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.

Jack Halberstam is the David Feinson Professor of The Humanities at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of seven books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011), Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press).  Halberstam’s latest book, 2020 from Duke UP is titled Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam  is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: Unworlding: An Aesthetics of Collapse. Halberstam was recently the subject of a short film titled “So We Moved” by Adam Pendleton. Halberstam was recently named a 2024 Guggenheim Fellow. Website 
 
 
Ange-Marie Hancock is Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at The Ohio State University, where she also serves as ENGIE-Axium Endowed Professor of Political Science. Dr. Hancock joined Kirwan in January 2023 after 15 years at the University of Southern California and previous positions at Yale University, Penn State, and the University of San Francisco.

A globally recognized scholar of intersectionality theory, she has written numerous articles and three books on the intersections of categories of difference like race, gender, class, sexuality and citizenship and their impact on policy: the award-winning The Politics of Disgust and the Public Identity of the “Welfare Queen,”(2004), Solidarity Politics for Millennials: A Guide to Ending the Oppression Olympics (2011) and Intersectionality: An Intellectual History (2016). She is hard at work on her fourth book, The Scope and Vision of African American Political Thought, a book that covers more than 250 years of African American political thought. In 1993, under the mentorship of NBA Hall of Famer Tom “Satch” Sanders, Hancock conducted the original survey research and designed the business model for the Women’s National Basketball Association. The only women’s professional basketball league to succeed in the United States, the WNBA has been in existence for over 25 years. More recent applied forms of her research focus racial and gender equity at the local and regional levels, including leading a racial equity baseline study for the City of Los Angeles and co-chairing an academic analysis of governance reform in Los Angeles. She has also led community-engaged, empirically rigorous data analyses for the Black Experience Action Team (BEAT) and the USC Department of Public Safety Community Advisory Board. Her current work includes new research projects on asylum requests by survivors of domestic violence, empirical applications of intersectionality, and The Kamala Harris Project, a nonpartisan collective of scholars dedicated to tracking all aspects of the first woman of color vice president in U.S. history. Born in Columbus, Hancock is an alumna of Thomas Worthington High School. Long committed to community work, she has served on the boards of Community Partners, the Los Angeles African American Women’s Public Policy Institute (LAAAWPPI), LA Voice, the Liberty Hill Foundation, and the ACLU of Southern California. She received a bachelor’s degree from New York University, and her MA and PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Website
 
 
Daniel Loick is Associate Professor of Political and Social Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. After receiving his PhD in 2010 from Goethe University Frankfurt, he held positions at multiple institutes in Germany, Switzerland, and the US, such as Harvard University, the New School for Social Research in New York, the Center for Humanities and Social Change in Berlin, and Barnard College, New York. Daniel’s main research interests are critiques of state-inflicted violence (prisons, police, borders) and politics of forms of life. Among his publications are five books, Kritik der Souveränität(Frankfurt 2012, English translation as A Critique of Sovereignty, 2018), Der Missbrauch des Eigentums (Berlin 2016, English translation as The Abuse of Property, 2023), Anarchismus zur Einführung (Hamburg 2017), Juridismus. Konturen einer kritischen Theorie des Rechts (Berlin 2017) and most recently Die Überlegenheit der Unterlegenen. Eine Theorie der Gegengemeinschaften(Berlin 2024). Daniel is also Principal Investigator of the research project “Abolition Democracies – Transnational Perspectives” as well as (together with Judith Butler, Robin Celikates and Zeynep Gambetti) of the project “Emergencies of Authoritarianism”. Website

Intersections 

Few other concepts in the humanities and social sciences have been subject to such widespread debates in recent decades and yet have persisted as stubbornly as the concept of ‘identity’. While until recently the concept’s heyday was mainly localized in 1990s academic discourse, of late it has found its way back into focus, along with related concepts such as ‘subjectivity’, ‘alterity’, ‘difference’.

Discourses on identity have always been manifold, heterogenous and contradictory: somewhere between constant flux and essential stasis, becoming and being, between particularism and universalism, between difference and similarity. Stuart Hall has conceived of (cultural) identities as unstable points of identification that are produced in discursive imaginings of history and culture. Not an essence, but a positioning. Paul Ricoeur put forward the idea that humans self-author identity by creating meaningful narratives or stories to make sense of the past, present and future. The idea of ‘third space’ as a liminal in-between space of colliding cultures within which new hybrid cultural identities are being formed and transformed, has been developed in Homi Bhabha’s work. ‘Intersectionality’, a concept that emerged within the civil rights movements and particularly in Black feminism, entered the academic debate, first through Kimberlé Crenshaw and then through other scholars such as Ange-Marie Hancock, Jennifer C. Nash, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. The concept showed the importance of understanding subjectivity and identity as shaped by mutually reinforcing factors such as race, gender, class, sexuality, age, education, dis/ability, etc. and their embedding in various power dynamics. Meanwhile, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism and phenomenology have long expressed the idea of the multiplicity of the subject and the self: our “auto” is always already radically altered through language, culture, time and space. A deferring game of inclusion and exclusion, differentiation and alterization brings permanently shifting selves and corresponding others into play. Relying mainly on Marxist frameworks, other critics of ‘cultural identity’ have suggested that, even though concepts of ‘identity‘ are useful to create moments of solidarity and connection, at the same time they open up the potential for conflict.  Instead, they have proposed to focus on similarity, shared struggles and a more inclusive universality. Queer theory, in its troubling of normative forms, moves away from an overemphasis on categories and ‘identities’ and attempts to find new forms of solidarity, community and care. In line with such a queering endeavor, Donna Haraway and other posthumanist feminist scholars replace all bounded individualism – including human exceptionalism – with a plea for a tentacular planetary thinking.

Amid this myriad of conceptualizations of identity and its contestations, the organizers of the Summer School sympathize with thinking from margins, boundaries, overlaps and transitions to open up innovative avenues of heuristic readings and engaged stances: Reading from in-between differences and identities, reading from the intersection, allows to reflect on the ways in which knowledge is produced, shared, and evaluated. It puts forward a complicating, connecting, vibrant, processual, transmedial and open way to conceptualize the world, undermining monolithic conceptions of systems, structures, fields, disciplines, and research objects.

In the 2024 Summer School, we aim to reimagine ‘Identities, Positionalities, Multiplicities, Alterities’ from historical, literary, cultural, sociological, anthropological, philosophical, and artistic perspectives, which allows for discussions on broader epistemological questions on power and justice, not least in the process of knowledge production and our own positionalities as researchers. We thus aim to stimulate inter- and transdisciplinary reflections implicated on both sides – the researcher’s and those being researched – as we grapple with the messiness of past, present and future life and how to capture its ambiguities and complexities. Some of the guiding questions of this Summer School are:

• What do we really mean by such elusive ideas and broad concepts as identity, difference or alterity and their avatars, whether by challenge or rediscovery? How have they evolved and changed in public discourse and academic analysis?
• How might ways of reading from the intersection and the margins be translated into concrete research practices, helping us to account for past and present complex realities and contexts in new and more nuanced ways and self-reflect on our ethical responsibilities as researchers towards engaged and future-oriented scholarship?
• Which participatory, narrative, experiential, poetic, sonic or artistic research methodologies could be employed to disrupt logocentric objectivism and linear methods?

Invited keynote speakers:

Prof. Dr. Jack Halberstam (Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University, New York)

Prof. Dr. Ange-Marie Hancock (Professor and Executive Director, Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race & Ethnicity, Ohio State University, Columbus)
Prof. Dr. Daniel Loick (Associate Professor of Political and Social Philosophy at University of Amsterdam)

Organizers: Graduate School of the Arts and Humanities (GSAH), University of Bern, within the framework of the European Summerschool of Cultural Studies (ESSCS).

Call for Application For further information about the summer school and the application procedure (application deadline April 22, 2024), please have a look at our call.

At the Sea’s Edge: A Queer Anti-Narrative

Prof. Dr. Macarena Gómez-Barris

In my own work, I have sought new vocabularies and methods for tracking racial and extractive capitalism in the Americas, pointing to the need to decolonize the Anthropocene through critical analysis and modes of engaging epistemes otherwise. In this experimental keynote based upon my forthcoming book At the Sea’s Edge, I continue to propose a critical lexicon and writing practice that attends to non-binarized geographies and imaginaries that extend beyond the reach of the extractive gaze.

I work to undo the normative paradigm of sustainability by centering pluriversal modes of imagining and being that take place at the sea’s edge. Through proliferation, mourning, lingering, play, and acknowledging pain and exhaustion, new imaginaries of queer ecologies can be made and reshaped. The river and sea edge offer ways of thinking and being that exceed the container of the nation state. And there are modes of visual and literary engagement that offer sources for perceiving the world beyond narrative enclosure. In a time of extreme planetary crisis, climate change, vast racial and economic inequality, how do we find embodied and collective modes of rendering our environments? I draw from queer literary texts, decolonial social movements, pluriversal visual art, and my own water biographies in relation to oceans and rivers to model a critical queer femme environmental writing practice.

Mandatory reading:

• Gómez-Barris, M. 2017. The Extractive Zone. Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives. Dissident acts. Durham ; London: Duke University Press. xiii-xx (preface) /1–16 (introduction) / 91–109 (chapter 4).
• Gómez-Barris, M. 2019. The Colonial Anthropocene: Damage, Remapping, and Resurgent Resources (Book Review Essay). Antipode Online March 2019. Available from: https://antipodefoundation.org/2019/03/19/the-colonial-anthropocene/.

The Ecological Imperative in Literary Studies: Cultural Ecology and Literary Sustainability

Prof. Dr. Hubert Zapf 

The ecological imperative manifests in different ways according to the linguistic, generic, medial, and semiotic conditions in which it is communicated. This is also true of creative forms of cultural practice such as literature and the aesthetic. In any of the prevailing definitions of literature, the criteria mentioned for literariness are ambiguity, polyvalence, structured complexity, and participatory openness for the reader’s reception – all of them, at first sight, at odds with communicating univocal messages or calls to action.  Nonetheless, imaginative literature – as other forms of art – does have something important to contribute to environmental ethics and thus can be said to implicitly transact something like an ecological imperative, even though this contribution is for the most part not explicitly formulated but is rather conveyed through the narrative, formal, and aesthetic procedures themselves that literary texts employ; in other words, it becomes an ecological imperative only in the translation of the autopoetic complexities of the aesthetic into the co-creative responsiveness of its recipients.

In my talk, I will look at some of the ways in which this intrinsic ecological dimension of literature can be described within larger discursive contexts that are significant for environmental studies in general: These contexts are survival, cultural ecology, sustainability, and the Anthropocene, all of them in some way or other relevant to the ways in which an ecological imperative is mediated in literature and art.

Mandatory reading:

More-than-optical: Media Theory for the Anthropocene

Prof. Dr. Caroline A. Jones

The Ecological Imperative demands that we communicate and grasp the changing climate and its contested human causes in ways that mobilize citizens beyond the stasis of denial and despair. What media are effective? Since the 1970s, developed nations’ activists have often assumed that pictures of environmental disaster would be sufficient in mobilizing the public against ecological degradation (the US government even commissioned such photographs to justify its newly-founded Environmental Protection Agency). But there are deep-set patterns of occlusion and revelation in our Western image repertoires. When does the volunteer cleaning an oil-soaked bird on the shores of Prince William Sound in 1989 impede our capacity to see relations between ecology, regulations, or the political economy of oil extraction and transportation? How did communities struggle technically and politically–against a determined push-back from industrial energy providers–to make visible the unseen methane plumes from the 2015 Aliso Canyon blowout outside Los Angeles, and what were the political-epistemic results of their efforts? What impact do US “ag-gag” laws seeded in the 1990s (with the follow-on 2002 “Animal and Ecological Terrorism Act” and its progeny) have on the struggle to make industrial animal depredations visible? And what senses beyond sight are propelled into action as more-than-optical cues for ongoing ecological harm?

Under water, on the ground, and in the air, images are prized and contested – yet increasingly, wavelengths beyond human detection (on the planetary scale) and stench (on the intimate human scale) must join the merely visual in our attempts to conceive of our geological epoch, identified as the Anthropocene. In this collaborative project with historian of science Peter Galison, we tackle specific cases in which visual arguments were mustered and more-than-optical data registered, in order to offer some steps toward a media theory of obscurity and visibility in our critical times.

Mandatory reading:

• Jones, C., Galison, P. 2010. Unknown Quantities. In: Artforum International 10: 49–52.
• Jones, C. 2021. Atmospheres and the Anthropogenic Image-Bind. In: The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change. Demos, T. J, Scott E. E., Banerjee, S. (Eds.). New York: Routledge. 242–251.

© Hans Baumann, Photo: Amy Santoferraro

The Ecological Imperative

Past and Contemporary Perspectives and Practices  

The Summer School takes the notion of an “ecological imperative” of cultural products as its starting point. We ask how specific formats of intermedial cultural production work to engender an ethical and political stance towards human resource management. A general ecological paradigm is part of a growing awareness of the image politics of climate change and the role of cultural sustainability, examined according to the principles of contemporary eco-aesthetics, literatures and new documentary ecologies, but also as revisions of premodern ecological potentials. Recent approaches to ecological temporalities and spatialization have blurred the boundaries between human and non-human life worlds as well as material, technological, socio-cultural, local/global, literary, visual, auditive and virtual spheres. An intermedial blurring of boundaries between the material and conceptual opens up time and space for an “ecological imperative”, a promising heuristic device. In face of an escalating environmental crisis, ecological imperatives have transformed the ways we perceive human interaction with the non-human environment and have nudged all disciplines towards an Environmental Humanities. A humanities-based ecological mode of thinking offers a complicating, connecting, vibrant, processual and open way to make sense of the world, undermining an all too monolithic conception of systems, structures, or fields. And, by starting from a point of entanglement, we recognize that we researchers do not preexist our relationships with our research objects and subjects, colleagues or institutions. Drawing attention to past and present ecological relationships might help us position our research and its objects and subjects, as well as ourselves as researchers, and thus invite us to take an ethical and political stance in a time of planetary crisis. We are in need of critical (re)readings, new self-definitions, and inter- and transdisciplinary dialogue – in short, what an Environmental Humanities seeks to kindle. The 2022 Summer School discusses present, past and future ecologies, both as research topics and as modes of thinking from historical, sociological, cultural, anthropological, philosophical, literary, and artistic perspectives. It reflects, particularly, on the temporalities and spatialization of material and media within which “ecological imperative(s)” are already inscribed.

• How do time and space structure ecological imperatives? How are temporalities and spatializations manifested in concrete matter, artefacts, textures or performative bodies? How do temporal notions (Postapocalyptic, Eschatological, Deep Time, Anachronism, Chronotopos, Linear and Circular Time etc.) correspond to spatial concepts (Oikos, Heterotopia, Biosphere, Human Geographies etc.) and ecological scenarios of concrete environments?
• Given that the “ecological imperative”, as a concept, largely decentralizes and destabilizes the human subject and turns towards non-human performativity, how can we reasonably reconcile the material and conceptual, body/matter and sign?
• If the “ecological imperative” expands the spatio-temporal relationality of our research fields, how can we still reasonably delimit our research, keep it focused and avoid arbitrariness?
• In what ways might performative, experiential, artistic or sensorial research methodologies help us to study ecological imperatives? For example, how can we account for sensual and performative aspects of material culture and media in our own research output—in textual, visual, verbal or auditive forms?
• How can ecological modes of thinking interrogate our own disciplinary positions and lead us towards engaged and future-oriented scholarship?

Invited keynote speakers:

Prof. Dr. Macarena Gòmez-Barris (Professor and Chairperson of Social Science and Cultural Studies at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York)

Prof. Dr. Caroline A. Jones (Professor in the History, Theory, and Criticism section, Department of Architecture, MIT)

Prof. Dr. Hubert Zapf (Professor and Chair of American Literature at the University of Augsburg, Germany)

Organizers: Graduate School of the Arts and Humanities in cooperation with SNF Sinergia “Mediating the Ecological Imperative” / Partner: International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC)

Call for Application For further information about the summer school and the application procedure (application deadline April 24, 2022), please have a look at our call.

Materiality is the Name of a Problem

Prof. Dr. Caroline van Eck

Two major developments have shaped the humanities since the 1980s: the material turn and the renewal of interest in human-thing entanglement. The latter had been a central issue, under the various headings of persuasion, fetishism or Einfühlung, in many disciplines that study human culture, from rhetoric to anthropology, and from aesthetics to psychology, but the emergence of formalism and iconography as dominating paradigms in art history, and behaviourism in psychology, in the early 20th century had driven human-thing entanglement out of academia and into popular culture or psychopathology. In the context of the material turn human-thing entanglement is now often considered a feature of the materiality of objects: of their power to act on humans, their capacity to exercise agency.

These developments have led to a complete rethinking of the study of human culture, both artefactual and visual. But they also raise at least two pressing questions: how to theorize what happens between humans and objects in situations of human-thing entanglement; and how to contextualize it, historically and culturally?

Coming to these questions as an art historian makes it possible on one side to draw on a very old and rich tradition of thought on what makes human viewers become entangled with art works as if they are the living beings they represent, both in terms of design or style and by way of theorizing: the complex tradition of Einfühlung/empathy is a case in point. On the other side, one of the challenges posed by the arrival of the material turn, with its concepts and methods taken largely from the social sciences and archaeology, is how to calibrate historical views and theories with the insights of present-day anthropology or psychology; and conversely, how to historicize these present-day theories and concepts of agency, materiality, or human-thing entanglement.

In my lecture I will consider, starting from Alfred’s Gell’s Art and Agency, various historical theories developed to account for what we now call human-thing entanglement, to investigate the historical and methodological challenges outlined here. The historical focus will be on the rich source material provided by accounts of sculpture-viewing and restoration in Paris and Rome c. 1800.

Mandatory reading (available here):

• Gell, Alfred. “The Problem Defined: The Need For an Anthropology of Art.” In Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory, 1–11. Oxford/New York: Clarendon Press, 1998.
• Eck, Caroline van, Miguel John Versluys, and Pieter ter Keurs. “The Biography of Cultures: Style, Objects and Agency: Proposal for an Interdisciplinary Approach.” Les Cahiers de l’École Du Louvre, no. 7 (October 1, 2015).
• Eck, Caroline van. “‘Du lebst und thust mir nichts’!: Fear, Empathy and Protection.” In Aby Warburg und die Natur Epistemik, Ästhetik, Kulturtheorie, edited by Frank Fehrenbach and Cornelia Zumbusch, 91–102. Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2018.