Excitable Writing
Trans_forming academia_art_activism through intersectional trans_versal,
trans_feminist politics of performativity
Conference for PhD students, other scholars, artists, and activists, interested in conversations across borders between academia, art and activism.
Dec 8-10, 2014
Registration procedure
Registration is open now. Please register before November 15th.
For registration please follow the LINK
Organized by the Swedish-International Gender Research School, InterGender.
Venue: Linköping University, Sweden
The conference will gather academic scholars, PhD students in particular, artists and activists. Excitable writing encompasses the
problems connected to academic knowledge production and writing. In academia, writing is often seen as an instrumental add-on, instead of understood as an integrated part of research and learning processes - a part which can sustain processes of disruption and resistance to inherent discrimination structures, powerful conventions and rituals, but which can also prolong exclusions and protect elitist practices. In this conference, we will explore the exciting perspectives of writing:
* writing as a passionate and playful way to produce transformative knowledge and poetic, world making truths,
* writing as a way to sustain research and learning processes,
* writing as way to break boundaries between the academic, the poetic and the political.
Through workshops and plenaries, using alternative formats, we will jointly reflect on the world making capacities of critical, poetic and reflective writing - the abilities of such writing to change social realities. The conference will create and sustain transversal, cross-cutting dialogues between academics, artists and activists. It is meant to offer inspiring discussions and perspectives, most of all for PhD-students, on the power of writing as an important tool in their research, but other scholars, artists and activists, interested in the transformative, performative and poetic powers of writing are also most welcome. The event consists of dialogical settings as well as workshops to experience, apply and discuss in more detail challenges of excitable writing in and in-between academia, art and activism.
For further questions please contact: InterGender's conference coordinator Wibke Straube, wibke.straube[at]liu.se
Organizing committee:
Professor Lann Hornscheidt, Humboldt University, Germany
Professor Nina Lykke, Linköping University, Sweden
Doctoral Student Evelyn Hayn, Humboldt University, Germany
Dr. Wibke Straube, Linköping University, Sweden
Dr. Astrida Neimanis, Linköping University, Sweden
Dr. Hanna Hallgren, Linneaus University, Sweden
Dr. Redi Koobak, Linköping University, Sweden
Conference Venue and Practical Information
The conference will start at 12: 15 with registration on December 8th, 2014 (coffee/tea and registration from 11.30) and end no later than 17:00 on December 10th, 2014.
Venue:
Tema Genus, Gender Studies, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden.
CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SPEAKERS
Naja Marie Aidt
Danish poet and author of many collections of poetry, and short stories. She has also written drama, film manuscripts, children’s books and a novel, Sten, saks, papir, 2012. In 2008, she was awarded the Nordic Council’s Literature Prize for the short story collection Bavian (2006), published in English translation: Baboon (Two Lines Press, San Francisco, 2014). Her poetry and short stories are translated into several languages (English, German, Swedish), and she has been awarded many literary prizes. Together with Line Knutzon and Mette Moestrup, she has published the genre transgressive book Frit Flet [Free plaiting] (2014) with a cornucopia of different texts and themes, among others feminism, anti-racism and whiteness.
Michelle Bastian
Chancellor’s Fellow at the Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh. Her work focuses on the role of time in social practices of inclusion and exclusion. She has explored this in relation to feminist theories of community, local food, political apologies, more-than-human participatory research, clocks, leatherback turtles, transition towns and sustainable economies. Her work has been published in Time & Society; Theory, Culture & Society; and the Journal of Environmental Philosophy.
Yasmin Gunaratnam
teaches in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK, on culture, gender, migration, disability, illness, death and qualitative research methods. She is author of Researching Race and Ethnicity (Sage, London 2003) and has jointly edited Narratives and Stories in Health Care with David Oliviere (Oxford University Press, 2009). Yasmin’s latest book Death and the Migrant (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013) brings together her interest in stories with her sociological research on diasporic dying and multicultural hospitality.
Hanna Hallgren
Swedish poet who has published several poetry books. Her most recent book, Prologue to the Literary Theory of Science (2014) is part of a project in Artistic Research. Hallgren holds a PhD degree in Gender Studies, and works as a lecturer in Gender Studies at Linnaeus University and is establishing the transdiciplinary research centre Gender and Language.
Lann Hornscheidt
Professor of Gender Studies and Linguistics, Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. Her research interests include linguistic sexisms and racisms, constructionist models of interdependent analysis of discrimination and privileging, discourse analysis, (post)colonial studies, transdisciplinarity. She has published extensively within these fields, eg Gender als interdependente Kategorie, 2007 (with K. Walgenbach, G. Dietze and K. Palm), Rassismus auf gut deutsch, (with Adibeli Nduka-Agwu), 2010, and feministische w_orte. ein lern-, denk- und handlungsbuch zu sprache und diskriminierung, gender studies und feministischer linguistik ,2012.
Line Knutzon
Danish dramatist. Her first play De ustyrlige venner [Unruly friends] appeared in 1992, and she has since then written many plays, among others Guitaristerne [The guitar players] (2006) , Håndværkerne [The craftsmen], 2008 and latest Gruppe 8 [Group 8], 2014. Her plays have been shown by different theatres in Denmark and other countries. She has also published children’s books, and she has been awarded many prizes for her work. Together with Naja Marie Aidt and Mette Moestrup, she has published the genre transgressive book Frit Flet [Free plaiting] (2014) with a cornucopia of different texts and themes, among others feminism, anti-racism and whiteness.
Mara Lee
Swedish writer, poet and translator. She also holds a PhD in Literary Composition from Gothenburg University. Her most recent novel is called Future Perfect (2014), and her books have also been translated into several languages. Lee has worked as a teacher in creative writing at Nordens folkhögskola, Biskops-Arnö. She has translated two books by the Canadian poet Anne Carson into Swedish.
Nina Lykke
Professor of Gender Studies, TEMA GENUS, Linköping University, Sweden. Co-Director of the research institute GEXcel International Collegium for Advanced Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, and Director of the Swedish-International gender research school InterGender. She has published numerous books and articles in many languages on feminist cultural studies, feminist theory and feminist writing, eg. Cosmodolphins (2000), Feminist Studies (2010) and Writing Academic Texts Differently (2014). Her present research focuses on critically queer patienthood studies, cancer cultures, mourning, death, and autobiography.
Mia McKenzie (requested)
Mia McKenzie studied writing at the University of Pittsburgh. She considers herself as queer Black feminist, which is both often reflected in her writing. She published several short stories and a novel (“The Summer we got free”), which won the 2013 Lambda Literary Award for debut fiction. Mia McKenzie is also a blogger and the creator of Black Girl Dangerous, a forum for the literary and artistic expression of queer and Trans*People of Color. Among others, she read and held keynotes at the Empowering Women of Color Conference at the University of California and the HBGC LGBTQ Youth Empowerment Conference at Harvard University.
Mette Moestrup
Danish poet and author of several collections of poetry and novels, among others Jævnet med Jorden [Leveled with the ground] (2009) and Dø løgn, dø [Die lie, die] (2012). Her poetry is translated to among others English and Swedish. She is also part of the performance duo SHE’S A SHOW, and she has taught courses at different creative writing institutions in the Nordic countries. She has received Montana’s Literary Prize. Together with Naja Marie Aidt and Line Knutzon, she has published the genre transgressive book Frit Flet [Free plaiting] (2014) with a cornucopia of different texts and themes, among others feminism, anti-racism and whiteness.
Astrida Neimanis
Lecturer at University of Toronto (Women’s and Gender Studies) and Researcher at Linkoping University (TEMA Genus). She has published widely on feminist and queer approaches to bodies and environmental matters in academic publications such as Hypatia, NORA, Feminist Review, and philoSOPHIA, and is also the author of numerous creative-theory works and textual artistic collaborations. She is also an active partner of the Environmental Humanities Collaboratory at LiU (TEMA Genus).
Deborah Bird Rose
Professor in the Environmental Humanities program at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and a founding co-editor of Environmental Humanities. She has worked with Aboriginal people in their claims to land and other decolonising contexts, and in both scholarly and practical arenas her work is focused on the convergence of social and ecological justice. Her current research interests focus on human-animal relationships in this time of extinctions, and she writes widely in both academic and literary genres.
Somaya El Sousi
Palestinian poet and researcher living in Gaza. She has published several books in Arabic, and her poetry has also been translated into other languages. Her latest book Idea, Space, Whiteness (2005) was written together with the poet Hala El Shrof Shier. El Sousi works as a researcher at the Palestinian Planning Centre Office at the Department of Social Issue, which is a governmental office in Gaza doing research on politics, economy and social issues.
She is the author of numerous acclaimed and award winning books including Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction (2011); Dingo Makes Us Human (2009) and Reports from a Wild Country (2004).
Jenny Tunedal
Swedish poet, translator and lecturer at Literary Composition, Gothenburg’s University.
Her last collection of poetry is My War (2011). She has translated several poets from English to Swedish, for example Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Tunedal has also been chief editor for the literary magazine Lyrikvännen, and worked as a literary editor for the daily paper Aftonbladet.
The conference is organised by InterGender: Swedish-International Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies.
InterGender is a research school in interdisciplinary gender studies that establishes interconnections between Swedish PhD programmes as well as four major European research schools. The aim of InterGender is to further increase the quality of PhD training offered in gender studies, by creating a systematized programme of PhD courses, PhD supervisors' courses, thematic research seminars and conferences.
The School is funded by The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). It is organized as a joint venture between Gender Studies Units and doctoral programmes at Linköping University (host university) and at ten other Swedish Universities: Blekinge Institute of Technology, Göteborg University, Lund University, Luleå Technical University, Stockholm University, Södertörn University, Uppsala University, Umeå University, Örebro University, Karlstad University and at four international partner institutions: Graduate Gender Program at Utrecht University (The Netherlands), The Finnish National Doctoral School of Women's and Gender Studies (Helsinki University, Finland), Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany) and The National Research School in Gender Studies (Norway).