Seminars
A special feature of this conference is two special topic seminars:
- Feminist Experimentalism (seminar leader: Alison Bartlett)
- Colonial Conjunctions (seminar leader: Anne Brewster)
Seminar participants write brief 'position papers' (5-7 pages) that are circulated and read two weeks prior to the conference. With no more than 15 participants, the seminars aim to generate lively exchange and to produce networks of feminist scholars who may continue to work together beyond the conference. The format also allows most conference attendees to seek financial support from their institutions. Seminars are 2 hours in length.
Colonial Conjunctions
This seminar will investigate both the coloniality of knowledge and genealogies of decolonization. It will focus on the conjunctions between groups of people and between discourses both in the aftermath of empire and in ongoing neocolonial reconfigurations of power. It will explore how these intersections are played out in global movements and local sites. Some of the conjunctions that may be addressed are those between:
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whiteness and race/indigeneity/gender
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the body/affect/performance and discourse
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memory/history and contemporary identities
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liberalism and protest
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specialized knowledges and the everyday
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genre and gender/race/nation etc
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the colonial wound and agency/identity
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subaltern/minority histories and literatures
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various disciplinary methodologies and knowledges
These issues may be explored in transdisciplinary writing methodologies.
Feminist Experimentalism
The seminar is interested in discussing examples and cases of experimental writing:
who’s doing it,
why is it experimental, and
what’s feminist about it?
It would welcome historical overviews of the relations between feminist theory and experimental writing practice, the impact of technology on feminist experimentalism, or position papers on the limits and potentials of experimental writing in contesting boundaries.
Other areas of potentially provocative debate might be:
- the un/importance of readers or audiences
- the pleasures and risks of reading/writing feminist experimentalism
- can anything still be experimental in postmodernism?
- reflections on teaching feminist experimental writing to new generations of students
- performativity and perversity
- fictocriticism
