COURSES

COURSES OFFERED AT THE UNIVERSITEIT VAN AMSTERDAM

Dislocating Agency, Moving Objects

(Theory Seminar 2011-2012)


The 2011-2012 theory seminar focuses on the articulation between change and mobility.

Is change always implicitly imagined as a form of mobility and vice-versa? To what extent is such a connection desirable or unavoidable?

The seminar proposes to explore the imaginary and political consequences of the waysin which various cultures establish links between, on the one hand, notions of progress, revolution, integration, economic development, ageing, healing and on the other hand nomadism, border-crossing, migration or commuting. Given that strong affective reactions are involved in the preference or mistrust of either movement of stasis, we interrogate the way in which concepts such loyalty or treachery, pain and pleasure, comedy or tragedy are woven into the politics of transformations and mobility.

Following up on this year's discussion of the relative benefits of slow and fast (reading) practices, we will try to establish what are the advantages or disadvantages of visualizing disciplines in terms of territories, of translation or language acquisition in terms of movement across languages, of class mobility as a journey but also of migration as a process of becoming (Dutch or woman or minority).
We will explore how each concept (change or mobility) contaminates the other and how they influence our definition of cultural norms and resistance, and our aesthetic and political assumptions.

PhD Seminar: Incredibly Close and Extremely Slow

(Theory Seminar 2010-2011)

The 2010-11 ASCA theory seminar focuses on the articulation between "closeness" and "slowness" in order to explore the cultural, political and aesthetic values that are implied when we celebrate or criticize speed (haste, fast food, race-pace, swiftness, quick on one's feet) or slowness (belatedness, boredom, tedium, laziness,thoroughness, meticulousness).The idea is not to search from "slowness" in a given past, a time when everything was always slower and when something that we call the quality of (human) life was not yet damagedby modernity. Instead, it is worth examining the value ascribed to slowness across historical periods and to ask whether each period turned to its own past as the golden age when a perfect balance between speed and slowness was possible. The desire to find slowness in one's own past may also be questioned as the mirror of spatial practices that confine "slowness" to the non-European or non-Western other. Slowness then becomes characteristic of the Exotic, whether he or she is idealized or not. Just as Gayatri Spivak suggests that many rural poor do not have to worry about choosing between being economic or intellectual migrants because they will never move at all, could it be that the celebration of slowness in non-Western spaces is a reading imposed by the other rather than by the self who gives an account of his/herself?

In the West, the current valorization of hyper-speed is historically linked to a globalized perspective that privileges the planet as the object of the gaze. In other words, distance (seeing from afar, seeing the "global picture") goes hand in hand with the privileging of speed. By crossing "slowness" and "closeness”, we propose to trouble the implicit quadrangular system of meaning that opposes fast to slow and close to far. Why should we have to pit "slow" food against "fast" food, or why should fast and slow find themselves either in a position of mutual exclusion or in paradigms that make one concept always more desirable than the other.

To what extent is close reading an obsolete disciplinary tool or the answer to norms that deprive each reader of the right to take one's time, give the other place, accept rudimentariness, welcome intercultural confusionand the moments of silence and misunderstandings that they generate. To what extent does close reading represent qualitative different moments of "slowness": once identified, do they demand another aesthetics and therefore another politics of reading, interpretingand communication? Given thatspeed is a hegemonic mode through which muchcultural production is experienced, can deliberate strategies of slowness, stuttering and gentle circumlocutions be analyzed as counter-hegemonic forms of manifestation?

Each double session revolves around a critical theme that is closely related to the issue of speed and slowness, distance and closenes

PhD Seminar: Practicing Theory

(Theory Seminar 2009-2010)


Description

We propose to work on the articulation between "theory" and "practice." The worry that theory and practice may be incompatible is a theory in itself. If we examine that theory, we are also practicing a type of critique that will change "Theory" (as supposedly different from practice) and "(that) theory" as the object that we now study.
Let us imagine that theory and practice are not fields or territories (spatial metaphor) that different agents claim and put borders around. Instead let us consider that they are ways of thinking, or more importantly ways of doing that are always both distinguishable and constantly interrupted by each other (Spivak 1986). Theories are discourses that we construct to create intelligible worlds but our discourses are limited and enabled by our historical situatedness, which limits the realms of what we can accept or even imagine as legible, intelligible and recognizable (think of the French word "partage," which means both share and divide, as used by Rancière in Le Partage du sensible or of Judith Butler's claim in Undoing Gender: "To be oppressed you must first become intelligible").
There are as many differences between types of practice and types of theory as they are between practice and theory. The type of thinking that opposes "practice"to "theory" erases internal differences. "Practicing," in thisseminar could refer to doing social work, doing political work, doing activist work but also teaching, writing a dissertation, presenting a conference paper, analyzing an object. Our hypothesis is that we cannot "practice" without theorizing but that "theory" is a practice. To what extent does cultural analysis help us conceptualize and practice at the same time without necessarily distinguishing between object and concept.

PhD seminar: Articulations

(TheorySeminar 2008-2009)

This year's theory seminar is entitled "Articulations." This single word is one of the ways of describing the methodological and theoretical challenges that we face dueto the fact that we have chosen to work in an "in(ter)disciplinary," multilingual and multicultural context. Starting from"articulations" is a different way of thinking through related concepts such as hybridity, translation, globalization, which look at (and therefore create) similar objects of inquiry but through different metaphorical matrixes. At least two ofthe definitional fields of articulations will be kept in mind: we need to articulate so that others understand what we say, but articulations are also a type of joint that enables two entities to connect and move.
One of the goals of the seminar will be to use theory as a way to reflect on the research culture that we constitute, and on the type of theoretical language weneed to learn (or invent) as we attempt to work together: we all come to this seminar with our own uniqueresearch project and our originality is an asset but at the same time, evenoriginality falls within the category of the legibleand we all need to share our research with a community of researchers. What kind of articulation does such a situation require? The dissertation or its equivalent is apriority, the seminar will help you write it by addressing two specific types of issues: 1) by directly addressing issues of translatability, pedagogical presentations, methodological awareness, 2) by providing a community of listeners and readers who will take you where you had not planned to go, who will make you discover what you did not know you were looking for.

One of the ways in which it is supposed to have an effect is that the seminar is meant to openup a space that will give you the opportunity to reflecton the ways in which you can present your own work to a community of researchers that share some of your assumptions and not others. To do so, we will startfrom anumber of key words that manydisciplines (literary theory, mediastudies,musicology, philosophy, postcolonial studies, gender studies) articulate differently. They are presented here as four sets of paradigms that we will interrogate to see when they are constraining or enabling, when they are the preconditions of our thinking andwhen they help us articulate the relationship between our individual research and a body of collective work that is both different from and inseparable from ours.

1. Imagination, Responsibility,Representation, Activism
2. Global, Local, National, Regional, European
3. Minoritizing, Universalizing, Paradigmatic, Thinking
4. Antagonism, Vulnerability, Alliances, Grievable, Account

Sessions: details

PHD Seminar: "Critical Intimacy and Theoretical Discomfort"

(Theory Seminar 2007/8)

The ASCA Theory Seminar 2007-2008 on Critical Intimacy and Theoretical Discomfort will explore the intrinsic relationship between theory and whatever it is that we constitute as its object/subject, knowing that the temptation is always to define it as a border. The secret agenda is to dealwith something that Jacques Rancière calls politics-althoughwe cannotdefine that as soon as we accept that our position is intrinsically linked to the object we study and to the theory we use(politics comprisesboth theory and us as theoreticians aswe dealwith the object we secrete). “Intimacy”could be the name given to the type of relationship that “theoreticians” will shy away from and resist, there where theborder between theory, theoretician and theorized becomes blurred.

Oneof the main questions of this seminar is: Does this relationship call for tools that do not exist? Are we perhaps always misusing tools to make them more efficient? Is what de Certeau calls “poaching” or “smuggling” the result of the intimacy/theory paradigm? In nine sessions (descriptions ofwhich you will find below) wewill look into the problematic difference between uses and misuses of theory, and investigate at which moments ‘misuse’ may be strategically useful, or when a theoretical framework should be avoided. Is it the case that our paradigms make us ignore loving uses of theory ("critical intimacy" in Spivak’s terms) in favour of a theory that protects,isolates, frames us/the object/our writing such that our jargon serves asa shield?

See the link below for details about each of the 9 sessions

Detail of sessions

Theories in Cultural Analysis

(Core course 1: Research MA Cultural Analysis)

 

Whatis cultural analysis? To whatextent does it bridge the gapbetween theory and practice? To what extent can it be botha discipline and interdisciplinary? How does it relate to cultural studies, literary analysis, comparative studies or object-based disciplines? Who can benefit from culturalanalysis and whatare the limits of this form of intellectual inquiry?

It is of course highly improbable that we will find the "right" answer to those questions and at the end of thiscourse, we may even decide that it is not so important to define the borders of thefield. Yet, the goal of spending timeon such questions is to allow us to move away from anxiety-producing attempts to define (what is cultural analysis?) to more freeing hermeneutic and creative practices (what do I do, what is my contribution to research, how to I define my own theoretical approach).

The "context" mentioned in the title of the course will consist of examples provided either by the syllabus or byyour own research projects.  Wewillwonder why we need to talk about "culture" when we study objects usually subsumed under such concepts as art and politics, fiction and truth, ethics and ideology.

This semester, some of the keywords are postcolonial and migration studies, queer formations, and linguistic encounters. Some of the authors studied or recommended are Judith Butler, Mieke Bal, Patricia Williams, Jacques Rancière and Michel Serres.  

 

Reseach MA Cultural Analysis