[Bilimsel Haber] Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Methodologies, Imagining Alternatives

[gonul at pultar.org]

Inside Knowledge: (Un)doing Methodologies, Imagining Alternatives
Location:	Netherlands

Call for papers

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.

Confirmed keynote speakers:

Derek Attridge (University of York)
Leo Bersani (University of California, Berkeley)
Steven Connor (Birkbeck College, London)
Saurabh Dube (El Colegio de Mexico)
Bruce Holsinger (University of Virginia)

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.

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.

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., 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

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 flâneur (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?

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.

Dr. Eloe Kingma (managing Director ASCA), Oude Turfmarkt 147, 1012 GC,  
Amsterdam, tel: +31 20 525 3874, email: asca-fgw at uva.nl

Visit the website at http://ww.insideknowledge.nl