Workshop Format

This conference is the latest in a series of ASCA International Workshops and is inspired by the 2005-2006 ASCA theory seminars on “Ways of Knowing,” organized by Mieke Bal. The workshop format is designed to stimulate discussion in the panels. For this purpose, readers have been made beforehand, including all the participants’ papers. Each participant is asked to read the papers that belong to his/her panel in advance. During the workshop, instead of reading their papers, participants will give a short summary of their paper and make connections with other people’s contributions in the panel. To stimulate discussion rather than formal presentations, each participant is asked to limit their presentations to 10 minutes.

Workshop Panels

1. Knowing through the Body

This panel highlights the corporeal dimensions to knowledge production and focuses on the body as a site where knowledge is produced, filtered, absorbed, internalized, stored and performed. Issues related to embodied knowledge, perceptual/corporeal knowing, corporeal memory, (en)gendered knowledge, including queer, transsexual and other bodies as sites for knowledge production and contestation, will be discussed and critically assessed.

2. Between Cultural Practices and Disciplines

This panel examines the possible contact-zones between theory and practice, different disciplines, disciplinary and non-disciplinary knowledge, Western and non-Western contexts or alternative forms of knowing. It wishes to probe assumptions about knowledge as objective or “value free” and to reflect on the “situatedness” of the scholar, along with his/her relation to disciplinary and institutional contexts and cultural practices.

3. Producing/Resisting Knowledge

This panel sets out to discuss different modes of knowledge production, as well as ways of resisting well-established regimes of knowledge. It wishes to foreground instances where things resist appropriation by existing modes of thought – instances where the space of the “known” is challenged and refashioned by “the other’s irruption into the settled order” (Derek Attridge). This panel will also examine how encounters between different regimes of knowledge or between the field of the known and its “outside” can turn into productive experiences.

4. Creating Objects, developing Methodologies

This panel centers on concrete methodologies and technologies of knowledge, and the ways that our research objects are conceptualized and created through these methodologies. It also wishes to critically address past or ongoing debates on academic knowledge-production and its legitimation processes, as well as envision new methodologies for academic knowledge-production, that can innovate the research programs of different disciplines and inter-disciplines.