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Call for Papers

Modern human knowledge, as is known today, has been largely built on the epistemologies of the West and the Global North through processes of colonial expansion, capitalist globalisation and cultural imperialism; it also privileges cultural experiences in specific geographical locations such as the Atlantic and the Pacific. In the Indian Ocean Worlds which include much of Africa and Asia and where the majority of the Global South countries are located, a wide range of knowledge practices and ways of knowing have long existed. However, they have been underexplored or even dismissed as ‘unmodern’ or ‘unscientific’, excluded from the modern knowledge system. Examples include: alternative understandings of the body and wellbeing through traditional medicines and healing methods, multiple ways of feeling and knowing the world without privileging the visual experience, and creative modes of relating to the world without recourse to personal identity and the individual self. The project asks: What are some of the indigenous and decolonized epistemologies in the Indian Ocean Worlds? How have they been practised by people on the ground in these regions? How can these knowledge and experiences be successfully incorporated into global epistemologies, for instance, how can they be used to inform innovative teaching and research in global universities?

This project, jointly funded by the University of Nottingham’s International Collaboration Grant and the University of Tübingen’s Global Counters Platform and the Excellence Strategy, explores global and indigenous epistemologies in the Indian Ocean Worlds. It imagines the Indian Ocean Worlds as spaces for conceptual and theoretical building towards decolonised knowledge. It seeks to bring together researchers from the two universities and beyond to exchange ideas and workshop papers, with the aim of putting together an edited book for publication based on selected papers from the workshops.

The core part of the project consists of two research workshops, held respectively in Tübingen in March 2024 and in Nottingham in June 2024. We welcome scholarly papers from different, and intersecting, disciplines and scholarly fields, including but not limited to critical theory, cultural studies, Asian studies, African studies, Indian Ocean studies, Afro-Asian linkages, inter-Asian exchanges, Afro-Arab crossroads, sociology, anthropology, history, geography, and international relations.

Researchers are welcome to submit a 300-word (max.) abstract and a 150-word (max.) biography note, together with their contact information (i.e. Email address) to the workshop co-organisers: Dr Hongwei Bao (hongwei.bao@nottingham.ac.uk) and JProf Jacky Kosgei (jacky.kosgei@es.uni-tuebingen.de). Please use ‘Nottingham-Tübingen workshops’ in the subject line of your Email. Please also address your questions and queries to the two co-organisers.

Tübingen Workshop

21-22 March 2024

Venue: Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, 50 Wilhelmstr., 72074, Tübingen, Germany

Nottingham Workshop

6-7 June 2024

Venue: University of Nottingham University Park Campus, Nottingham, NG7 2RD, United Kingdom

Workshop Bursary

There is a bursary to enable PhD students and Early Career Researchers from the two universities to attend the workshop. Please submit a request to the co-convenors.

This event celebrates global queer history, desire and creativity by launching two poetry chapbooks: Hongwei Bao’s Dream of the Orchid Pavilion (Big White Shed, 2024) and Gregory Woods’ They Exchange Glances: Gay Modernist Poems in Translation (Hercules Editions, 2024). Informed by different cultural traditions and composed in distinct styles, these poems testify to the persistence of queer desire even under difficult circumstances and the richness of queer history and heritage around the world.

The title poem of Dream of the Orchid Pavilion is a contemporary rewriting of a fourth-century classical Chinese text, rediscovering forgotten homoerotic traditions in ancient China. Drawing on Bao’s life experience of being a queer Chinese migrant living in the UK, the pamphlet ruminates upon love, intimacy, memory, heritage and identity. It takes readers from gay bars and drag shows in Nottingham to haunted city streets in Prague, from Beeston high street to Brighton Pier. It asks what it means to be queer and Chinese today.

Hongwei Bao is a queer Chinese researcher, writer and poet based in Nottingham. He teaches media studies at the University of Nottingham. His academic work documents queer Chinese history, culture and activism. His creative work explores queer desire, transcultural encounter, East Asian heritage, and diasporic positionality. His debut poetry collection The Passion of the Rabbit God has recently been published by Valley Press.

They Exchange Glances presents a selection of poems celebrating gay love, and lamenting its loss, translated by Gregory Woods, one of the UK’s leading gay poets. As men pass each other in public spaces, sustained eye contact may lead to either extreme pleasure or pain. Enclosed, rented rooms may provide safe privacy or constrictive isolation. Subject to intense social stigma but refusing to be silenced, poets such as Lorca and Cavafy, Umberto Saba, Luis Cernuda, Salvador Novo, Mikhail Kuzmin, Antonio Botto and Vicente Aleixandre proudly defied convention while dodging censorship.

Gregory Woods is the author of six poetry collections from Carcanet Press, the latest being An Ordinary Dog (2011) and Records of an Incitement to Silence (2021). His cultural histories include Articulate Flesh: Male Homo-eroticism and Modern Poetry (1987), A History of Gay Literature (1998) and Homintern: How Gay Culture Liberated the Modern World (2016), all from Yale University Press. He is Emeritus Professor of Gay & Lesbian Studies at Nottingham Trent University. Find out more on his website.

We are living in an age characterised by proliferating natural disasters, environmental degradation and ecological crisis. In response, feminist and queer scholars have highlighted the anthropocentric, patriarchal and heteronormative nature of human intervention into more-than-human worlds. Feminist and queer artists, filmmakers and media producers in the UK, Germany and globally have also responded creatively to the ecological crisis through their art, film and media works. What can we learn from these innovative initiatives and sustainable cultural practices? What critical and conceptual tools can be developed to advance our thinking on the mutually imbricated and cross-fertilising relationship between gender, sexuality and ecology? How can art and media contribute to a critical discourse dedicated to problems of planetary impact, and, in return, how does a new awareness about sustainability and environmental change our understanding of, and practices in art and media? This international research networking workshop brings together researchers from three universities (Bremen, Bochum and Nottingham) to explore these important questions.

This in-person workshop is supported by the University of Nottingham’s International Collaboration Fund. We invite scholars from the three universities to participate in the workshop and present papers. If you are interested in participating in the workshop in person, please contact:

• Dr Hongwei Bao (hongwei.bao@nottingham.ac.uk)
• Dr Susanne Huber (hubers@uni-bremen.de)
• Professor Änne Söll (aenne.soell@ruhr-uni-bochum.de)

Speakers include:

• Ms Tonia Andresen, Predoc Research Assistant, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
• Ms Longlong Ge, PhD candidate in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, University of Nottingham, UK
• Dr Leora Hadas, Assistant Professor in Culture, Film and Media, University of Nottingham, UK
• Dr Xing Huang, Teaching Associate in Media Studies Education, University of Nottingham, UK
• Dr Susanne Huber, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Bremen, Germany Dr Adelaide McGinity-Peebles, Leverhulme Early Career Fellow, University of Nottingham, UK
• Dr Franziska Rauh, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, University of Bremen, Germany
• Ms Nadja Siemer, Predoc Research Assistant, University of Bremen, Germany
• Professor Änne Söll, Professor, of Modern Art History Ruhr University Bochum, Germany
• Mr Christian Wandhof, Predoc Research Assistant, Ruhr University Bochum, Germany

The fourth in the annual postgraduate symposium focused on the social, cultural, political and technical implications of remembering and forgetting. Keynote talks were given by Tracey Potts and Andrew Goffey, and several of the Centre’s current and past PhD students gave position papers around memory studies, cultural commemoration and the politics of forgetting in post-conflict contexts. In the afternoon, a workshop on ‘Objects of Memory’ explored the connections between nostalgia, representation and materiality as well as the role of technology in supporting contemporary modes of memory. As ever, the day ended with Vital Theory’s ‘Anti-Market’ with presentations on thinkers such as Henri Lefebvre and the Tiqqun Collective.

Organised and run at Nottingham Contemporary in anticipation of Grant Watson’s ‘How We Behave’ installation, these study sessions were loosely themed around Michel Foucault’s later work on technologies of the self and were run by Andrew Goffey and Sophie Fuggle (French, NTU) and involved analysis and discussion of topics ranging from Kafka’s text ‘The Hunger Artist’ through Félix Guattari’s notion of ‘machinic junkies’, to extreme sports and the philosophy of the Greek Cynics.

The public screening of the Spanish psychoanalyst Ivan Ruiz’s moving documentary film, Other Voices, which took place at the Nottingham Lakeside Arts Centre, aimed to open up a debate about the conceptualisation of autism in mainstream discourse. Ivan travelled from Barcelona to be involved in a Q&A after the screening, and the following day, a small workshop was convened to launch the Centres ‘Critical Autism Network’ which aims to bring critical research into dialogue not only with discourse about autism, but with individuals, groups and institutions dealing with or affected by autism. The network is part of the Centre’s addressing of questions raised by critical medical/health humanities.

In this second workshop in the Centre’s series devoted to exploring relations between neoliberalism, criticism, and crisis, we focussed on issues to do with neoliberal subjects and with law (and/or the lack of it) in contemporary politics. Two presentations were given. Colin Wright’s talk, entitled ‘Bouncebackability: The Production and Governance of the Resilient Subject’, explored the role of the psychology and neuroscience of resilience in the production of the neoliberal subject supposedly adapted to crises. Cosmin Cercel’s talk, ‘Beyond Exception: Law, Emergency and the Powers of Capital’ examined the ways in which repressive practices in the sphere of law and security frame the ideological background of neoliberalism in which the resilient subject emerges.

Drawing on his forthcoming book project Foucault’s Last Decade, Stuart Elden, Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick, and one of the founding editors of the journal Foucault Studies, gave a public lecture at the Nottingham Contemporary on the question of sexuality in the later writings of Michel Foucault.

Watch Professor Elden's public lecture.

The well-known artist, TV art critic and writer Matthew Collings gave a public talk at the Djanogly Theatre, Lakeside Arts, focused on the role of diverse forms of writing connected to art and art practice, from catalogues to press releases, from gallery captions to art theory. Matthew spoke about his own trajectory from art student to art critic and, now, to practicing artist.

This two-day interdisciplinary conference brought together critical and cultural theorists with clinical practitioners in order to interrogate contemporary addiction discourse, whether in governmental policy, psychiatric diagnostic frameworks, literary and media representations, or in the neuroscience of the ‘addicted brain’. The conference was accompanied by an exhibition of art work, photography and poetry produced by young clients working with the SUBSTANce group in Denmark.

Matthew Del Nevo, from the Catholic Institute of Sydney, Australia, led this seminar centering on the metaphor of the line in Plato’s Republic. His presentation worked through this metaphor, related the theory of the unconscious and a theory of the symbol to it (Cassirer, Elliot R. Wolfson), and then located Lacan within this overall cultural sensibility.

The idea of thinking with animals has gained considerable ground since Claude Lévi Strauss’s provocative remark in Totemism that ‘natural species are chosen not because they are “good to eat” [bonnes à manger] but because they are “good to think” [bonnes à penser].’ (p. 89). The emerging field of Animal Studies now evidences a growing scholarly interest in nonhuman animal life. Such interest moves beyond the idea of human-animal relations to encompass questions of co-constitution, co-evolution, biopower, ecology and cosmopolitics. This workshop, with a series of rapid presentations by a number of staff and doctoral students, both showcased and explored research of this kind at the University of Nottingham.

A screening of this important documentary - about the student movement against the neoliberalisation of education in Chile, and the gains and losses of grassroots social movements engaging with representational forms of politics – was followed by a response from doctoral student Sofia Mason and a Q&A session with the London-based Chilean director.

Run in conjunction with the Public Programme at Nottingham Contemporary, this series of study sessions took its cue from Herman Melville’s widely commented story ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’ and explored a range of arguments and ideas about radical passivity and strategies of refusal – from Lafargue’s Right to Be Lazy, Lee Lozano’s artistic practice, and Baudrillard fatal strategy of the refusal of meaning.

This first workshop in a projected series explored the ongoing relevance of Foucault’s account of neoliberalism and its connections to biopolitics for more recent work, post 2008 credit crunch, by autonomist Marxist Maurizio Lazzarato (author of The Making of Indebted Man) and economic historian, Philip Mirowski (author of Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste).

This half-day conference, organised by the Translating Thought research group, with the support of the Centre for Critical Theory, the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, and the Nottingham French Studies journal explored the challenges involved in translating the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies, which is rapidly becoming a key reference work for the study of a broad range of reputedly untranslatable philosophical, literary, and political terms. With Barbara Cassin, Emily Apter, Michael Wood, and Michael Syrotinski.

This public lecture explored what makes contemporary art contemporary by addressing some of the ways in which contemporary art structures our experiences of time. Peter Osborne is Professor of Modern European Philosophy and Director of the Centre for Modern European Philosophy at Kingston University and is the author of (amongst other books) Anywhere or Not At All, The Philosophy of Contemporary Art (Verso, 2013).

This two-day international conference - organised by one the Centre’s previous MA and PhD students and subsequently member of staff, Eva Giraud – provided a forum for discussion around the link between technology and neoliberalism, as well as the potential role of technology in practices of resistance and activism. The central concept of ‘friction’ focussed the contributions on the potential for resistance inherent to the ‘glitches’ of technology considered as a material infrastructure.

This one-day workshop drew together an interdisciplinary field of academics and artists who find themselves engaged with questions concerning our relation to 'nature' and the nature of relationality. Ranging across the fields of ethics, politics and art, the event provided a forum for the sustained interrogation of contemporary trajectories of thought and practice, and a platform for the further development of novel interdisciplinary approaches to pressing, global-ecological concerns.

This talk addressed recent theories of the mediated, informational subject by exploring several art projects that utilise YouTube as a curatorial tool, showing the generic effects of computational affordances linked to databases. Olga Goriunova is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies at the University of Warwick.

Can art push the boundaries of the socially and culturally acceptable, or does the controlled environment of the liberal institution nullify transgression? Four fortnightly sessions use Madani’s work as a springboard to explore themes including role of humour, irony and parody in aesthetic critique, the limits of offensive art as a challenge to political correctness, and the gendered and racialised nature of dominant representations of what counts as “disgusting.”

This talk, by one of our former PhD students who is now a colleague at the Ningbo campus of the University of Nottingham, explored the meaning of ‘emptiness’ in the Buddhist philosophy of Nagarjuna as well the resonances of this notion with aspects of Derridean deconstruction.

This workshop focussed on the work of Henri Lefebvre around ‘rhythmanalysis’ and its inter-disciplinary relevance for innovative approaches in Geography, Cultural Studies and Cultural History and Literary Theory.

The third in our annual post-graduate one-day conferences, Vital Theory, focused on the role of new (and old) technologies and their attendant infrastructures in the perpetuation of and resistance against neoliberal capitalism. A keynote introduction by Eva Giraud was followed by three position papers by PhD students in the Centre: Joshua Bowsher talked about NGOs as a technology of neoliberalism; Stephanie Petschick discussed the links between memorialisation, technology and capitalism; and Tom Harding provided a psychoanalytic critique of the DSM as a biopolitical technology.

What does it mean to be disgusting? Through reading and discussion, four study sessions, held in the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery and led by Tracey Potts and Colin Wright, addressed disgust within art, theory, and the social realm, bringing in references from theories of abjection to TV documentaries.

Josephine Berry-Slater is a Lecturer in the Centre for Cultural Studies at Goldsmiths College and long-standing editor of Mute Magazine. Her talk addressed the question of the relationship between the life sciences and art.

From speed-bumps to sludge in ponds, Amerindian totems to Tamagotchi, this reading group, held at the Nottingham Contemporary Gallery and led by Eva Giraud and Andrew Goffey, traced some lively debates within contemporary philosophies of technology: exploring not only how technologies shape the world, but how objects themselves can be said to have agency.

This two-day conference offered an opportunity to reconsider the role of the senses in the grand narratives of modernity and postmodernity and to elevate the relevance of recent sensory approaches for investigating questions of social, political and cultural change.

Peter Hallward of Kingston University, best known as a Badiou scholar, gave a talk on the notion of the ‘will of the people’, with its roots in Rousseau, Marx and Mao among many others, in order to deal with critiques of voluntarism around more radical understandings of political subjectivity.

Internationally renowned critical theorist Jodi Dean joined us for a day devoted to interrogating her work on both digital technologies and ‘communicative capitalism’ and her engagements with the recent resurgence of interest in the ‘Idea of Communism’. The day involved a workshops based around excerpts from her book Blog Theory, followed by four position papers by Eva Giraud, Andrew Goffey, Seb Franklin and Colin Wright. Colin then chaired a public lecture by Jodi on her most recent book, The Communist Hypothesis.

This one day event explored the factors – geographical, architectural, visual, tactile and sonorous – that contribute to the production of ‘atmospheres’ conducive to particular affects, whether excitement, fear or boredom. As such, it engaged with the so-called ‘affective turn’ in the human and social sciences and the specific methodological challenges faced by researchers working on sensory experience and culture. A paper by Tim Edensor (Manchester Metropolitan) on the role of lighting in creating the unique atmosphere at the Blackpool illuminations was followed by a roundtable discussion on innovative methodologies in sensory research with Tim Edensor, Ben Anderson (Durham), Tracey Potts (Nottingham) and James Mansell (Nottingham). The day concluded with a public lecture by Ben Anderson on ‘Atmospheres of Emergency’ held at the Nottingham Contemporary art gallery.