Useful Category of Transnational Analysis” before the first session and to read Yusoff’s 108-page A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None and screen Ragad before the second session. Participants will be asked to bring a short piece to share in small groups on their current projects (research, pedagogy, media, performance) and then in the final session to share with others how our tool-box could be helpful for further shaping these projects.

BIOS

Dr. Rebecca Moody is Assistant Teaching Professor of Religion at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Worcester, MA. She is currently working on a book titled Synaesthetic Shock: Gender, Politics and the Varieties of Islamic Experience in Moroccan Film by Women Filmmakers in which she positions film form as a medium by which viewers affectively and sensorially experience Moroccan women’s quotidian conditions of life.

Dr. Courtney O’Dell-Chaib is a recent graduate of the Religion department at Syracuse University. She is currently working on a book titled Desiring Devastated Landscapes on environmental racism, affect, and environmental imaginaries.

KEYWORDS

research-creation, queer theory, more-than-representation, sound studies

DESCRIPTION

Can already-felts be put-down in words?
(How) Do we respond to the crisis of representation in research?
How do you begin in the middle if you have nothing to begin with?
What does your hook get tangled-with?
How do I lure a different future through words and music?
How can we make relationality into sound?
What is the timbre of Lancaster, PA?

In our experience, making songs has the potential to research the affective stickiness, viscosity and relationality of encounters. Rather than phonographically recording the affective qualities of ‘sound’, this seminar will question how music composition renders more-than-sonic affective intensities sonorous. We understand affect as circulating intensity that registers (or not) somewhere between feeling and emotion as it capacitates or debilitates.

This seminar asks participants to think-with, write-with, and compose-with affect theory in music research-creation. By the end of the seminars, participants will:

1. Understand more-than-representational approaches to conducting, theorizing and disseminating research into affect.
2. Understand research-creation as a way of conducting research into sound and writing.
3. Problematize how affect is mobilized non-neutrally through sound/music/words.
4. Have co-composed the components of a song.
5. Have thought propositionally about research methodologies.

As artist-researchers we situate this seminar in conversation with the affective turn in sound studies (Henriques 2010; Gershon 2013; Gallagher 2016; Thompson 2017). This seminar will draw on our ongoing music research-creation practice as Oblique Curiosities where we compose with ‘already-felts’ (Manning 2009, 30). Through songwriting, production and performance, we explore affect theory, more-than-representation, and the ethics and politics of becoming affected (Truman and Shannon 2018). For Vannini (2015), the “non-representational answer to the crisis of representation lies in a variety of research styles and techniques that do not concern themselves so much with representing life-worlds as with issuing forth novel reverberations” (12). In this way, the participants will create songs that represent affective intensities and more-than-representationally recirculate those intensities (Truman and Shannon 2018).

In attending to the affective, what has been dubbed ‘post-qualitative’ inquiry relies on artistic method. As composers, producers and educators, with experience conducting research-creation with diverse publics, we will scaffold the seminars so as to enable artistic practice and research into affect for all participants. In conducting research-creation with diverse publics we understand that affects do not circulate neutrally; affects stick to or smear-past QT/BIPOC and dis/abled bodies, onto whom cis-heteronormativity, racialization and debility is always-already inscribed (Ahmed 2004; Lara et al. 2017; Weheliye 2014).

For McCormack (2008), “research-creation involves an ethical commitment to learning to become affected” (9). Research-creation is the interrelated practices of art, theory, and research (Truman and Springgay 2015). Rather than representing research findings, research-creation is the simultaneous process of artistic practice as empirical research and theoretical practice (and not the finished work).

In conducting research-creation projects with large publics, school and kindergarten groups, in seminars, or as Oblique Curiosities, we prime our practices through propositional thought (Manning and Massumi 2014; Manning 2016), speculative middles, and (in)tensions (Springgay & Truman 2018). We work with multiple conditions of possibility. Conditions of possibility are the material-discursive frameworks that enable our artistic practice to proliferate in particular directions (Truman and Shannon 2018). The seminar will draw on conditions of possibility to incite affective encounters and provide directionality for the participants’ work. The (in)tensions we bring to the research are situated in a queer-feminist, anti-racist, disability justice and anti-colonial ethics, and rigorous artistic practices: while we’re open and speculative, it’s not an ‘anything goes’ approach to art.

FORMAT

As research-creation, these seminars are concerned with what is unveiled in the process of creative practice. As such, participants should not expect to ‘finish’ their songs.

Seminar sessions may include:

• Discussion of the readings and songs, emphasizing more-than-representation and research-creation;
• Sound/writing activation and warm-ups;
• Sharing of pre-prepared prompts;
• Propositions, including enabling constraints of meter and rhythm.
• Group-work: participants will work in groups with their already-felts (that they bring with them to the seminar).

Participants will take their folding fermenting already-felts around with them between seminars. After the first seminar, participants will go for a walk around Lancaster, with the following propositions:

• Feel something old: What is it’s timbre (sonic color)? Smooth, shrill, scratchy, warm, metallic, obtuse?
• Visit something new in Lancaster. What was overwritten?
• Strain to hear-feel something that’s not in Lancaster. What did you bring with you that was already there?

Participants will then render whatever emerges as 100 words of affective prompts for sharing and further development in Seminar 2: this should be accompanied by an existing song that compliments/inspires/is-frictional-with/surfaces/sticks-to these prompts. In the final seminar (conducted as one-hour workshops in much smaller groups) we will structure and record the song(s).

REQUIREMENTS

Musical skill is not required or discouraged. In attending, you give consent for us to record the final song.

Pre-reading:

Eidsheim, N. S. (2011). Marian Anderson and “Sonic Blackness” in American Opera. American Quarterly, 63(3), 641–671. https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2011.0045

Thompson, M. (2017). Whiteness and the Ontological Turn in Sound Studies. Parallax, 23(3), 266–282. https://doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2017.1339967

Truman, S. E., & Shannon, D. B. (2018). Queer Sonic Cultures: An Affective Walking-Composing Project. Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry, 1(3), 58–77. https://doi.org/10.22387/CAP2018.19

Baraka, A. (2014). Rhythm Travel. In Sheree R. Thomas (Ed). Dark Matter: a century of speculative fiction from the African Diaspora, (pp. 96-98).

Pre-listening:

• Concrete Walls and Wanna Sip by Fever Ray
• Uja by Tanya Tagaq
• Runs Reprise by Klein
• Into the Garden (Needles) and Alpha Centauri by Oblique Curiosities (available here)

Pre-writing:

Before the seminar, please compose between 20-50 words attending to each of the following:

• One already-felt
• One lure for the future
• One noisy piece of the past, which may or may not be a ‘sound’
• One thing you heard, but not with your ears
• Something fleshy that won’t go away

BIOS

The seminars will be led by Oblique Curiosities:

Sarah E. Truman is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She researches English literary education with a specific focus on QT/BIPOC speculative fiction. Her research is informed by the feminist new materialisms, particularly queer and affect theories, and speculative pragmatism. She is co-author of Walking Methodologies in a More-than-Human World: WalkingLab; co-editor of Pedagogical Matters: New Materialisms and Curriculum Studies; and author of Searching for Guan Yin. Sarah is the recipient of two Ontario Arts Council Grants for creative writing, and the winner of a National Magazine Award for creative non-fiction writing. She is co-director of WalkingLab, and one-half of electronica duo Oblique Curiosities. sarahetruman.com

David Ben Shannon is an ESRC-funded PhD student in ESRI, Manchester Metropolitan University. His research explores neuroqueer practices in early childhood education, and draws from crip, affect and queer theories. He is a composer and producer: his works include Filmworker, Finding Happiness, and The Liverpool Shakespeare Festival, as well multiple compositions for the Vox Novus collective. He is one-half of glitch-folk/research-creation duo Oblique Curiosities, and a former elementary and Assistant Head teacher. davidbenshannon.co.uk

KEYWORDS

queer theory, posthuman theories, affect theories, decolonial politics, post/qualitative methodologies

DESCRIPTION

According to Blackman, science is a “storytelling machine” with the propensity to “sanitize, excise or even exorcise narratives, actors, agents and entities.” This ‘machine’ furthers a dominant narrative that not only decontextualizes time and space, but also reduces research/teaching/learning to “rationality” and “certainty”—often at the expense of multiplicity, surprise, experimentation, and even wonder. Within the field of education, specifically, this “single story” affectively circulates to re/produce student bodies in myriad ways: for example, as “struggling,” “unsuccessful,” and even learning “disabled.” As a larger destructive force, then, it has the potential to violently impact our capacity to read, write, think, and imagine otherwise, thereby closing off other ways of knowing/being/doing.

Yet, as MacLure reminds us, qualitative inquiries are always haunted by rebel becomings–a kind of wildness that also incites openings for wondrous connections and relationalities.  Such wildness disrupts the boundaries of power and knowledge by inviting us to consider: How might thinking with affect theories help us to blur traditional disciplinary boundaries/procedures that make dominant narratives and rigid normativities possible? How might we create different stories that enable us to re/member how bodies (e.g. of research/ers, students) are constantly being re/modulated through affects and affective encounters? How might these stories contribute to a “new analytic”, or new modes of reading and writing the social that attend to what always exceeds bodily “capture”? Within this seminar, we explore post/qualitative research as a queer form of storytelling and time-travel: “not queer as in strange, but queer as undoing, queer as ‘trans/formation.’” We are especially interested in how becoming wild functions as a relational and ethical process of disruption. As Blackman notes, data are entanglements of somatic, spatial, historical, technical, and digital bodies that require different “method[s] of ‘interfering’ in order to make visible what cannot be easily seen in the conventional methodological sense.”

QUESTIONS AND PROVOCATIONS

(a) All research tells stories, which of course reminds us that no reading is ever neutral. For Freire, “reading the world” is an ethico-political act, while for Deleuze reading is a philosophical experiment–an affective assemblage bringing “into being that which does not yet exist.” Drawing upon Deleuze and St. Pierre, Springgay and Truman further argue that the act of reading is necessary for researchers to “push thought to its edge, but…must also be accompanied simultaneously with a thinking-making-doing.” While recent post/qualitative research has indeed drawn our attention to reading as a relational process, there has been less exploration of the ways that reading practices can, at times, keep us “stuck” in a kind of affective time-warp—that is, how the past merges with the present and future in potentially threatening ways. For example, as Sharpe so brilliantly argues, we are living in a past that is not quite past. We are living in “the wake of the unfinished project of emancipation…always swept up in the wake produced and determined, though not absolutely, by the afterlives of slavery.” How might we think with Springgay and Truman’s concept of “thinking-making-doing” alongside Sharpe’s concept of “the wake” and Britzman’s concept of “reading straight” to map out the affective forces that—despite our good intentions—shape how many of us are able to read, see, hear, feel, and think the world?

(b) MacLure encourages qualitative researchers to attend to phenomena that traditional positivist inquiries tend to forget or exclude altogether. Her discussion of disconcerting moments or “hot-spots” does not promote singular representations/analyses but, rather, “open-ended and ongoing practices of making sense.” We are interested specifically in what disconcerting moments get left out of our research practices, what remains on the cutting-room floor, and how re/orienting ourselves towards these “things” may potentially invite in wonder. At the same time, we are wary of Hemmings’ warning that for only certain privileged subjects does affect tend to “stick” in more “open” ways. These tensions lead us to wonder more deeply about those hidden histories or stories that serve to haunt us. How might we explore affect’s potential promise and threat in ways that account for such hauntings (e.g. see Gordon)? And how might we explore hauntings alongside the concept of the middle as “immanent mode[s] of thinking-making-doing”? As Springgay and Truman note, “it’s hard to see things clearly in the middle. That is the point.” Yet, we wonder how our privileges work in relation to our not/seeing. How might the concept of hauntings better enable us to make sense of, and potentially diffract, those dominant stories that inevitably influence the ways we read the social and intra-act with particular bodies? In what ways can different orientations help keep alive the “minor gestures” or invisibilities that often get “cast aside, overlooked, or forgotten”?

(c) Finally, we wonder how becoming wild, as a kind of “live method[s],” may help us stay (in)tension with data, as well as the (hopeful, violent, etc.) space-times we traverse. One goal of this seminar is for participants to not only think, but also act, with theories of affect by considering how “data, theories, writing, thinking, research, researchers, participants, past, future, present, and body-mind-material are entangled and inseparable” from the hauntings that make up the very fabric of our social worlds. In an effort to undo the violence that has produced the ongoing subjection of black and other historically marginalized subjects, how might we put theoretical/methodological concepts, such as hauntings (e.g. Gordon) and “the wake” (e.g. Sharpe’s black annotation/redaction), to actual work with/in our own “wild” inquiries?

FORMAT

Before the seminar commences, participants will read selections from two anchor texts, Sharpe’s (2016) In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, and Manning’s (2016) The Minor Gesture, along with several chapters/articles (e.g. Britzman, 1995; Gordon, 1997; Koro-Ljungberg et al., 2018; Springgay & Truman, 2018). They will also write, individually and/or collaboratively, and share/work with their own data during the workshops.

BIOS

Nancy Lesko is Maxine Greene Professor at Teachers College, Columbia University. She teaches in the areas of curriculum, social theory, gender studies, and youth studies. Her research interests focus on affective approaches to curriculum studies, youth, and gender and sexualities in school. Recent publications historicize the affective dimensions of teaching, such as, ‘Historicizing Affect in Education’ (co-authored with Alyssa Niccolini) in Knowledge Cultures. She is co-editing a forthcoming volume, Mapping the Affective Turn in Education: Theory, Research, Pedagogy (Routledge, co-edited with Bessie Dernikos, Stephanie McCall, and Alyssa Niccolini).

Bessie P. Dernikos is an assistant professor of reading and language arts at Florida Atlantic University (USA). Her research explores the affective forces that shape literacy learning for young children in order to rethink how the everyday embodied practices ‘we’ engage in promote justice and/or sustain violence. She has authored publications in peer-reviewed journals, including M/C Journal, the Journal of Early Childhood Literacy, and the Journal of Early Childhood Research.

In the spirit of Fluxus and contemporary social practice artists, the “&” following “Stephanie Springgay + Andrea Alarcon” recognizes the multiplicity of collaborators present in facilitating the seminar (some in person, some virtual, and some aesthetically) including artists: Anthea Black, People’s Kitchen Collective (Sita Bhaumik, Jocelyn Jackson, Saqib Keval), Jen Delos Reyes, Josh McPhee, BFAMFAPHD (Caroline Woolard and Susan Jahoda), Mare Liberum, Rodrigo Hernandez-Gomez, Helen Reed and Hannah Jickling, Tania Willard, Syrus Marcus Ware, Shannon Gerard (with Pressing Issues students: Maddie Bellino, Leah Benetti, Geryl Cabrera, Rocio Cardoso, Angelica Granados Lopez, Riel Hattori-Caspi, Megan Moore, Cleo Peterson, Celina Sieh, Francis Tomkins, Rebecca Vaughan, Regina Xiao, Dana Zamzul and artist-researcher Andrea Vela Alarcon), and PA System (Alexa Hatanaka and Patrick Thompson). With graduate student research assistants: Aubyn O’Grady, James Miles, Amy Meleca, Anise Truman, Christine Jackson, Andrea Vela Alarcon, and Emmanuel Rutayisire.

KEYWORDS

queer & trans theory, anti-colonization & anti-racism, contemporary art theory and criticism, theories of chance and indeterminacy

DESCRIPTION

This seminar will activate Instant Class Kit and focus on the affects of indeterminacy, chance, and ‘assemble, make, perform!’ At first, the name Instant Class Kit feels like a misnomer. The title carries associations with the visual culture of 1960s advertising and its promises of immediate gratification, as well as the appropriation of these tropes by Pop Art. Yet it also implies a degree of humour and irony. Does learning, or teaching, for that matter, really happen in an instant? Can you create an “instant class” as easily as you can make a cup of instant soup? Maybe.

Instant Class Kit borrows its ludic title from an obscure archival source: a white legal-size envelope labeled “INSTANT CLASS KIT– with readymade responses,” designed by artist George Maciunas. Maciunas belonged to Fluxus – an international network of poets, artists and composers who worked across different media, and who sought to integrate art into everyday life. Fluxus artists produced concerts and performances, as well as instructional works, ready-made objects, and printed editions. The current Instant Class Kit is inspired by the format and multisensory nature of Fluxkits.

Fluxkits contain printed event scores, newspapers, and/or small, interactive three-dimensional objects housed in hinged boxes or retrofitted attaché cases. Fluxkits were produced in multiple editions, as part of anthologies, and for distribution via mail order. Fluxkits and Flux editions were often presented to audiences during Fluxus performances. Today, Fluxkits and Fluxus editions have become precious, collectible artifacts. However, according to art historian Hannah Higgins, such objects demand to be touched, smelled, tasted, and heard, in addition to being observed, in order to fulfill their pedagogical function. Fluxkits can offer participants a form of affective learning that encourages collective decision-making and a sense of interconnectedness.

Today, interacting with multiples, primary objects, or documents preserved in archives, involves similar processes: opening, touching, coaxing, smelling, unfolding, unfurling, and listening as artifacts rattle and roll around inside their small boxes. Yet, this experience of Fluxkits is carefully controlled for conservation purposes by museums or other institutions. The experience is often silent, and touch is occasionally conditioned by the use of white archival gloves. Even while libraries or special collections make accessible multiples that are too rare or too fragile to circulate, the experience remains incomplete and, for the most part, a solitary rather than shared activity.

The present-day Instant Class Kit responds to the process of handling these primary objects. Rather than curating an exhibition where similar materials would be encased in vitrines or available for manipulation within the confines of a library or special collection, Instant Class Kit was conceived to circulate, and its curriculum materials to be touched. The instructions are open-ended so as to allow participants to collectively decide how to interpret, manipulate and activate the multiples housed inside. This flexible curatorial model resists the typical fate of both Fluxkits and historical curriculum materials: to lie dormant in the archive, without circulation, foreclosing the promise of manipulation as they were originally intended.

 14 queer, trans, Black, Indigenous and people of colour (QTBIPOC) contemporary artists have contributed to Instant Class Kit. The contemporary artists strive to deliver a curriculum based on the values of critical democratic pedagogy, anti-racist and anti-colonial logics, and social justice, as well as continuing the experimental and inventive collaboration that defined Fluxus. The lessons, syllabi and classroom activities produced by this new generation of artists address topics and methodologies including queer subjectivities and Indigenous epistemologies, social movements and collective protest, immigration, technology, and ecology. A full inventory of works is available on the website thepedagogicalimpulse.com. Opening the kit for the first time becomes a learning challenge unto itself, as participants decide how to interpret, activate and respond to the instructional works, each dependent on time, space, and context.

The seminar’s focus will be on activating the kit contents. The instructions or event scores that accompany each of the 14 works are open to affects of indeterminacy, chance, and the unknown. Readings will direct us to consider the affects of chance and indeterminacy, and the focus of the seminar will be on collective enactments of the kit’s contents – assemble, make, perform! According to Janae Sholtz (2018) Fluxus works, “with their emphasis on the contingent and indeterminate, were meant to jolt the audience and break open the established structures of reception” (p. 250). As studies of intensity that amplify the forces of chance, Instant Class Kit constitutes an opening and an interval to an inventive pedagogy.

FORMAT

We will first engage with a predetermined set of readings (which will have been read prior to the seminar) and examine the Instant Class Kit contents. Based on our discussion, participants will most likely work in smaller groups to activate different parts of the kit over the remaining sessions. What and how will be determined by the group, facilitated by the paired convenors.

REQUIREMENTS

Pre-seminar: Participants will read some essays before the seminar. This will include the curatorial essay, and 3-4 scholarly publications.

During: Participants need to be willing to engage with and activate the kit materials – this might include writing, performance, ‘making of something,’ etc. No prior art experience is needed. How and what will be determined by the seminar group. Most likely we will work in small groups to be determined during our first session. Some additional ‘activations’ might need to happen between sessions.

BIOS

Bios of all the &s can be found here: thepedagogicalimpulse.com

Stephanie Springgay is an Associate Professor at the University of Toronto. She is a leading scholar of research-creation with a focus on walking, affect, queer theory, and contemporary art as pedagogy. Her SSHRC funded research-creation include: WalkingLab (walkinglab.org), The Pedagogical Impulse (thepedagogicalimpulse.com), and is a co-applicant on Bodies in Translation: Activist Art, Technology, and Access to Life (bodiesintranslation.ca). She has published widely on contemporary art, curriculum studies, and research-creation practices. stephaniespringgay.com

Andrea Vela Alarcón is an educator, artist and MA student at OISE. Her professional practice is based on popular education and socially engaged arts. At OISE, her research interest is the relationship with art, representation and solidarity.