Between 27 August and 24 September the University of Groningen organizes a 3rd 'covid-proof' online edition of the (formerly 'U4Society') Gender Studies Summer School, entitled 'Disturbances and Intervention. Contemporary Practices of Gender Research'. The summer school consists of four lecture sessions and a keynoye lecture. The summer school is open to PhD-students from all the ENLIGHT partners. Participants should apply before May 10th.
Dates and times
When? August 27th, September 3rd, September 17th and September 24th. Sessions will be 9.00-12.00 CET on Nestor, the University of Groningen’s platform for online teaching.
There will be a keynote lecture on September 16th, 19.30-20.30.
Venue: In view of the COVID-situation, the summer school will be online and spread out across several days to give students time for reflection.
Information: Dr. Mathilde van Dijk,
ECTS: (7.5 ECTS) are awarded by the student’s home university upon request.
- In preparation for each day, the students should prepare approximately 200 pages of literature. In total approximately 800 pages will be assigned.
- In correspondence with the differences in learning aims for the PhD-programmes of the several universities, some may have additional demands before awarding the ECTS. Please check this with your universities.
Call for applications
Because of the COVID-19 pandemic, this summer school takes its point of departure in a seminal work in gender studies: Donna Haraway’s Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chtulucene (Durham: Duke University Press 2016). In the context of ecological destruction, and still unaware of the pandemic to come, Haraway argues against the concept of the Anthropocene and proposes to replace it with Chtulucene, an era in which humankind’s and its relations to earth and all living creatures need to be reconfigured. Her call became even more topical after the outbreak of COVID-19, probably at an animal-market in Wuhan, China. This led even more people to question the way in which humans deal with animals. Haraway envisages a pioneering role for gender studies in this debate and defines its task as ‘to make trouble, to stir up potent response to devastating event, as well as to settle troubled waters and rebuild quiet places’(p. 1).
This summer school is primarily about connections, about how gender studies understands and can reform relations between earth and all living creatures, including humans, against the background of a series of crises – health, ecological, humanitarian, cultural not to mention the increasingly deteriorating positions of the humanities and social sciences. In part, the latter is due to political visions, which regard the humanities and social sciences as a luxury to dispense with. The Covid-19 crisis also creates practical problems such as the impossibility of travelling to do fieldwork, to meet respondents face to face or to use non-digitized archival material. The summer school also connects to questions about who (or perhaps what) counts as entities worth connecting with – paraphrasing Haraway’s earlier works: humans, cyborgs, simians.
Deadline for application: May 10th, 2021
How to apply: Apply through the application form. In this document, prepare a paper of ca. 800 words, in which you explain why participation in this summer school is important for your research. How do the theme and one of several of the sub-themes connect to your research? Have you worked with themes before? What do you expect to learn in this summer school? What do you expect to learn in this summer school? Send your application in on the assigned date to
For whom: PhD-students from all ENLIGHT partners, preferably halfway through their contracts. If there are vacancies, (Research) Master students can also be accepted.
Programme
The sessions will typically consist of a recorded lecture by the assigned lecturer, after which smaller groups will discuss the readings for the day and their own research projects, focusing on how the readings help in these. At the end of the session, they will report in the large group.
In addition, there will be a keynote lecture on an evening.
Assessment will be through participation and a paper (1500 words max), in which the students discuss the applicability of the classes to their own research.
{slider Session 1: 27 August, Ghent and Tartu}
Theme: affect and relationality
Teachers: Prof. Dr. Raily Marling, Dr. Carine Plancke, Dr. Leena Kurvet-Käosaar and Dr. Ladan Rahbari
Affect theory plays a prominent role in the current search, within humanities and social sciences, for ways to move beyond the human. It displaces the centrality of the human subject and reconnects it to the vitality of the world where the potential for change resides in radical and unexpected forms of interweaving and (re)linking. In this sense, affect theory is connected with key concerns in contemporary feminist and queer theory that highlight fluidity and indeterminacy in gendered and sexual ways of being and relating. However, the tendency to situate affect outside of discursive realms and to celebrate it as a force of freedom beyond social subjection and constraint is more difficult to reconcile with a perspective that critically interrogates human agency in perpetuating power asymmetries. Hence, in this session we will discuss ways of researching the diversity of affects in empirical and grounded ways which investigates their imbrication in socio-political structures and ideologies.
Affect will be tied to relationality. Both for Simone de Beauvoir and Adriana Cavarero, the notion of encounter is, on the one hand, a condition of identity and freedom. On the other, it involves restrictions that are gendered and depend on socio-political hierarchies. Their thinking on encounter and relationality challenges the conventional models of individualized self by highlighting the centrality of our exposure to, relations with and shared vulnerability with others. The encounters have been conceptualized in interstices of the public, intimate and aesthetic sphere. Encounters also emerge between human and nonhuman entities, in complex processes of making-with (or sym-poiesis, in Haraway’s terms). In this seminar, we aim at staging an encounter between these thinkers and the students’ research.
Required readings will be announced later.
{slider Session 2: 3 September, Groningen}
Theme: (post)migration, cultural hybridity/translation, transmission
Teacher: Dr. Jeanette den Toonder
Studying gender from a transnational perspective includes examining (post)-migrant voices operating at a cultural border zone. In this session, we will analyse the dynamics of the (post)migratory from a gender perspective. Constant movement fosters cultural transmission and offers revisions of notions such as hybridity and belonging. In this session we intend to draw on cultural, feminist and gender identity theory in order to examine the dynamics of these (post)-migrant voices. As a case study, we will analyse a selection of short stories from Leila Aboulela’s collection Elsewhere, home (2018) through a gendered postmigration lens.
Required readings
- Aboulela, Leila. Elsewhere, Home. London: Telegram, 2018 (selection of short stories).
- Bromley, Roger. “A bricolage of identifications: storying postmigrant belonging.” Journal of Aesthetics & Culture 9:2, 2017: 36-44
- Moslund, Sten Pultz, Petersen, Anne Ring. “Introduction: Towards a postmigrant frame of reading.” In: Schramm, Moritz, Moslund, Sten Pultz, Petersen, Anne Ring (eds). Reframing Migration, Diversity and the Arts: The Postmigrant Condition. New York: Routledge, 2019: 67-74.
- Pessar, Patricia R. and Mahler, Sarah J. “Transnational Migration: Bringing Gender in.” The International Migration Review 37:3, 2003: 812-846.
{slider Event: 16 September - Keynote lecture Astrida Neimanis}
Astrida Neimanis is a cultural theorist working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. Her research focuses on bodies, water and weather, and how they can help us reimagine justice, care, responsibility and relation in the time of climate catastrophe. Her most recent book, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology, is a call for humans to examine our relationships to oceans, watersheds and other aquatic life forms from the perspective of our own primarily watery bodies, and our ecological, poetic and political connections to other bodies of water. Often in collaboration with other researchers, writers, artists and scientists, Astrida’s work features in academic publications, gallery exhibitions and catalogues, and as part of public workshops and events. Astrida recently joined UBC Okanagan on the unceded Syilx and Okanagan lands, in Kelowna, BC, Canada, as an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Feminist Environmental Humanities.
Required readings will be announced later.
{slider Session 3: 17 September, Göttingen}
Theme: Identities, politics, movement, narrations
Teacher: Dr. Christine M. Klapeer
According to postcolonial theorist Stuart Hall, identity can be best described as an ongoing and ambivalent process of identification and negotiation, which is never completed. Following a poststructuralist, postcolonial and posthumanist approach, identity cannot be related to an 'inner core' of 'the self' but is based on "difference" and practices of boundary making. As for instance Judith Butler has convincingly shown in her various works, identities become performatively constructed through the expulsion and abjection of what is being considered as "other(s)", as "opposition", as "non-identity". Processes of identity construction are therefore highly racialized, gendered, sexualized and classed political practices, deeply interlinked with modern conceptions of "the subject" and as well as with ideas of the “self-possessive” and “autonomous individual”. However, identity and concepts of self-ownership similarly play and have played a key role in a number of social movements, not only as a mobilizing point of reference but also by enabling powerful counter-identities and supporting struggles for bodily autonomy (e.g. Black Feminism, Women's Movements, LGBTIQ* movements). In this session, we will engage with the tensions and ambivalences created by modern concepts of identity, the powerful fiction of self-ownership and what Donna Haraway conceptualizes as imagination/realization/practice of the Chtulucene - “ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with”. Particular attention will be given to current debates from the field of gender, postcolonial and queer studies that encounter entanglement, interconnectedness, relationality and dispossession as a chance to think identity and “the self” beyond processes of “othering”, the autonomous individual and self-possession.
Required readings
- Athanasiou, Athena/Butler, Judith (2013): Aporetic dispossession, or the trouble with dispossession & The logic of dispossession and the matter of the human (after the critique of metaphysics of substance). In: Dispossession. The Performative in the Political, Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press, 1-37
- Hall, Stuart (1996): Introduction: Who Needs Identity. In: Hall, Stuart/ Gay, Paul du (ed.): Questions of Cultural Identity, Los Angeles: Sage, 1-16
- Haraway, Donna (2008): When Species meet. Introductions. In: When Species meet, Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1-19
- Phillips, Anne (2011): It’s My Body and I’ll Do What I Like With It. Bodies as Objects and Property. In: Political Theory 39 (6), 724–748
{slider Session 4: 24 September, Uppsala & Ghent}
Theme: Writing in stuck places; A Workshop
Teachers: Professor Ulrika Dahl & Chia Longman
What place does writing have in a (post)pandemic world that faces a series of interrelated ecological, epistemological and political challenges? Writing is at the centre of all academic work and as such it can be both painful and pleasurable, engender anxiety or excitement. The interdisciplinary field of gender research has a longstanding commitment to questions of epistemology and methodology and a critical approach to scientific conventions and methods. For feminist researchers, questions of positionality and scientific conventions but also those of voice, style and narrative have historically been central to the craft of writing and the goal of our research. At the same time, in neoliberal academia, there is increasing pressure to adhere to increasingly standardized formats of scientific journal publishing. This final session reflects on the politics of writing with regards to gender research and also aims to offer hands on tips and inspire PhD students in the process of writing. How do we engage with different genres of writing and how do we find voice and style? How is writing related to self-care and care for the subjects of our research? By practicing and reflecting on the various kinds of writing we do, we will discuss how we can enhance a sense of joy and engagement in the writing process. To that end, following an introduction, the session will largely be run as a workshop. We will both explore our experiences with experimenting with writing, talk about why and how we get stuck and unstuck, share hands on tips for various genres of writing, from introductions to research notes, articles to summaries.
Required readings
- Ahmed, Sara (2016) ’Introduction: Bringing Feminist Theory Home’ Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. P. 1-42 = 42 p.
- Dahl, Ulrika (2017) ’Femmebodiment: Notes on the queer feminine shapes of vulnerability’ Feminist Theory. 18(1) 35–53 = 18 p.
- Dahl, Ulrika (2020) ’Screening and Writing: Households and (queer) kinship in Covid times’ Feminist Review Blog https://femrev.wordpress.com/2020/10/23/screening-and-writing-households-and-queer-kinship-in-covid-19-times/
- Longman, Chia (2020) ‘Covid 19 and Radical Self-Care’ https://trafo.hypotheses.org/24794
Lykke, Nina, ed. (2014). Writing Academic Texts Differently: Intersectional Feminist Methodologies and the Playful Art of Writing. Vol. 16. London: Routledge. Chapters 3 (Koobak & Thapar Björkert), 9 (Lykke), 11 (Davis), 13 (Koobak) and 14 (Davis), especially) =63p.
Page, Tiffany (2017) ’Vulnerable writing as a feminist methodological practice’ Feminist Review 115:13-29 = 16 p. - Richardson, Laurel and St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams (2005) “Writing: A Method of Inquiry”. In N. K. Denzin and Y. S. Lincoln (eds.) Handbook of qualitative research (Second Edition).
London: New Delhi, 959–978 =18 p.
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