PCI Newsletter December 2019
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Dear colleagues,
With this newsletter we are happy to inform you about relevant events in the field of postcolonial studies, locally, nationally and internationally. Please take a look at our lists of conferences, lectures, films and publications for December and upcoming months.
We wish you all the best for the upcoming holidays and looking forward to reconnect in 2020.
Sandra Ponzanesi
Director PCI
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9th PCI Film Series continues in 2020
Paris is Burning (dir. Jenny Livingston 1990)
Introduced by Zerrin Cengiz (Utrecht University) and Milica Trakilović (Utrecht University)
The legendary documentary Paris is Burning (Jenny Livingston, 1990) about the New York Underground drag queen and transgender culture.
A new restoration of Paris Is Burning has been released. The timing couldn’t be more apt: this year marks the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which arrives at a fraught time in queer visibility. It’s no wonder that in addition to being cherished and debated over the years, Paris Is Burning has often been taught in colleges and beyond, an urtext for debates about the meanings of gender, race, class, and sexuality.
Over the past decade, Jennie Livingston’s landmark 1990 documentary “Paris Is Burning” has had a renaissance of sorts, thanks in no small part to the popularity of “RuPaul’s Drag Race.” If you’ve never seen “Paris Is Burning,” you’re only getting half of what “Drag Race” has to offer, so a new restoration and theatrical re-release of the film courtesy of Janus Films is the perfect opportunity to catch up.
Practical information
Date: 13 January, 2019
Time: 17:00-19:00
Location: Entrance at Muntstraat 2A, MCW-LAB (Grote zaal KNG20)
Admission is free of charge. However, due to safety regulations, maximum capacity of the room is 80 people. Because the screening is part of the postcolonial studies minor, seating for non-UU students is limited.
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13th Biennial Crossroads in Cultural Studies Conference
Lisbon, Portugal, 28-31 July, 2020
The Lisbon 2020 Crossroads will bring Cultural Studies scholars into inter- and cross-disciplinary and institutional dialogues through conference presentations, film screenings, exhibits, book launches and roundtables. Building also on existing research at CEAUL/ULICES within the scope of Cultural Studies, this event will contribute to the development of opportunities for networking and future research collaborations. The goal is to provide a platform to promote the exchange of knowledge, research outputs and experiences, and encourage the creation of further links among scholars and practitioners.
While the research of our invited keynotes and plenary speakers mostly gravitates around the issues of labour and precarities, decolonizing knowledge and the refugee “crisis” in the Mediterranean, the conference is open to all topics relevant to Cultural Studies. Suggested topics, drawing on the work of the invited keynote, plenary and spotlight speakers, and on more general themes in Cultural Studies research, include but are not limited to: adaptation cultures, borders and mobilities, critical and cultural theory, digital infrastructure, dfood cultural studies, gender, sexuality, race and class in the Anthropocene, Indigenous knowledge and politics, popular cultures and genres, refugee 'crisis' in the Mediterranean, rethinking the human and the posthuman, and transforming/globalising/decolonising universities.
For more information and the full call for papers, see here.
Invited speakers include:
For an overview of all invited speakers, see here.
Practical information
- Date: July 28-31, 2020
- Location: Lisbon, Portugal
- Deadline: 10 January, 2020
- Notification of acceptance: 15 february 2020
- Abstracts to be submitted to info@cultstud.org
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ECREA 2020: Communication and Trust: Building Safe, Sustainable and Promising Futures
Braga, Portugal, 2-5 October, 2020
The European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA) and the Communication and Society Research Centre of University of Minho are delighted to host the 8th European Communication Conference (ECC). The Conference has chosen the key theme ‘Communication and trust: building safe, sustainable and promising futures. Organisers call for proposals addressing (but not limited to) the main conference theme and relating to ECREA Sections, Networks or Temporary Working Groups.
What futures are we building up? What is the role of media and communication in these processes? Considering the pace of technological change and the way it is reshaping economy and culture, what type of adaptations and commitments are being asked of citizens and to what extent are institutions and policy makers engaged in achieving solutions that are both progressive and sustainable? What type of social, political and cultural futures are media and communication inducing and modelling? What relations exist between them and what are their main normative cornerstones? These are questions of critical interest for the 2020 ECREA conference. Scholars are invited to question the relevance of communication studies in face of societal challenges today and for generations to come.
Scholars are defied to address emerging responsibilities of the media and communication field vis-à-vis new social and environmental asymmetries. The quality of public information is obviously key to this debate. What role should the media play deconstruing technological determinisms and finding paths to increase trust, confidence and safety? How to manage the relationships between the local and the global so that internet giants’ activities do not govern the common symbolic environment? How to improve transparency and the defence of the public interest, and what type of public interest is still possible to identify? By proposing the theme ‘Communication and trust: building safe, sustainable and promising futures’, the conference should provide an opportunity to diagnose, discuss and rethink the role and responsibilities of academics and professionals in the reading of present circumstances and in the anticipation of future challenges. Read the full call for papers here.
Practical information
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ATGENDER Spring Conference: Caring in Uncaring Times
Middlesex University, London, 13-15 May, 2020
The 2020 ATGENDER Spring Conference will explore the possibilities for and necessity of embedding care in policy and activism. Adopting a broad approach to the concepts of care, policy and activism, the conference invites proposals from researchers, activists, practitioners, carers, archivists, artists and others from a range of backgrounds and disciplines.
The conference seeks to explore care and caring in all its diversity and invites its participants to reflect on the devastating consequences of an uncaring state (across a range of time and places), and the vital work of activism and policy that centres care. Questions and concerns include, but are not limited to: What does it mean to enact careful activism? How can we develop and implement policy founded in care? What strategies and practices can be used to embed care in policy and activism? How are certain groups marked out as deserving or undeserving of care? How can we attend to the emotion and ethics of care? How can care and activism be (re)imagined in relation to new and digital technology? The full call for papers can be found here.
Practical information
- Date: 13-15 May, 2020
- Location: Middlesex University, London
- Deadline: 16 December, 2019
- Abstracts to be submitted to atgender2020con@gmail.com
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Change in Motion: Environment, Migration, and Mobilities
University of California, Berkeley, 18 and 19 May, 2020
Scholars from across disciplines are invited to share work that explores the multifaceted interdependencies entanglements between migration and environmental change. How and under what circumstances might climate and migration scholarship be most productively brought to bear on each other? We invite participants to widen the scope of questions commonly posed, knowledges considered, and histories told, and to think at varying temporal, spatial, and causal scales. As such, we aim to challenge the assumptions and power relations often inadvertently or implicitly reproduced in research that reads the intersection of mobility and environmental change only in its most pronounced manifestations: for instance, in the desertification of the Sahel—a region of interest in EU illegal immigration fears—or in rising sea levels in Tuvalu. Moreover, by incorporating a variety of research foci and methods, we aim to shed light on how conceptions of climate, migration, and intersections thereof shift according to our scholarly perspectives: the temporal or geographic scale at which we consider a given crisis or migratory pattern, or whether we examine environmental change on a local, national, hemispheric, or planetary level.
This workshop convenes historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and geographers, as well as media, literary, and legal scholars. Contributors are welcome to explore any periodization that they deem appropriate; geographic area and theoretical approach are also open. Contributions will engage with the following areas of inquiry, including but not limited to: How and where do we consider the migration of both humans and non-humans? What mobile subjects, histories, and narratives act within and upon certain landscapes? How is time constructed in response to climate change, which results in both slow violence and sudden catastrophe, degradation, and disaster? What temporal scales are invoked by environmental migration? How are historically racialized, gendered, and classed distinctions in mobility reproduced in narratives around environmental migration, particularly in the Global North? How can we account for the feedback loop of migration and climate change? The full call can be read here.
Practical information
- Date: May 18 and 19, 2020
- Location: University of California, Berkeley
- Deadline: 15 January, 2020
- Abstracts to be submitted to submission portal
- Contact about submission process: Heike Friedman
- Contact about the conference: Sarah Earnshaw or Samantha Fox
- Succesful applicants will be notified by the end of January 2020. In case of acceptance, applicants are asked to submit their previously unpublished paper by April 20, 2020 to ensure engagement with pre-circulated papers and potentially publish selected papers in a peer-reviewed venue.
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NECS 2020 Conference: Transitions: Moving Images and Bodies
University of Palermo, 18-20 June, 2020
The NECS 2020 Conference aims to explore connections between media and a series of developments within our current era that can be grouped under the term “transitions.” In order to explore this connection, we can perhaps begin from the most general meaning of “medium” as a form and instrument for the expression of a mediation, i.e. a shift, a motion and therefore also a “transit.” According to Bolter and Grusin’s famous idea of “remediation,” every kind of media can be considered in a certain sense as a form of “remediation,” a translation between new and old media. This is the general framework in which the conference is conceived, considering media as instruments of different kinds of transition.
The NECS 2020 conference aims to embrace the idea of transit – as a privileged keyword for interpreting contemporary audiovisual media. The relations and overlapping demonstrated by phenomena of different orders represent an occasion and starting point for a detailed reflection that touches on different but contiguous approaches to audiovisual media: gender studies, post-colonial studies, global studies, translation theory and, of course, sound, cinema and media studies.
The NECS 2020 conference call there seeks presentations not only on technological devices for communication systems, but also on bodies, languages and images that run across and overlap within our contemporary world. In this context, we imagine the conference and its confrontations as enabling a space for an act of transversing (a ‘transit’ in itself), in which borders between objects and disciplinary zones can be usefully redrawn.
Submissions may include, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Transitions and migrations
- Migrants narratives, narratives on migrants
- Mapping and analyzing migratory movement
- Migration, anthropocene, climate
- Politics of migration, borders, citizenship, new communities
- Transitions, intermediality, transmediality
- Reusing, remaking, citing
- Translation, transposing, dubbing
- Trans-culture, trans-nationality, transnational productions
- Converging culture and remediations
- Transmedia storytelling
- Circulation of media objects and texts, film festivals circuits, media networks
- Transnational productive practices
- Transitions, genres, gender
- Bodies, images, media, sounds
The full call can be read here.
Practical information
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Conference: Stranger Things: Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture
Netherlands Research School of Literary Studies, Amsterdam, 12-13 december 2019
On December 12 and 13, the conference Stranger Things: Rethinking Defamiliarization in Literature and Visual Culture will be held in Amsterdam. The conference is organized by Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar (California College of the Arts; NIAS) and Dr. Alberto Godioli (University of Groningen)
Confirmed keynote speakers:
- Prof. Caroline Levine, Cornell University, "Defamiliarization for a Sustainable Planet" (Skype lecture and discussion)
- Prof. Dr. Sandra Ponzanesi, Utrecht University, "Strangers in Paradise: Migrant Figurations in Media Culture"
Confirmed Speakers:
- Dr. Nilgun Bayraktar, California College of the Arts / NIAS, "Stranger Futures: Critical Dystopia and Dark Humor in Contemporary Video Art"
- Prof. Dr. Maria Boletsi, University of Amsterdam / Leiden University, "Defamiliarization in New Languages of Protest: The Literary Uncanny as a Challenge to Post-Truth Rhetoric"
- Prof. Dr. Esther Peeren, University of Amsterdam, "Defamiliarizing the Rural Idyll in Jon McGregor's Reservoir 13 and Cynan Jones' The Long Dry"
- Lora Sariaslan, University of Amsterdam, "Familiarly Strange / Strangely Familiar: Humor and Contemporary Artists from Turkey"
- Dr. Alberto Godioli, University of Groningen, "Playing with Fire: Dark Humor, Defamiliarization and Empathy"
- Dr. Christian Kirchmeier, University of Groningen, "Thinking the Unfammiliar: On Weird Ontologies and Eerie Agencies"
- Dr. Florian Lippert, University of Groningen, "The Good, the Bad and the Familiar: Deconstructing 'Cultural Normality' with Zygmunt Bauman and François Jullien"
- Prof. Dr. Annie van den Oever, University of Groningen, "If You Only Knew How Strange It Was... Viktor Shlovsky's Theory of Ostran(n)enie and Its Relevance for 21st-century Research on Techniques and Technologies"
- Prof. Dr. Pablo Valdivia, University of Groningen, "Tresholds and Metaphors: The Physics of Cultural Narratives"
- Ruby de Vos, University of Groningen, "Making the Strange Familiar: Getting Intimate with Toxicity"
- alaa minawi, (inside-out) talk
- Jo-Lene Ong, talk, title to be confirmed
Venue
On 12 december, the conference will be held at Roeterseiland REC A 1.02. The next day, 13 december, the location will be the NIAS Seminar Room at Korte Spinhuissteeg 3.
The conference is fully booked, but there are still places available for the first day (12 december). Please send an e-mail to osl@rug.nl if you want to attend the first day. If you want to be on the waiting list for both days, please send an email to osl@rug.nl. Include your name, university and research school in all e-mails.
To read more click here. The full conference program is available here.
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Symposium: Unhinging the National Framework: Perspectives on Transnational Life Writing
VU Amsterdam, Medical Faculty, Atrium
On Friday, 6 December 2019 the symposium Unhinging the National Framework: Perspectives on Transnational Life Writing will be held at VU Amsterdam.
Keynote speakers:
- Prof. Sonja Boon, Memorial University, Newfoundland, "Speculative Lives: Haunted Yearnings for Impossible Pasts"
- Prof. dr. Elleke Boehmer, University of Oxford, "Unhinging the National Framework through Curricular Change"
 Other speakers:
- Dr. Esther Captain (KITLV) and Dr. Guno Jones (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam), "Postcolonial Transnational (Family) Histories
- Dr. Karin Willemse, Erasmus School of History, Culture and Communication, "Re-membering Those Who Left: Abandoned Houses as Archives of (In)Tangible Nubian Heritage"
- Dr. Lizzy van Leeuwen, independent scholar and biographer (interview)
- Dr. Frank Dragtenstein (interview)
- Dik van der Meulen, "King William III. A Boundless Royal"
- Dr. Monica Soeting, European Journal of Life Writing, "Queen Emma, the Sweetest Grandmother of Europe"
Registration is free of charge, but please register before 3 december by sending a message to b.boter@vu.nl.
To read more click here.
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Selbst | Literary Cafe with Thomas Meinecke and Charis Goer
Goethe-Institut, Amsterdam, 12 december 2019
German author, musician and DJ Thomas Meinecke, winner of the Berliner Literaturpreis 2020, will from his most recent novel Selbst, and perform music that is important to this novel and his work as a writer. He will be in conversation with dr. Charis Goer (Utrecht University).
The event will take place at the Goethe-Institut in Amsterdam, on 12 December and will be held in German.
For more information about the event and guests, see here.
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The Communal, the Museum and the End of the Contemporary: Decolonial Summer School
Organized by University College Roosevelt, held at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven
Between 23 June and 8 July 2020, the Decolonial Summer School entitled The Communal, the Museum and the End of the Contemporary will be organized by University College Roosevelt. The course location is the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven.
The 11th edition of the former Middelburg Decolonial Summer School will be located at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. The summer school will focus on the communal and modern/colonial histories, looking in particular at the role of museums and other cultural institutions and their (potential) impact on society. The school will analyse the conceptual foundation of “modern” cultural institutions questioning the idea of “modernity’ through a decolonial perspective. It will explore the closing of Western modernity through the end of the contemporary and the decolonial opening toward the communal. The Van Abbemuseum has a collection of modern and contemporary art and tries to apply decolonial and ‘demodern’ thinking to its activities, and the course will make use of the museum as a site for critical inquiry as well as looking at other cultural institutions contexts.
The core of the Middelburg Decolonial School has been the search for paths of delinking, healing and re-existence. This year the focus will be on the closing of modernity and especially the place that the museum and other cultural institutions have in that process. It will examine how the Colonial Matrix of Power and modern politics of time sustain the status quo and what needs to change. We will foreground the end of the contemporary and the openings that the communal offers towards a decolonial horizon of meaning.
The communal is grounded on respect for the living, on cooperation and care to live together in plenitude beyond the human-animal and the human-earth divides. We will address the challenges to engage in recovering the freedom of decolonial joy and decolonial love— and with it regenerate the communal praxis of living. The course will make the students acquainted with the most current debates around decolonial critical thought, in particular in relation to the communal. The course is a joint partnership with the Centre For Global Studies & The Humanities Duke University. The course directors are Walter Mignolo and Rolando Vazquez.
Lecturers
- Jean Casimir (Haiti)
- Maria Lugones (Argentina/US)
- Gloria Wekker (The Netherlands/Suriname)
- Fabian Barba (Ecuador)
- Jeanette Ehlers (Denmark)
- Charles Esche (UK/The Netherlands)
- Rosalba Icaza (Mexico/The Netherlands)
- Patricia Kaersenhout (The Netherlands/Suriname)
- Ovidiu Tichindeleanu (Rumania)
- Madine Tlostanova (Circassia/Sweden)
Practical information:
- The summer school is designed for graduate students (Ph.D. and M.A.) from all disciplinary backgrounds. The course is also open to interested advanced undergraduate students.
- The fee for the summer school is €900.00. Included in these costs are the course and course materials. Excluded is housing, which costs an additional €502.50. For more information, see here.
- Applicants must include a motivation letter and C.V. in their registration.
- For more information, contact decoloniality@ucr.nl.
- Application deadline: 15 May 2020
For more information, see here.
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The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration
Edited by Kevin Smets, Koen Leurs, Myria Georgiou, Saskia Witteborn and Radhika Gajjala
 Migration moves people, ideas and things. Migration shakes up political scenes and instigates new social movements. It redraws emotional landscapes and reshapes social networks, with traditional and digital media enabling, representing, and shaping the processes, relationships and people on the move. The deep entanglement of media and migration expands across the fields of political, cultural and social life. For example, migration is increasingly digitally tracked and surveilled, and national and international policy-making draws on data on migrant movement, anticipated movement, and biometrics to maintain a sense of control over the mobilities of humans and things. Also, social imaginaries are constituted in highly mediated environments where information and emotions on migration are constantly shared on social and traditional media. Both, those migrating and those receiving them, turn to media and communicative practices to learn how to make sense of migration and to manage fears and desires associated with cross-border mobility in an increasingly porous but also controlled and divided world.
Publication Date: November 2019
Publisher: Sage Publishing
ISSN: 9781526447210
Link to publishers page here
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Locating African European Studies
Edited by Felipe Espinoza Garrido, Caroline Koegler, Deborah Nyangulu, Mark U. Stein
Drawing on a rich lineage of anti-discriminatory scholarship, art, and activism, Locating African European Studies engages with contemporary and historical African European formations, positionalities, politics, and cultural productions in Europe.
Locating African European Studies reflects on the meanings, objectives, and contours of this field. Twenty-six activists, academics, and artists cover a wide range of topics, engaging with processes of affiliation, discrimination, and resistance. They negotiate the methodological foundations of the field, explore different meanings and politics of ‘African’ and ‘European’, and investigate African European representations in literature, film, photography, art, and other media. In three thematic sections, the book focusses on:
- African European social and historical formations
- African European cultural production
- Decolonial academic practice
Locating African European Studies features innovative transdisciplinary research, and will be of interest to students and scholars of various fields, including Black Studies, Critical Whiteness Studies, African American Studies, Diaspora Studies, Postcolonial Studies, African Studies, History, and Social Sciences.
Publication Date: November 2019
Publisher: Routledge
ISSN: 9781138590328
Link to publishers page here
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The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing
Edited by Susheila Nasta and Mark U. Stein
The Cambridge History of Black and Asian British Writing provides a comprehensive historical overview of the diverse literary traditions impacting on this field's evolution, from the eighteenth century to the present. Drawing on the expertise of over forty international experts, this book gathers innovative scholarship to look forward to new readings and perspectives, while also focusing on undervalued writers, texts, and research areas. Creating new pathways to engage with the naming of a field that has often been contested, readings of literary texts are interwoven throughout with key political, social, and material contexts. In making visible the diverse influences constituting past and contemporary British literary culture, this Cambridge History makes a unique contribution to British, Commonwealth, postcolonial, transnational, diasporic, and global literary studies, serving both as one of the first major reference works to cover four centuries of black and Asian British literary history and as a compass for future scholarship.
Publication Date: December 2019
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISSN: 9781108164146
Link to publishers page here
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Postcolonial Narratives of the Present, between Conflict and Coexistence
In: Imago. Studi di Cinema e media (Issue 19)
Editors: Farah Polato and Leonardo de Franceschi
 This issue of Imago. Studi di cinema e media is largely occupied by the dossier "Postcolonial Narratives of the Present, between Conflict and Coexistence". In this dossier, you will find included some articles in Italian translation by Robert Stam & Ella Shohat, Sandra Ponzanesi & Marguerite Walker and Raka Shome, as well as original contributions by Áine O'Healy, Gina Annunziata, Gaia Maqui Giuliani & Francesco Vacchiano, Jessica L. Harris, Raffaele Pavoni, Vito Zagarrio, Veronice Pravadelli and Andrea Gelardi.
Publication Date: November 2019
Publisher: Bulzoni editore
ISSN: 2038-5536
Link to publishers page here
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The Politics of Public Memories of Forced Migration and Bordering in Europe
Editor: Karina Horsti
Increasingly, the European Union and its member states have exhibited a lack of commitment to protecting the human rights of non-citizens. Thinking beyond the oppressive bordering taking place in Europe requires new forms of scholarship. This book provides such examples, offering the analytical lenses of memory and temporality. It also identifies ways of collaborating with people who experience the violence of borders. Established scholars in fields such as history, anthropology, literary studies, media studies, migration and border studies, arts, and cultural studies offer important contributions to the so-called “European refugee crisis”.
This book was published as part of the series Palgrave Macmillan Memory Studies.
Publication Date: November 2019
Publisher: Palgrave Pivot, Cham
ISBN: 978-3-030-3-564-2
Link to publishers page here
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Assistant Professor Gender Studies & Postcolonial Studies
Utrecht University, Utrecht
Deadline: 5 January 2020
Lecturer in Cross-Cultural Communication
Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne
Deadline: 12 December 2019
Professor by Special Appointment: Diversifying Philosophy
Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam
Deadline: 12 December 2019
Postdoctoral Researcher Vital@2040 (Impact of Institutions on Active Lifestyles among Vulnerable Youth)
Utrecht University, Utrecht
Deadline: 5 January 2020
Postdoctoral Research Fellowships
University of Warwick, Coventry
Deadline: 10 January 2020
2 Postdoctoral Fellowships
Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society (Stanford PACS), Stanford University
Deadline: 13 January 2020
Assistant Professor in History of East and South-East Asia
Università Ca' Foscari Venezia, Venice
Deadline: 14 January 2020
Lecturer in Queer Studies (Full Time)
CAPA International Education, London
Deadline: 15 January 2020
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The activities of the PCI are organized in collaboration with The Graduate Gender Programme and Institution for Open Society (Hub Gender and Diversity)
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