Unworlding: Atopia, Dystopia, Queertopia

Prof. Dr. Jack Halberstam

How do we unmake the structures, ideologies, modes of thought, epistemologies and ways of seeing that, in a Euro-American tradition, we currently call “world”? What is the world? Who is the world? Who must necessarily be excluded in order for worlds to exist, to thrive, and possibly to die? We will explore the making, unmaking, and dismantling of worlds, and the relation between aesthetic practice and un/worlding. This talk pursues questions of negativity and a/dystopia, Blackness, queerness, transness and ontology, desire and its itineraries. We will work with texts that open onto a-topic spaces and others in which worlds collapse and fall apart. In the aftermath of collapse, what constitutes identity, alterity and potentiality?

Mandatory reading:

• Halberstam, Jack. 2018. Unbuilding Gender. Trans* Anarchitectures In and Beyond the Work of Gordon Matta-Clark. Places (Cambridge, Mass.), No. 2018. doi:10.22269/181003, https://placesjournal.org/article/unbuilding-gender/#0 (last access: 25. Juli 2024).
• Halberstam, Jack. 2024. Collapse, Demolition and Queer Landscapes. Scottish Literary Review 16, Nr. 1: 45–57. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/243/article/930911/pdf.
• Hayward, Eva. 2008. More Lessons from a Starfish: Prefixial Flesh and Transspeciated Selves. WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, Nr. 3–4: 64–85. https://muse.jhu.edu/article/255359 (last access: 25. Juli 2024).

Surplus, Struggle, and the Mystery of Political Subjectivation

Prof. Dr. Daniel Loick

According to Rancière, the mystery of political subjectivation is the central problem for every emancipatory politics: How can social figures transform into political figures? How does the worker become a proletarian? In Marxism, the answer to this mystery lies in the experience of work itself: It is collective bargaining that can turn the sellers of labor power into politically conscious subjects. This talk starts with the premise that it is no longer possible to ground the process of political subjectivation within the experience of work (alone). Rather, I suggest the concept of struggle as a more encompassing notion to describe contemporary social experiences. This re-conceptialization, I argue, corresponds with an objective increasing production of surplus populations, of groups of people abandoned and rendered superfluous.

Mandatory reading:

• Clover, Joshua. 2016. Surplus Rebellions (chapter 8). In: Riot. Strike. Riot: the new era of uprisings, 153–174. London: New York : Verso.
• Shaw, Ian G. R. und Marv Waterstone. 2021. A Planet of Surplus Life: Building Worlds Beyond Capitalism. Antipode 53, Nr. 6: 1787–1806. doi:10.1111/anti.12741, https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/anti.12741 (zugegriffen: 23. Juli 2024).

Avoiding Paradigm Voyeurism and Embracing Intersectionality Stewardship: Intersectionality as a Research Paradigm “From Below”

Prof. Dr. Ange-Marie Hancock

While “intersectionality” as an approach to understanding and analyzing power has a history that spans nearly 200 years, its time in political science, sociology, and other social sciences is more commonly measured in decades, not centuries.  While power – particularly structural power – has been a primary unit of analysis across the various disciplines and fields of study, analytical approaches to understanding power have, for most of their respective intellectual histories, evolved separately.  While many feminist scholars have focused on the influential roles played by the politics of citation and the politics invested in keeping the two histories separate, in this chapter I focus on sketching the ontological, epistemological and methodological points of convergence between traditional social scientific and intersectional approaches to analyzing power.

Mandatory reading:

• Carastathis, Anna. 2016. Critical Engagements with Intersectionality (chapter 4). In: Intersectionality: Origins, Contestations, Horizons, 125–162. UNP – Nebraska. doi:10.2307/j.ctt1fzhfz8

• Hancock, Ange-Marie. 2016. „The Multicultural Epistemology of Intersectionality (chapter 3)“. In Intersectionality: An Intellectual History, 72–123. New York: Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199370368.001.0001.