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Rita GT
‘Escola ao lado | School next door’
EXHIBITION:       March 22nd until April 3rd, 2018, 50 Golborne

School next Door, the translation for the Portuguese “Escola ao Lado”, is the first solo exhibition of Portuguese Performance and Visual artist Rita GT who lives and works between Viana do Castelo, Portugal and Luanda, Angola.

Curated by Ana Cristina Cachola, The Lesson nº1 – Learning with Golborne presents an Installation and a series of Performative, Expositional, Interventional and Collaborative actions that the artist has developed with the aim to explore both the wider and intimate historical and current narratives of immigration in West London.

The School next door is laid out in the gallery with purposely conceived flat-pack furniture made as a collaboration between Rita GT, the architect Miguel Coutinho and the carpenters of the city council of her hometown. It features a series of artworks that Rita GT created for the site: photographs, ceramics, works on paper, and sound installations -inspired by research, interviews and performances she executed during previous residencies in this London neighbourhood.

https://www.facebook.com/events/609440772725491/

When the artistic gesture becomes vernacular gesture

The notions of nativeness and domesticity, spontaneity and belonging, necessity and sharing are intrinsic to the vernacular. At a junction in which the future and the speculative occupy central places in contemporary thought, Rita GT focuses on a vernacular present built not only upon ideals of proximity, neighbourliness, urgency and priority, but also on a location that does not fit into a global-ness that is weakened by excessively broad categories: north, south, east, west, centre and periphery. The absence of an aesthetical orthodoxy and the urgencies of the everyday (dis)orient Escola ao Lado [School Next Door].  The Portuguese artist’s itinerant school and exhibition is shown for the first time in London with Learning from Golborne, a lesson that reflects on, and with, the Portuguese migrant community living in that area of the city.

Recent years have been marked by a boom in the discourse about migratory phenomena, the so-called refugee crisis and the emergence of new migration typologies, notably in the arts, in academia and in the media. However, in this exhibition, Rita GT examines what she has learned about migrations from Golborne. In Golborne, a London street near renowned Portobello Road market, live a relatively large community of Portuguese emigrants. The older members of this community had left the country during the so-called (in Portugal) colonial war to avoid being drafted or to escape the dictatorial fascist regime known as Estado Novo (New State).

Migration and escape

The colonial war is an historical episode that left one of the deepest imprints in Portugal’s recent past. The conflict, opposing the Portuguese state and independence movements in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea, began in 1961 and raged across these three different theatres of war until 1974. Because of its impact on the lives of the Portuguese, the colonial war was, in and of itself, the main cause of the so-called Carnation Revolution of 25 April 1974, which brought an end to the authoritarian fascist regime that ruled in Portugal and fed the defence of its sovereignty over overseas territories.

The regime, led by António de Oliveira Salazar, turned Portugal into a place where it was difficult to live. The hyper-conservative society promoted by Salazar and his propaganda machine was watched over by the political police – PIDE*–, the media were subject to censorship and young Portuguese forced to leave the country to fight in Africa. At the same time, most of the adult Portuguese population was illiterate or had but the lowest education level, in line with a policy that was part and parcel of the regime’s control apparatus.

The few who had access to school were faced with a crystalized institution fully controlled by the regime. School manuals included, for instance, The Lessons of Salazar – illustrations synthesizing the ideological triad God, Fatherland and Family. These remain as unfinished episodes of recent Portuguese history, which are crucially important to think contemporary migratory phenomena, both involving the Portuguese and occurring in Portugal.

The work of gender

The various works that constitute the first lesson of Escola ao Lado are the result of the (un) disciplined methodology that intersects practices and knowledges, and of an apprenticeship ensuing from GT’s stay in Golborne Road.  For the most part, this stay was spent sitting at a table at Café Lisboa, learning through conversation and through the stories she heard.  These conversations were complemented by other methods of investigation, both plastic and involving historiographic revision and demographic research.

While today Portugal is already (also) a country that receives emigrants, in the 1960s-70s it mostly witnessed the departure of its populations in search of better living conditions. Given the low educational level of the Portuguese, men worked mostly in construction or as unskilled workers, while the women, whose access to school was even more limited, did menial work in private homes or in the hotel industry.

Precisely transversal to Rita GT’s work are gender (discrimination) issues, which emerge in the first lesson of Escola ao Lado.  In the series of photo-performances that she carried out in Golborne Road, the artist puts on an overall which reads ‘Mulher a dias [Journeywoman]’. ‘Mulher a dias’ is colloquial Portuguese expression referring to a woman in charge of domestic services (tasks that are always and only performed by women) in private homes and is paid by the hour or by the day without the right to any type of labour contract or bond. Made worse by gender, the precariousness of this situation is exposed by the artist and feminist.

The pedagogical drive in contemporary art

The educational installation or predisposition in (contemporary) art is neither new nor original. Numerous artists have already addressed this pedagogical drive resorting to various strategies and approaches, from radical pedagogy to anti-schooling activism. Aside from the fact that, in its association with the concept of originality, the new is an irrelevant characteristic in contemporary art, the school institution still plays a fundamental role in social and cultural structure. In this context, to insist on artistic pedagogy is still relevant in the domain of ethically oriented artistic production.

In Escola ao Lado, each lesson corresponds to a different exhibition-installation prepared according to different processes, based on dialogues and apprenticeships of the artist with the communities in the vicinity of the itinerant school’s location – the vernacular present of peripheral zones. The various valences of the school– performative, expositive, interventional, recreational – are ransomed into an horizontal structure of participation. In this sense, the positions of pupils and teachers may alternate in order to avoid generating fixed hierarchies in the production of knowledge, steering clear of the rigidity of enunciating subjects and the reproduction of themes.

Sou um instrumento (poros sintomáticos) [I am an instrument (symptomatic pores)], a performance by Rita GT with Nigerian singer and composer Keziah Jones, is an example of that. In itself, the title is ambiguous. While on the one hand I am an instrument may point to the instrumentalization of subjects by authoritarian forces (for instance), on the other, it contains in itself a counter-discursive potency, everyone’s ability to be a subversive instrument. In this performance, both GT and Jones dress clothes made of sound speakers from which the artists’ textual and musical compositions are projected live. The tiny perforations on the speakers are reminiscent of pores, whose secretions, although beyond our control, are essential to maintain the balance of the human body. The clothing used in the performance will be part of the exhibition, along with the resulting sound.

Itinerant collaboration  

This school echoes with many voices. Aside from a programme of informal talks with Georges Shire and Yvette Greslé, the work Laringite – Vozes Invisíveis [Laryngitis – invisible voices], developed in collaboration with João Gigante, records the voices and stories of Portuguese emigrants residing in Golborne. Many of these voices are imperceptible; like disembodied tongues, these voices find shelter inside ceramic larynxes and tracheas.  The larynx and the trachea, among other functions protect the vocal chords and the airway that allow us to have a voice. Therefore, the tables of Escola ao Lado (whose first version was designed in collaboration with Miguel Dias Coutinho) are occupied by voice shelters.

In Portugal, the school is still one of the most problematic institutions in its relationship with, and description of, the country’s colonial past. The same is true of migratory phenomena. Several activists and researchers, such as Joacine Katar Moreira or Mamadou Ba, have drawn attention to the need of an urgent intervention in Portuguese school programmes so that the nature of the colonial past might be recognized in its aspects of violence and slavery.  At the same time, migratory flows are approached from a simplistic standpoint, i.e., from geographic coordinates or empirical data that exclude systemic issues such as racism, xenophobia or sexism. It is necessary to rethink the school, to find alternative formats and to localize it at the very same time that it becomes itinerant.

After London, Escola ao lado will travel to Viana do Castelo, GT’s hometown, and to Luanda, where the artist lived from 2012 to 2015, keeping the reflections on migration as a palimpsest, which will be the core of the entire process, each lesson preserving something of the previous lesson. The generated knowledge will be in itinerancy with the school, which will be reconstructed and adapted at each location. The performance-gestures and activism-actions of Rita GT will also engage with many places, so as to learn from them.  With Rita GT we know that the artistic gesture is also vernacular.

Ana Cristina Cachola

March 2018

* TN – PIDE, Polícia Internacional e de Defesa do Estado [International and State Defense Police]

 

VIII Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture

Cyber+Cipher+Culture

Lisbon, July 2-7, 2018

DEADLINE EXTENSION: FEBRUARY 28

The Summer School for the Study of Culture, the yearly seminar for doctoral students in the critical humanities and cultural analysis, will in 2018 inspect the contentious realm of cyber, as it performs the fluid and the solid, the evanescence of the cloud and the heavy materiality of technology, the fear of war and the brave world of global information, surveillance and security, the right of inspection and the obfuscation of knowledge. Under the conditions of modernity 4.0, the prefix cyber seems to have become the point of entry for a new narrative of experience. One that draws on a technological unconscious to reboot modes of conviviality, modes of knowledge production, the organization of society, the very definition of democracy, the idea of the human. Coined by mathematician Norbert Wiener, the term cybernetics referred to the science of autonomous machines, that could both adapt their behavior and learn. Cybernetics developed out of a system structured upon coding models. The infrastructure of the new autonomous machines was helpless without the incision, the graphing of the software that would effectively bring them to life.

The Summer School brings together cyber with cipher in order to discuss the manifold incisions that write the machine into life and the strategies that users need to read them back. As Jacques Derrida famously claimed, writing always connotes an element of fracture, of removal from ‘the real’ context. Writing bears the signature of a physical absence – of the subject and of the context – and articulates a moment of rupture, enacted as a counter act or as a mode of dissent under the very act of writing. As our social and cultural experience is being increasingly shaped, written over and redone by the cyber world, it is also here in the utopian drive for perfectioning the human that the hope of resistance before the oblique powers of modernity may lie.

Amongst other theme-related presentations, papers are welcome on the following topics:

• Cyberculture and creativity;
• Cyber mediation and the future of cultural media;
• Citizenship, the public space and the right to privacy;
• Cyberactivism;
• Writing cybernetics: Net literature and the literary network;
• The transformation of the face of war;
• Surveillance and critique;
• Cyberterrorism/cybersecurity and the artistic conviviality;
• Critical thinking in the age of drones;
• Representing cyber.

 

Speakers:

Mandy Merck (Royal Holloway College)

Carla Ganito (Universidade Católica Portuguesa)

Frederik Tygstrup (University of Copenhagen)

Marie-Laure Ryan (independent scholar)

Lev Manovich (City University of New York)

Luís Gustavo Martins (Universidade Católica Portuguesa)

Gustavo Cardoso (ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa)

Manuel Portela (Universidade de Coimbra)

The Summer School will take place at several cultural institutions in Lisbon and will gather outstanding doctoral students and post-doctoral researchers from around the world. In the morning there will be lectures and master classes by invited keynote speakers. In the afternoon there will be paper presentations by doctoral students.

Paper proposals

Proposals should be sent to lxsummerschool@gmail.com no later than February 28, 2018 and include paper title, abstract in English (max. 200 words), name, e-mail address, institutional affiliation and a brief bio (max. 100 words) mentioning ongoing research.

Applicants will be informed of the result of their submissions by March 15, 2018.

Rules for presentation

The organizing committee shall place presenters in small groups according to the research focus of their papers. They are advised to stay in these groups for the duration of the Summer School, so a structured exchange of ideas may be developed to its full potential.

Full papers submission

Presenters are required to send in full papers by May 30, 2018.

The papers will then be circulated amongst the members of each research group and in the slot allotted to each participant (30’), only 10’ may be used for a brief summary of the research piece. The Summer School is a place of networked exchange of ideas and organizers wish to have as much time as possible for a structured discussion between participants. Ideally, in each slot, 10’ will be used for presentation, and 20’ for discussion.

Registration fees

Participants with paper – 265€ for the entire week (includes lectures, master classes, doctoral sessions, lunches and closing dinner)

Participants without paper – 55€ per session/day | 180€ for the entire week

Fee waivers

For The Lisbon Consortium students, there is no registration fee.

For students from Universities affiliated with the European Summer School in Cultural Studies and members of the Excellence Network in Cultural Studies the registration fee is 50€.

 

Organizing Committee

• Isabel Capeloa Gil
• Peter Hanenberg
• Alexandra Lopes
• Paulo de Campos Pinto
• Diana Gonçalves
• Clara Caldeira
• Rita Bacelar

 

For further information, please contact us through lxsummerschool@gmail.com. Find us online at http://www.lisbonconsortium.com.

 

The PhD student Jan Świerkowski was awarded with the Science Populariser 2017 competition organized by PAP – Science in Poland and the Ministry of Science, in the Animator Category. Congratulations!

The award in the Animator category went to Jan Świerkowski, the leader of the B61 Institute who promotes science by combining the work of artists and researchers. His performances have been watched by over 20,000. spectators, and the exhibition “Cosmic Underground” (realized on a freight train) travelled across Europe: from Tallinn, through Poland, to Lisbon.

“It is important for our team of scientists and artists to work out a language of understanding with the public” – emphasised Świerkowski.

Read more here

1. CONTABILIDADE E AUDITORIA

Mestrado em Finanças, NOVA School of Business and Economics (Nova SBE), Universidade Nova de Lisboa

2. DIREITO COMERCIAL E EMPRESARIAL

LL.M. Law in a European Global Context, Universidade Católica Portuguesa

3. COMUNICAÇÃO

Pós-Graduação em Comunicação Empresarial, Porto Business School – Universidade do Porto

4. FINANÇAS EMPRESARIAIS

Mestrado em Finanças, NOVA School of Business and Economics, Universidade Nova de Lisboa

5. GESTÃO DE ARTE E CULTURA

Mestrado em Estudos Culturais – The Lisbon Consortium, Universidade Católica Portuguesa – Faculdade de Ciências Humanas

On E-Konomista

 

September 21: the new MA and PhD students were at MAAT, to a guided tour at the exhibition “Tension and Conflict: Video Art after 2008” by Luísa Santos, professor of the Program and curator of the exhibition (with Pedro Gadanho).

September 18: the new Ma and PhD students gathered for the ‘Meet and Greet’ of the Lisbon Consortium, the start of the Induction Week.
Welcome! We wish you all a very successful and productive semester.

 

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BLR/ESSCS

August 14th-18th 2017 – BERGEN, NORWAY

 

“LIVING TOGETHER”

Website: http://www.folk.uib.no/hlils/te17/

 

New deadline for paper proposals : May 26

”Living Together” is the joint venture of the European Summer School in Cultural Studies (ESSCS) and of the Norwegian nationwide researcher-training school TBLR (Tekst Bilde Lyd Rom = Text Image Sound Space), in Bergen, August 14th-18th, 2017. (See also ”Background” in our website’s topbar.) The TBLR has seven member universities, and is since the turn of the millenium Norway’s largest nationally networking PhD researcher-training school within literary, aesthetic and cultural studies. The ESSCS is a network-based seminar for interdisciplinary-research training in the fields of art and culture, and it consists of eight European university partners.

 

14th through 18th of August 2017, ESSCS and TBLR’s tandem efforts aim for a truly international inter-aesthetic and cultural-study event for PhD students, keynotes and participating faculty. Venue is Bergen: Norway’s second largest city, founded in 1070. Bergen is a beautiful city, internationally connected, bustling with life, trade and culture, and centuries of living together. It is situated on the West Coast with its amazing archipelago towards the North Sea, and it is at the same time the gateway to the fjords.

 

Under the heading ”Living Together”, this Call for Papers is anchored broadly in some of the work of Roland Barthes, Giorgio Agamben and Jacques Derrida. You are cordially invited to apply for participation with papers bearing some relation to the following wide plethora of topics. (On PhD student-paper topics, however, see also further specifics under ”Practical details” below.)

 

Roland Barthes:

Originally, Roland Barthes gave “Comment vivre ensemble? ­Sur l’idiorrythmie” as a Cours at Collège de France from January through May in 1977. In the Comment vivre ensemble manuscripts (published in English as How To Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces (2013)), Barthes uses five main literary references to isolate five perspectives – or topoi. His literary references are Palladius’ The Lausiac History, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Zola’s Pot Luck and Gide’s “The Confined Woman of Poitiers”. Barthes’ five perspectives call for closer investigation in many specific directions, as the list of related issues and extrapolated concepts shows. The five topoi are the desert, the island, the sanatorium, the city and the home.

These five perspectives function as part of the framework for organising the activities of the TBLR and the ESSCS in Bergen. The PhD students are invited to participate in the plenary sessions where invited keynotes present their talks followed by ensemble discussions, and in one of three groups where the students’ pre-submitted papers are discussed. Keynotes will be given according to the issues.

There are numerous connections between the five topoi; they complement each other, create differences and show the complexity of the issues of living together in human societies:

(1) DESERT. As a concept, the “desert” is generally thought of as a desolate and emptylandscape, interpreted by writers, philosophers, composers, film-makers, artists and critics as a place of extremes. As the landscape of the desert contains dryness, silence, margins and, with some exceptions, lack of fauna and flora, it may serve as a metaphor for anything from death, poverty or religion, to the primitive past, desolate future and nomad culture, but also retirement, withdrawal and acedia (a mental state characterised by indifference, boredom, fear, loss of desire etc.). Since Bishop Palladius’ Lausiac History there is an extensive literature on the subject of deserts. As the American poet Robert Frost writes in his poem “Desert Places”, the desert is among other things related to loneliness and sorrow, the feeling of bearing a void: “I have it in me so much nearer home/To scare myself with my own desert places”. This platform invites to think the idiorrhythmic and idiorrhythmic life as vulnerable and exposed to death. Suggestive key words for PhD student-paper topics and perspectives: death, religions, rules, margins, poverty, silence, acedia/melancholy, nomads, withdrawal, retirement, refusal.

 

(2) ISLAND. In the history of literature and of myths, the island is a metaphor for isolation, individuality, strandedness, forsakenness, but also independence, new life and creativity based on reduced circumstances. The number of fictional islands is great, from Avalon (Arthurian legend) and Neverland (Barrie) to Treasure Island (Stevenson) and Kokovoko (Melville); from New Atlantis (Bacon) and Utopia (More) to Fraxos (Fowles) and Isla Nublar (Jurrassic Park). As in John Donne’s phrasing, “No man is an island”, the metaphor is obviously open for a questioning of the very essence of idiorrhythmic life. For the summer course, the topos of the island also opens up for reflection on immigration. Bhabha points to the unmappable spaces – in-betweens and liminalities – which appear as archipelagos of or on the outer and inner margins of nations and metropoles: they are produced today primarily by global flows of migration and established diasporic cultures, in which hybrid identities flourish in contemporary cosmopolitan societies.Suggestive key words: isolation, boundaries, independence, individuality, civilisation, migration.

 

(3) SANATORIUM. The sanatorium is a now outmoded concept for health care institutions or places of recreation for people suffering from tuberculosis until the TB epidemic died down in the 1940s, thanks to antibiotics, as well as for places treating nervous disorders. The life of the sanatorium is described in literature: in novels, short stories and poems, especially from the 19^thand 20^th Centuries (e.g. Skram, Hamsun, Mann, Plath, Solzjenitsyn), as well as in our time, where it occupies an important place in films (Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), television (von Trier’s Riget), and theatre (Verdensteatret’s The Hourglass Sanatorium). On the other hand, the sanatorium as institution is described in documents and literature concerning public health systems (public accounts and reports on hospital organisation etc.). The particular essence of the sanatorium is that it is closed, but at the same time submitted to public direction. At the summer school, the sanatorium as institution, idea and metaphor may include an exploration of the telos and the the idiorrhythmic of the life at institutions. The sanatorium can be taken as exemplary of various institutions in which people spend parts of their lives living together, such as retirement communities, cruise ships, colleges and prisons. Suggestive key words: health, death, institutions, institution analysis, illness and identification.

 

(4) CITY. While the city may be regarded as the opposite of the desert, it has affinities to the island metaphor as well as to the topos of the home. The topos of the city invites reflections on various modern life forms, analyses that are focused on idiorrhythmics. In literary studies the modern city has been described as a mythological heterogeneous space for fascination and imagination (e.g. Benjamin, Stierle, Berman). It has also been regarded as a place for anonymity, consisting of alienated literary heroes (Dostoyevsky, Hamsun, Kafka). Cities have been recognized as sites for innovation and for speeding up technological solutions, infrastructure and social relations (Virilio). While they are places for activity and exhaustion, yet city planners have always acknowledged the need for resting places as necessary conditions for a well-functioning city. Cities can thus be seen as places where rhythms of activity and rest, engagement and isolation, become crucial questions. The topos of the city is characterised by paradoxical dynamics: the crowd/loneliness, interaction/anonymity, speed/rest. The city has further been recognised as a place where feudal family structures are challenged, and for experimenting with a huge variety of ways of living together, a major theme in 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st Century fiction (e.g. Dickens, Balzac, Zola, Dostoyevsky, Döblin, Joyce, Cole, Auster).Suggestive key words: urbanity, food, media, ecology, rhythms, finance, information, digital life, recreation, anonymity, single life, dating.

 

(5) HOME. The topos of home is wideranging, covering the everyday routines, family life yet also, as metaphor, a place that provides a guarentee for identity, health, nutrition, shelter and security. In this sense, home is close to the topoi of island and sanatorium, and as metaphor it is also opposite to city and desert. Traditional food is one of the products of the home, and may be studied as a specific sort of the idiorrhythmic, linked to the notion of taste as both physical and cultural phenomenon. In Barthes’ research the home is also, in his reading of Gide, a place that may be the scene of a crime, that is, characterised by the Freudian notion of the Unheimlich. In the center of home is the idiorrhythmic of shared life as well as the individual, single life forms. Suggestive key words: the everyday, routines, food, rest, taste, solidarity.

 

 

Giorgio Agamben; Jacques Derrida:

The summer course’s broadly inclusive topic of Living Together also raises the question of the status of the ’singularities’ that in some form or way actually did, do or may live together. Whether individuals, human persons, members of a community; or bodies, biological entities or other forms of bare life; or linguistically communicating interlocutors, or linguistic beings performatively speech-acting, etc. – the question of the status of the “singularities” also actualises their being’s relation to language and to the law and the subject positions endorsed, allotted or produced by the rights of law, and by language. This makes some of Giorgio Agamben’s work highly topical and inspirationally relevant for our event, as well as some of Jacques Derrida’s work.

Among the works by Agamben that bear particular relevance for the summer school event, are The Coming Community ([1990] 1993); Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life ([1995] 1998); State of Exception ([2003] 2005); and The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life ([2011] 2013).

Similarly, there is a series of works by Jacques Derrida that come to mind in the perspective of the summer course’s topic, Living Together. Some of these might also prepare the ground for exciting comparison, as is the case with Agamben’s works. What has been referred to as an ’ethical’ turn in Derrida’s production, introduced a period of fifteen years plus, during which time Derrida was particularly concerned with problems and promises related to living together. At a closer look, and as has also been contented, both an ’ethical’ and a ’political’ strand may prove to traject through all of his production.

At any rate, Derrida during the latter part of his life, and still ’deconstructively’, was highly concerned with topics such as violence, subjection and extinction, death, loss, memory, mourning; furthermore, globalization and cosmopolitanism; and not least, with topics such as forgiveness, responsibility, friendship (as opposed to brotherhood), hospitality, the gift, as well as with a sustained thinking of the ’democracy to come’. All of which are thought in radical fashion, and which seem to reverberate with topoi, topics and perspectives in both Barthes’ and Agamben’s work actualised here, and with the summer school’s main heading, Living Together.

Among the works by Derrida that seem to bear particular relevance for the summer school event, are The Work of Mourning (1981; in which is included ”The Deaths of Roland Barthes”); Memoires: For Paul de Man (1989); The Gift of Death ([1991] 1995); The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe ([1991] 1992); The Politics of Friendship (1994); Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money (1994); Of Hospitality (2000); On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness(2001); Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (2005; in which is included “The Last of the Rogue States: The ‘Democracy to Come’, Opening in Two Turns”).

 

A note on suggestive key words for possible PhD student-paper topics: For the work of Georgio Agamben and for that of Jacques Derrida, our CfP does it the other way round with regard to the possible scope of inspiration: Beyond referring to relevant works by Agamben and Derrida, the CfP does not list specified, suggestive topoi, perspectives and key words on a par with the level of detail as in the case of Roland Barthes’ book. The idea is to attempt to productively mingle ’two modi of inspirational suggestivity’ – that of the organisers (’detailing’ Barthes) and that of the enlisted participants (’detailing’ Agamben and Derrida).

Therefore, you yourselves are encouraged to productively select, work out and specify ’living-together perspectives’ on relevant work by Agamben and Derrida.

Suggested Reading List

Agamben, Giorgio. The Coming Community. Transl. Michael Hardt. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, [1990] 1993.

–––––––. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Transl. Daniel Heller-Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, [1995] 1998.

–––––––. State of Exception. Transl. Kevin Attell. Chicaho and London: University of Chicago Press, [2003] 2005.

–––––––. The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life. Transl. Adam Kotsko. Stanford: Stanford University Press, [2011] 2013.

Anyuru, Johannes. En Storm kom från paradiset (2012). Stockholm: Norstedts, 2013.

Bakhtin, M. “Forms of time and of the chronotope in the novel”. In The Dialogic Imagination. Austin: Univ. Texas Press, 1981.

Barthes, Roland. Comment vivre ensemble. Simulations romanesques de quelques espaces quotidiens. Cours et séminaires au Collège de France (1976-1977). Paris: Seuil, 2002.

–––––––. How to Live Together: Novelistic Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces. New York: Colombia UP, 2013.

Bourdieu, Pierre. La distinction. Critique sociale du jugement. Paris: Minuit, 1979,

Baudelaire, Charles. “Le Spleen de Paris”, in: Œuvres Complètes, Tome 1. Paris: Gallimard/Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1975.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2000.

Benjamin, Walter. The Writer of Modern Life. Essays on Charles Baudelaire. Cambridge Mass.: Belknap Press, 2006.

Berman, Marshall. All That is Solid Melts Into Air. The Experience of Modernity. Penguin Books, 1988.

Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994.

Certeau, Michel de. L’invention du quotidien II, habiter, cuisiner. Paris: Gallimard,1994.

Canguilhem, Georges. Le normal et le patologique, Paris: PUF 1966; The Normal and the Pathological. New York: Zone,1991.

Coles, Teju. Open City. London: Faber & Faber, 2011.

Defoe, Daniel. Robinson Crusoe [1719]. London: Penguin 1994.

Derrida, Jacques. The Work of Mourning. Ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Mann. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981.

–––––––. ”The Deaths of Roland Barthes”. In The Work of Mourning. Ed. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Mann. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1981. 31-68.

–––––––. Memoires: For Paul de Man. Transl. Lindsay, Culler, Cadava, and Kamuf. New York: Columbia University Press, 1989.

–––––––. The Other Heading: Reflections on Today’s Europe. Transl. Pascale-Anne Brault, Michael B. Naas. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, [1991] 1992.

–––––––. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Transl. Kamuf. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1992.

–––––––. The Politics of Friendship. Transl. George Collins. London and New York: Verso, 1994.

–––––––. The Gift of Death. Transl. Wills. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, [1991] 1995.

–––––––. Of Hospitality. Transl. Rachel Bowlby. Stanford, SUP, 2000.

–––––––. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. London: Routledge, 2001

–––––––. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Transl. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

–––––––. “The Last of the Rogue States: The ‘Democracy to Come’, Opening in Two Turns”. In:Rogues: Two Essays on Reason. Transl. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. 78-94.

Foucault, Michel. Naissance de la clinique. Paris: Gallimard, 1963.

Gide, André. “La Séquestrée de Poitiers” [1930], in Ne jugez pas, Paris: Gallimard/NRF, 1969.

Goffman, Erving. Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates. New York: Anchor Books, 1991.

Lefebvre, Henri. Critique de la vie quotidienne. Paris: L’Arche, 1947.

Mann, Thomas. Der Zauberberg [1929]. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1998.

Palladius. The Lausiac History [AD 423]. New York: Newman Press, 1998.

Pfaller, Robert. On the pleasure principle in Culture: Illusions without owners. London: Verso 2014.

Rabinowich, Julya. Spaltkopf: Roman. Wien: Deuticke Verlag, 2008.

Sassen, Saskia. The Global City. New York: Princeton Univ. Press, 2001.

Selvon, Sam. The Lonely Londoners. London: Penguin, 2006.

Stene-Johansen, Knut et al. (eds.). Å leve sammen. Roland Barthes, individet og fellesskapet. Oslo: Spartacus, 2016.

Taïa, Abdellah. L’Armée du Salut. Paris: Seuil, 2006.

Ugresic, Dubravka. The Ministry of Pain. London: Telegram, 2011.

Zola, Émile. Pot-Bouille [1882], in Les Rougon-Macquart, Vol 3. Paris: Gallimard/Bibliothéque de la Pleiade, 1964. –––––––––. Pot Luck, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1999.

 

 

Practical details

See the “Living Together” course website, which will be updated continuously; keep checking back for updates. – Here are the most important details:

 

–– Course layout: We start the summer course with luncheon at 13:00 on Monday 14^th Aug., then go on with a half-day (afternoon and early evening) programme that day; and then continue with full-day programmes both Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday 17^th Aug. Festive dinner offered on Thursday evening (on the organisers). Good-byes and departures after breakfast and before noon on Friday 18th.

 

–– Programme: “Living Together” is a combined keynote topic/plenary-discussion event, and a PhD paper-discussion course. There will be five Scandinavian/international keynotes on the programme, whose names and topics will be disseminated on the webiste as confirmations are in. Already now, though, we are happy to announce the first keynote, prof. Knut Stene-Johansen (Comparative Literature, University of Oslo), with whom the scholarly idea about “Living Together” originated, and who – with his Oslo-based research group – has already published a first project anthology: Knut Stene-Johansen et al. (eds.):  Å leve sammen. Roland Barthes, individet og fellesskapet. Oslo: Spartacus, 2016 (to be transl. into and publ. also in English). – For the PhD paper-discussion sessions, the participants will be organised into relevant thematic groups, composed of PhD students as well as of TBLR/ESSCS-faculty and keynotes.

The detailed programme will be posted and disseminated when fully confirmed.

 

–– Time frames/duration/length: Keynotes are set up with 45-minute lectures, and the same amount of time allotted to the ensuing discussion. – PhD student-paper discussions are set up with a total time frame of 1 to 1,5 hours for each single one, in the course of which time up to 20 introductory minutes are allotted to the PhD student’s oral presentation/contextualisation of her/his paper, and the remaining time to a rich discussion between the PhD-student author, student peers, TBLR/ESSCS faculty, and keynotes, with comments, questions, further suggestions, etc. This structure – while all student papers are mandatory beforehand reading for all participants, thus leaving ample time for a rich discussion of the papers.

 

–– PhD student-paper topics: (1) a paper bearing a relation to some aspect or problem detailed or suggested in the ”Living Together” Call for Papers (Barthes; Agamben; and/or Derrida); (2) a paper stemming from the PhD student’s ongoing dissertation work, like a chapter, a section, an excerpt, a focus on a special problem, theoretical or other, lifted out of the dissertation-writing process for particular, critical attention, etc. – all of which with or without a relation to the CfP; (3) a paper presenting and critically discussing one or more of the works on the course’s reading list. – Bear in mind that inter-aesthetic and comparative as well as disciplinary papers are welcome. – Max length of paper: about 15 pp, 1,5 line spacing, Word: Times New Roman.

 

ECTS points for PhD students: 5 ECTS with a paper; 2 ECTS without.

 

–– Venue for the course as well as for all participants’ hotel rooms 14th-18th Aug. will be Hotel Scandic Neptun, downtown Bergen, one street removed from the historic wharf and the quayside. The hotel rooms (covered by the organisers throughout the duration of the summer-course), will be spacious double rooms, housing two PhD students in each (a summer-school room-mate system, which also creates an extra and contact-facilitating atmosphere).

 

–– Travel costs will have to be covered by the PhD students themselves or through the PhD-trajectory means that they themselves have at their disposal. Other than that, hotel rooms and full board (three meals a day) from Monday 14th at noon through Friday 18th Aug. at noon will be covered by the TBLR/ESSCS (the dinner on Wednesday is the exception: Wed’s dinner is open for each and every one to find another restaurant in the city, and on that particular evening pay their dinner themselves).

 

–– Application deadline (extended till late May) will be 26th May 2017 (to lars.saetre@uib.no), with max. 300 words paper abstract submitted at the same time. In your application, please state whether you require vegetarian or vegan meals.

–– Paper-submission deadline: 1st August 2017 (as attachment, to lars.saetre@uib.no).

 

–– Options for prolonged individual (tourist) stays in Bergen: This is a possibility – yet then, expressly, at the personal expense of the participant her/himself. This could be either during the week-end prior to, or during the week-end immediately following the “Living Together”-event: In the case that such prospective individual wishes would be for our venue hotel (Hotel Scandic Neptun), these queries should be directed to lars.saetre@uib.no, who will then handle them vis-à-vis our Hotel (Neptun). – All other private-stay sojourns before and/or after the summer course – i.e. outside of Hotel Scandic Neptun – should be arranged by – and in that case, too: paid for by – the individual course participant her/himself.

 

Welcome to Bergen!

ALTERITY AND THE RESEARCH IMAGINATION

VII Graduate Conference in Culture Studies

25–26 January 2018

School of Human Sciences ׀ Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Lisbon

Preoccupation with theories and practices of representation and othering, across the breadth of various genres and disciplines, has moved forward debates about positioning in research and modes of constructing and producing knowledge. In Meatless Days (1989), a vivid memoir of her girlhood in postcolonial Pakistan, Sara Suleri Goodyear deplores being regarded as an “otherness machine” — a concern Kwame Anthony Appiah (1991) shares in his famous critique of postcolonial literature, culture and critical studies. A host of scholars who tend to conflate the post-isms as such contend that postcolonial theory and praxis are embedded in Western institutions that shape the field. Aijaz Ahmad (1992) and Arif Dirlik (1994) have argued that, owing to its reliance on poststructuralist approaches, postcolonial thought excludes questions of economic and political power structures. A staunch Derridean who uses deconstruction to uncover and disrupt such inevitable hegemonic relations of power in the academy or elsewhere, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1999) has likewise dissociated herself from the postcolonial mainstream. Edward Said (1983), whose groundbreaking book Orientalism (1978) sets out a toolbox for colonial discourse analysis, has grown more and more dissatisfied with the untenable apolitical nature of the theoretical insights of Derrida, Foucault and others. Yet, some scholars, and Said himself, have pointed to the geocultural limitations of his theoretical model. In considering discourses of orientalism and balkanism, for instance, Maria Todorova (1997) argues that, unlike the Orient, the Balkans is a concrete entity that is peripheral, but not completely other, to Europe. Paul Gilroy has challenged the racial and ethnocentric biases inherent within British cultural studies in his first major work There Ain’t no Black in the Union Jack (1987). His discussion of diasporic hybridity (1993), however, has been censured for being gender-neutral. In his seminal essay The New Cultural Politics of Difference (1990), Cornel West locates his polemic on the emergence of the new black (or African-American) cultural worker in a critical historical juncture that might be comparable to what Stuart Hall calls “the end of the innocent notion of the essential black subject” (1988). More recently, Arjun Appadurai (2006) has made the case for research as a human right — an exercise of the imagination that is intrinsic to knowledge citizenship in the era of globalization.

This conference considers the theoretical and methodological conundrums researchers and creative practitioners in the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences face when encountering sites of alterity. We invite proposals that engage with the concept of alterity and subject it to a searching critique through the lenses of multiple academic disciplines. Themes of interest include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Representations of alterity in film, literature, architecture, the visual and performing arts, etc.
• Alternative media, politics and creativity
• Multicultural, intercultural and transcultural communication
• Critical human geography
• The everyday — its antecedents and simulacra
• Sociality and the ethics of care
• Hybrid modalities of identity and difference
• Ethnographic translations of radical alterity

The working language of the conference is English.

Individual paper presentations will be allocated 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for questions. Proposals for panels of 3 papers (90 minutes) or roundtables of 3–5 participants (60 minutes) related to the theme of the conference are welcome. We aim to integrate an ambitious range of perspectives. Proposals incorporating practice as research, or other creative work, are encouraged.

Please send an abstract (250 words) and a brief biographical note (150 words) to alterityresearchimagination@gmail.com. All proposals should include a title, your name(s), contact details and, if relevant, institutional affiliation(s). The deadline for submission of proposals is 31 August 2017. Notifications of acceptance or rejection will be sent on 1 October 2017.

Keynote Speakers

Jess Auerbach ׀ Assistant Professor of Social Science, African Leadership University

Jeremy Gilbert ׀ Professor of Cultural and Political Theory, School of Arts and Digital Industries, University of East London

Margherita Laera ׀ Lecturer in Drama and Theater, School of Arts, University of Kent

Katarzyna Murawska-Muthesius ׀ Associate Lecturer, Department of History of Art, Birkbeck College, University of London

 

Organizing Committee

• Amani Maihoub (CECC-UCP)
• Gregor Taul (CECC-UCP)

The Graduate Conference in Culture Studies is an annual meeting organized by Doctoral students of the Programme in Culture Studies of The Lisbon Consortium, based at the School of Human Sciences (Universidade Católica Portuguesa).

 

E-mail: alterityresearchimagination@gmail.com

Website: www.alterityresearchimagination.wordpress.com

 

Professor Isabel Capeloa Gil, Rector of UCP and Director of The Lisbon Consortium, was in Macau last week to teach a seminar in Visual Culture at University of Saint Joseph.

The sixth Mnemonics: Network for Memory Studies summer school will be hosted by the Frankfurt Memory Studies Platform from September 7-9, 2017 at Goethe University Frankfurt. Confirmed keynote speakers are Aleida Assmann (University of Konstanz), Andreas Huyssen (Columbia University, New York) and Anna Reading (King’s College London).

This year’s Mnemonics summer school addresses the ‘social life of memory’. Memory studies is based on the premise that memories emerge (as Maurice Halbwachs argued) within ‘social frameworks’. But this is just the first stage of memory’s social dynamics. Those memories which have an impact in culture don’t just stand still, but lead a vibrant ‘social life’: They are mediated and remediated, emphatically welcomed and harshly criticized, handed on across generations, they travel across space, become connected with other memories or turn into a paradigm for further experience. Conversely, books about the past that are not sold and read, oral stories that are not passed on to grandchildren, history films that are not screened and reviewed, monuments that nobody visits, public apologies that do not engender heated debates – all these will fail to have an effect in memory culture. Memory ‘lives’ only insofar as it is continually shared among people, moves from minds and bodies to media and back again, is performed, remediated, translated, received, discussed and negotiated.

Once we conceive of objects and media as part of memory culture, we realize that these are not stable entities, containing unalterable meanings, but that they unfold their mnemonic significance only within dynamic and transitory social processes. This insight entails methodological consequences. It creates the need to use more complex theory/methodology-designs in order to do justice to the moving constellations we study. This may also mean connecting humanities- and social sciences-approaches. Reception theories, reader response theories, audience studies, performance studies, sociological and political science-methods, museum visitor studies, social history, social psychology, ethnography, or actor-network theory – these all belong to the long list of approaches that we may want to draw on in order to study what our research group here in Frankfurt calls ‘socio-medial constellations’ of memory.

The metaphor of the ‘social life of memory’ is not yet a clear-cut concept. However, it resonates with existing ideas, from Mikhail Bakhtin’s ‘social life of discourse’ to Arjun Appadurai’s ‘social life of things’ or Alondra Nelson’s ‘the social life of DNA’. It also brings to mind the ‘afterlife’ of artworks as it was addressed by Aby Warburg and Walter Benjamin. More recently, and within the new memory studies, Astrid Erll and Stephanie Wodianka have addressed the life of ‘memory-making films’ by studying their embeddedness in social contexts and in ‘plurimedial constellations’. In her study of Walter Scott, Ann Rigney has theorized the social (after-)lives of texts and authors in cultural memory.

The summer school welcomes paper proposals that display a keen interest in the dynamic interplay of medial and social aspects of memory culture and that suggest ways to explore ‘the social life of memory’ – from the perspectives of contemporary memory cultures across the globe as well as from historical viewpoints. Possible topics include, but are emphatically not restricted to, the following:

• What social practices and networks bring (and have historically brought) memory to life (or fail to do so)?
• How are media of memory socially framed and reframed?
• How can we study the social reception of media of memory (e.g. via discursive remembering, in interpretive communities, by historical audiences etc.) ?
• What are the social dynamics of memory-translation (the ‘cultural translation’ of memories, but also ‘literal translations’ of memory texts)?
• Which performances express and foster the social life of memory, or inhibit it?
• How do memory objects ‘travel’, what are their trajectories (or mnemonic ‘object biographies’)?
• What are the economics and politics of mnemonic objects (in the sense of Appadurai’s ‘social life of things’)?
• How do space and movement influence the social life of memory?
• How does time factor in the social life of memory (when do memories emerge, circulate or become inert)?
• How does politics enable or interfere with the social life of memory?
• What types of ‘social life’ can we distinguish (lives as ‘monumental memory’, as ‘countermemory’, ‘agonistic lives’ etc.)?
• How can we critically assess the logic of the metaphor of ‘social life’ (and its possible religious, biologistic etc. overtones) and find concepts that fine-tune, substitute or complement it?

MORE INFORMATION HERE