[Bilimsel Haber] CFP: Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Methodologies, Imagining Alternatives (Netherlands) (10/1/06; 3/28/07-3/30/07)

[Sule Tarakcioglu]

Call for papers
from Maria Boletsi <M.Boletsi at uva.nl>


Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Methodologies, Imagining Alternatives

The Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA) invites proposals for
an international workshop, INSIDE KNOWLEDGE, to be held at the
University of Amsterdam on March 28-30, 2007.

We welcome proposals from a range of disciplines, including (but not
limited to) art history and theory, literary studies, cultural studies,
film and media studies, theatre, dance and performance studies,
philosophy, history, gender studies, queer theory, art and design,
musicology, anthropology, sociology, political science, geography,
religion studies, and linguistics.

Scholars think of themselves as having "inside knowledge" or being
"inside" knowledge. The state of being inside can be interpreted as a
comfort zone or privileged position, or on the other hand, a trap
excluding other ways of knowing. Is being inside knowledge a kind of
all-compassing frame forming our subjectivity or are scholars active
agents in this process? Do we discover or invent knowledge? While the
myth of knowledge as objective and neutral appears to have been
debunked, a question remains unresolved: If not objectivity, then what?

In search for an answer to this question, academic disciplines today
often find themselves trapped between relativist and essentialist
tendencies. Faced with the new multiple and complex realities of
globalization, cross-cultural encounters and conflicts, the inadequacy
of old approaches to knowledge underscores the need for either radical
revisions of traditional modes of knowledge production, or alternative
ways of doing and thinking knowledge. Disciplines therefore appear to be
in need of specific methodologies, which could function across
disciplinary borders and provide (tentative) grounds for inter- or
transdisciplinary communication.

The previous ASCA workshop focused on specific issues of commitment and
complicity for self-reflexive, engaged and responsible scholarship. This
year, we have decided to make knowledge itself an issue. In dedicating a
whole workshop to the admittedly vast issue of knowledge, we intend to
bring practices and theories of knowledge to the foreground, thereby
making knowledge a starting point for critical discussion and
interrogation, rather than a pre-given fundament of our academic,
scientific and everyday practices.

By revisiting the theme of knowledge, we wish to challenge, question and
resist existing methodologies; revise traditional modes of knowledge
production; revisit the histories of knowledge and epistemologies of the
past and the present; culturally contextualize and situate knowledge;
discuss new emerging regimes of knowledge and the power relations that
they (re)inscribe; imagine different ways of experiencing and doing
knowledge; and, finally, dare to envision the future of our various
disciplines through different ways of knowing.

In light of the above, we encourage workshop participants to explore the
issue of knowledge through the following panel themes:

1. Knowledge production: conversation or conservation?
2. Configurations and practices of knowledge
3. Resisting knowledge
4. Alternative sites for knowledge
5. Corporeality and the senses as sites for knowledge
6. Technologies and methodologies of knowledge

For more on each thematic panel, see below.

This conference is the latest in a series of ASCA International
Workshops and is inspired by the 2005-2006 ASCA theory seminar on Ways
of Knowing, organized by Mieke Bal. Please send your one-page proposal
(500 words maximum) and a short biographical note by 1st October 2006 to
the ASCA office:  asca-fgw at uva.nl

Dr. Eloe Kingma
(managing Director ASCA)
Oude Turfmarkt 147, 1012 GC, Amsterdam
The Netherlands.

tel: +31 20 525 3874.

Please indicate in your proposal which panel theme (out of the six
mentioned above) you believe your proposal would best fit in.

Proposals will be selected according to their relevance to the topics of
the conference. The workshop format is designed to stimulate discussion
in the panels. For this purpose, participants will be asked to send the
final version of their papers (no more than 4000 words) two months prior
to the conference. We shall strictly adhere to this deadline since we
will prepare a reader for each of the panels in advance, to be
circulated before the conference. Upon permission of each participant,
the papers will also be placed on the official website of the workshop
beforehand, and will be accessible only to the participants through a
username and password. This way, participants can also have access to
papers from other panels that fall within their interest, something that
will hopefully encourage communication among the people of the workshop
and create an ongoing discussion. During the workshop, instead of
reading their papers, participants will give a short summary of their
work 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.

For more information and updates on the workshop, please visit our
website: www.insideknowledge.nl <http://www.insideknowledge.nl/>

Organizing Committee: Carolyn Birdsall, Maria Boletsi, Itay Sapir,
Pieter Verstraete

Thematic Panels:

Knowledge production: conversation or conservation?

Knowledge can be thought of as vertical or as horizontal. The former
concept implies a solidly structured knowledge based on clear
foundations; the latter understanding of knowledge sees it as based on
social negotiation and constant conversation. Whereas the "horizontal"
spatial metaphor has gained important currency in the various schools of
"theory" (Deleuze, Rorty and others), it seems that in the everyday
practice of most scholars in the humanities the idea of a systematic,
hierarchical and well-established knowledge is still the ideal model to
follow. And then again, many possible combinations of the two are
imaginable.

This state of affairs, with its highly political ramifications, raises
many questions that this panel will revolve around: What are the
advantages and the problems of each concept of knowledge? Historically,
which concept of knowledge was prevalent in which kind of social and
intellectual circumstances, and what is the situation today? How is the
idea of interdisciplinary or hybrid knowledge related to the opposition
foundational vs. conversational knowledge? And should there be a
distinction between the production and the communication of knowledge in
this respect?


Configurations and practices of knowledge

Theory ideally does not go without practice. Cultural analysis regards
knowledge production as a continuous negotiation and interaction with
the object as a theoretical tool for analytical practice. In this
section we would like to reposition both knowledge in practice and
theoretical research as practice. Different modes of analytical
practice, such as the experiment, the test case or the case study call
for a re-examination of the positions and perspectives the analyst
chooses to take. Such positions could be the exterior microbe-like
perspective and the view-on-high of the theorist (De Certeau), or the
interior perspective of the fl=E2neur (Benjamin) and the artistic
practitioner who perform modes of knowledge by reconfiguring the
immediate spatial modalities. We want to examine how such performative
interventions can lead to new models of theory as practice, and how they
are positioned in practice.

Among the many questions raised in this section are: How can artistic
and analytic practice today still add to the expansion of knowledge?
Which alternative models of knowledge have evolved from these practices?
To which reconfigurations have they led? And how can we conceptualize
practicing modes of knowledge?


Resisting knowledge

Knowledge, especially since Foucault, has been indissolubly linked with
discursive regimes of power. It does not pose as the expression of a
truth that exists "out there", but is filtered, mediated, and subject to
processes of cultural translation.  Locating knowledge within discursive
limits also entails that there is an outside to the "knowable," which
resists appropriation by existing modes of thought. In order to resist
knowledge, we sometimes have to refashion the configurations of
knowledge that we inhabit, in order to occasion "the other's irruption
into the settled order" (Derek Attridge) and dare to walk on what
Rebecca Saunders has called "a zone of error": the zone of the foreign,
the erroneous, the anomalous, the barbaric. One question we would like
to pose in this panel is: what do we do with the unknown, the (absolute)
other, the unintelligible - that which exceeds the limits of our
discourse? And, perhaps most importantly, what does the unknown or
foreign do to us? If we resist our impulse to decipher and appropriate
the unintelligible into our own modes of knowing, how could we still
turn the encounter with the "unknowable" into a productive experience,
without having to make sense out of it?=20

To resist knowledge could also mean to resist the comfort of remaining
within one cultural/social system, and to provoke encounters among
different modes of knowing; to stand at the "significatory boundaries of
cultures", which is where, according to Homi Bhabha, "meanings and
values are (mis-)read or signs are misappropriated". In this case, the
other of our mode of knowing could be that which subscribes to another
culture, social group, discipline, methodology or code.


Alternative sites for knowledge

In academic practices of knowledge production, we are confronted with
the difficulties in the task of "thinking otherwise". This is especially
the case, Gayatri Spivak reminds us, when scholars from privileged
backgrounds attempt to represent and "know" the experiences of others.
For this reason, it is essential to probe assumptions about knowledge as
objective or "value free". When considering the situatedness of the
scholar and their academic practice, we might turn to Donna Haraway's
notion of the "privilege of partial perspective" (1991), where gender is
one of the many important and necessary interventions in standardised
forms of knowledge production.

Among the many approaches to "ways of knowing", this panel could prompt
a discussion of how non-Western contexts or alternative forms of knowing
interact with dominant frameworks of knowledge production. What methods
can be employed to reflect on the "situatedness" of the scholar, along
with his/her relation to disciplinary and institutional contexts? How
might an investigation of subcultures, social practices or material
cultures engage in the production of new forms of knowledge? What
alternatives are available to the scholars who want to participate in
radical scholarship or academic practices of discovery?


Corporeality and the senses as sites for knowledge

Knowledge can be regarded as an effect (Althusser), whereby ideology
produces and conditions our modes of knowing. In this sense, knowledge
can also 'affect' the filtering processes of our senses and bodies. This
section places knowledge on and in the body, thereby highlighting the
spatial and corporeal dimensions to knowledge production. We want to
space out the topographies, stratifications, and borders of the sensing
body with both its atavistic and surface levels: the flesh, the skin,
the 'five' senses, affects and emotions as tools for producing,
filtering and storing knowledge. This mapping of the body will be
critically assessed by the question of what it means to know the world
through our senses. The human senses and their intersensory nature could
be discussed in terms of "embodied knowledge", a perceptual and
corporeal knowing ("habitus", literacy and competence), and an
(en)gendered knowledge, including queer, transsexual and other bodies as
sites for knowledge and contestation. These sites seem nowadays to reach
beyond the senses towards a concept of "posthumanism" (Niklas Luhmann,
among others).

Working through cultural objects in relation with the (post-)human
experience invites us to reflect on the following questions: How do we
perform forms of knowledge through sights, smells, sounds, touch? How do
we conceptualize intersensory and transsensory experience?  What kinds
of conceptual tools can the body and the senses offer us through
embodied knowledge and corporeal memory? And how could gendered bodies
contest the established theoretical frameworks, narratives, and
categories of analysis?


Technologies and Methodologies of Knowledge

Discussions about the nature of knowledge can serve as the basis for the
actual elaboration of new methodologies for academic
knowledge-production. Thus, this panel will centre on concrete
strategies and technologies of knowledge in the aftermath of the
undecided debates between poststructuralists and traditionalists,
postmodernists and humanists, rationalists, psychoanalysts,
post-colonialists, and so forth. We propose to consider the following
questions: How do research methodologies in the Humanities reflect
different concepts of knowledge? How can we invent new methodologies
that avoid epistemological problems of existing ones? What are - and
what could be - the procedures of legitimation for new methodologies?

While theoretical frameworks are indispensable, we are looking in this
section, for new propositions concerning "the know-how of knowledge",
concrete and case-related ways of knowing that can innovate the research
programs of different disciplines - and, indeed, of not-yet-existing
inter-disciplines.



==========================================================
 From the Literary Calls for Papers Mailing List