DAY 1
Wednesday 22 May
9.00-12.00: Keynote lectures, respondents & discussion
Auditorium O, Rozier 44
9-9.30: Intro & Welcome: Chia Longman (UGent)
Chair: Griet Roets (UGent)
9.30-10.00: Lecture 1
Carolyn Pedwell (Newcastle University, UK)
Lecture title: ‘Affect, Embodiment and Transnational Politics’
Exploring the critical links between affect, embodiment and transnational politics, this lecture considers transnational feminist perspectives on the contemporary ‘turn to affect’. Over the past 15 years, the trans-disciplinary ‘turn to affect’ has marked an intensification of interest in emotions, feelings and affects (and their differences) as objects of scholarly inquiry. Feminist theory’s long-standing interest in the links between affect and gendered, sexualised, racialised and classed relations of power places feminist scholars at the heart of this renewed engagement. This focus on the political, cultural, economic and psychoanalytic implications of affect and emotion both reflects and engages critically with a wider ‘emotionalisation of society’ in which ‘emotions are imagined to provide a privileged source of truth about the self and its relations with others’, in both the ‘private’ and ‘public’ spheres (Swan, 2008: 89). In the context of transnational capitalism, feminist theories of affect have been employed alongside Foucaultian notions of biopolitics to examine neoliberal forms of governmentality and embodied subject formation (Ong, 2006; Fraser and Bedford, 2008; Pedwell, 2012). Affective frameworks also figure centrally in feminist, postcolonial and queer analyses of the embodied and psychical legacies of colonialism and slavery, as well as the emotional politics of contemporary nation building, migration and multiculturalism (Khanna, 2003; Ahmed, 2004; Fortier, 2008; Puar, 2008). But how might we think through the ways in which emotions and affects themselves are (re)produced through transnational circuits, of which individual embodied subjects, communities and nations are the effects as much as the causes? How can a transnational feminist approach probe the complex ways in which feeling travels between, and imbricates, diverse cultural and geo-political contexts, bodies and subjectivities?
10.00-10.10: Respondent Christine Kanz (UGent)
10.10-10.30: Discussion
10.30-10.50: coffee break
Chair: Gily Coene (VUB)
10.50-11.30: Lecture 2
Paola Bacchetta (UC Berkeley, USA)
Lecture title: 'Avoiding Deadly Encounters: Reflections on Transnational Feminist and Queer Solidarities'
In this lecture, I draw from my recent book Co-Motion: Co-Formations, Co-Productions and the Planetary in Transnational Feminist and Queer Alliances
11.30- 12.00: Discussion
12-13.30: lunch
13.30 – 17.00: 2 Parallel Master classes
Master class 1 : Embodiment and affect
Room D0.19, Rozier 44
Moderator: Griet Roets
13:30-14:00: theme intro & lecture on readings: Griet Roets & Carolyn Pedwell
14.00-15.15: student presentations relating their research projects to the session theme and readings
15.15-15.30: coffee break
15.30-17.00: discussion and feedback on student presentations and assigned readings; Griet Roets & Carolyn Pedwell
Master class 2: Movements/mobilizations
Room D0.22, Rozier 44
Moderator: Petra Debusscher (UGent)
13:30-14:00: theme intro & lecture on readings: Petra Debusscher & Paola Bacchetta
14.00-15.15: 3-4 prepared student presentations relating their research projects to the session theme and readings (max. 10 minutes of individual presentation each).
15.15-15.30: coffee break
15.30-17.00: discussion and feedback on student presentations and assigned readings; Petra Debusscher & Paola Bacchetta
19:30 Evening plenary + Reception: Fighting for Gender Studies in Academia Today
Auditorium O, Rozier 44
Co-organized with Sophia, Belgian Network for Gender Studies, Brussels.
Speakers: Paola Bacchetta (UC Berkeley USA), Sarah Bracke (KULeuven/Sophia), Gily Coene (VUB), Chia Longman (UGent), Petra Meier (University of Antwerp/Sophia)
In this panel discussion we will address the contemporary state of and possible futures for gender studies at our universities. There have been many attempts to create platforms for, recognize and institutionalize gender studies over the past decades. Yet spaces for critical knowledge production and feminist research in particular are under threat everywhere in the 'corporatized' academia of today. How do we evaluate the uneven, yet always precarious conditions for courses, programmes, research and jobs in gender studies? What can we learn from experiences of struggling to save or maintain what there is? And what new strategies can we devise for strengthening and introducing new footholds?