We’re happy to announce our third workshop which will take place at the University of Arts and Design, Linz, Austria, June 1st-3rd 2016.
Over the last two decades, increasingly diverse intellectual practices have become subsumed under the heading cultural studies. These engagements speak from different linguistic, regional, national and diasporic contexts, draw on specific local traditions and methodologies, and are forking distinct trajectories, thus making it impossible to speak of a unified cultural studies. This heterogeneity has led to an increasing emphasis on decolonising knowledge and the need for new transcultural approaches that transcend the limitations of regional studies. On the one hand, this development highlights the necessity of translation: of languages, concepts, different academic approaches. On the other, this decolonial momentum reasserts cultural studies as a political project that exceeds academic spaces of knowledge and opens itself to epistemologies that challenge the university’s Eurocentrism, gender and class gaps from the outside. These multiform spaces of knowledge become inhabitable at the intersection of artistic, academic and activist modes of knowledge production, in spaces and via events open to a diverse public. They can be discerned in new models of publishing not exclusively reserved to academia, such as open-access online journals or blogs that utilise the virtual and accessible space of the internet.
This two-day workshop invites to reflect on practices of epistemological translation between diverse knowledge spaces. How can we translate between spaces inside and outside of academia? How can we encourage decolonial agendas when negotiating between institutional and other agents? Furthermore, we invite scholars to reflect on, propose and invent practices of cultural studies in virtual and other spaces. What kinds of practices do we have to create such open spaces? How can we inhabit them?
Participants: Anna Artaker (Vienna), Hongwei Bao (Nottingham), Henriette Gunkel (London), Karin Harrasser (Linz), Katrin Köppert (Linz), Anja Michaelsen (Bochum), Sumugan Sivanesan (Berlin), Daniel Winkler (Innsbruck)
Organizers: Alexander Dunst (Paderborn), Elahe Haschemi Yekani (Flensburg), Anja Schwarz (Potsdam), Gudrun Rath (Linz)
criticalhabitations 