NOI♀SE 2015 Summer School

Biopolitics, Necropolitics, Cosmopolitics:

Feminist and Queer Interventions

24 – 28 August 2015, Utrecht University, The Netherlands

Organized by the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies

• Have you ever thought about which lives are deemed worthy of inclusion into contemporary regimes of power, and which are considered disposable?
• Are you curious about how the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics are taken up in feminist, queer, and postcolonial studies?
• Do you want to know more about transversal connections between biopolitics, necropolitics, and cosmopolitics in the humanities and social sciences?
• Would you like to explore how postcolonial and posthuman(ist) perspectives can be fruitfully combined for a feminist/queer cosmopolitics to come?

Then join the 2015 Summer School!

This year, the 23rd edition of NOI♀SE will introduce you to cutting-edge scholarship at the intersection of media and cultural studies, social sciences, gender studies, and the arts. The relation between discursive strategies and their socio-political effects on both local and global scales will be explored. We will focus upon the mechanisms that mobilize biopolitics within academic spheres whilst simultaneously attending to strategies employed in artistic and activist interventions through law, literature, media, science studies, and the arts.

Concepts & content

The summer school emerges from a larger engagement with questions of biopolitics and necropolitics in an era of neoliberalism and late capitalism. It pays close attention to the effects this has on bodies and lives. Informed by postcolonial theory, cultural analysis, critical posthumanism, and feminist/queer studies, we will address the boundaries of subjectivity and citizenship in a system that actively monitors and excludes certain identities, particularly those who do not – or cannot – conform to a white, middle-class, gender-normative, heteronormative, able-bodied, legally employed, state-documented existence. From here, we move forward toward envisioning feminist/queer futures that rethink categories such as “human” and “subjectivity” based on the modern onto-epistemological premises, opening up into new ways of imagining vital politics, resistance strategies, and other-than-human agencies.

Examining the politics of twenty-first-century life and death, key themes of the summer school will be surveillance, securitization, planetary co-existence, and co-habitation. In a post-9/11, postcolonial/neocolonial era, bodily norms – informed by race, gender, and sexuality – are encoded in tools of surveillance and security, including body scanners, facial recognition software, and identity documents. In examining these processes, we will critically investigate how a politics of inclusion requires – and is in fact built on – simultaneous exclusion wherein some bodies become recognizable subjects while others are constructed as internal enemies and illegitimate non-subjects. Taking account of these global dynamics, the Summer School aims at visions of transformation of the matrix of in-/exclusion into feminist/queer cosmo-political futures that work towards a new discourse of planetary social justice.

Focusing on cultural, legal, scientific, and social practices, this Summer School addresses the following questions: Which lives are deemed worthy of recognition and inclusion in contemporary regimes of power, and which lives are considered disposable? Who may live and who must die? How to envision a different politics of difference(s) that un-works established (anthropocentric) hierarchies and enriches inter-human and inter-species relationality?

Aims
This advanced training course offers a diverse yet coherent program of study from an interdisciplinary perspective. The Summer School is meant for PhD and MA students. Separate seminars for these two groups will be provided in the afternoons.
Formula

• Two lectures in the morning
• Separate PhD and MA-seminars in the afternoon
• Social program
• Students prepare before NOI♀SE by reading and collecting material for assignments (approximately 40 hours of work). After the school has ended, participants who fulfilled all requirements (preparation of assignments and reading, active participation, and final essay of 10-15 pages) receive a NOI♀SE Certificate (5 ECTS).
• All students are expected to participate in the entire program for the duration of five days.

Please check the website for more information, registration and regular updates: www.graduategenderstudies.nl.

Venue
The NOI♀SE Summer School 2015 will be hosted by Utrecht University, the Netherlands.

Tuition Fees

The tuition fee is €425. This includes digital reading materials but excludes accommodation and subsistence costs (i.e., food, meals, drinks, etc.).

Teachers in the course

The NOISE Summer School is organized by the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG, Utrecht University). The 2015 edition is coordinated by dr. Christine Quinan and dr. Kathrin Thiele. Several renowned international scholars and artists from various disciplines will be teaching at the Summer School. Their names will be announced on the website in April.

Registration and Deadline:

Deadline: April 20, 2015. You can find the application form on the website: www.graduategenderstudies.nl.

For more information
NOI♀SE Central Coordination
Utrecht University
Muntstraat 2a
3512 EV Utrecht
The Netherlands
E-mail: noise@uu.nl