Social and Political Suffocations

 Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies

As feminist scholars have pointed out for decades, the unequal distribution of wealth, privilege, and social and political agency and recognition take place along intersectional power dynamics structured by, for example, gender, race, class, mental and physical dis/ability, sexuality. While the last year’s NOISE summer school examined the relevance of critique in times of crisis, this year we continue this timely exploration by turning attention to how intersectional dynamics of social power relations operate in constituting whose lives and what forms of living are currently un/breathable. By approaching this topic as a matter of an entanglement of structural, individual, and quotidian operations of bio- and necropolitics, we seek to discuss possible feminist transformative interventions that can be developed to combat the suffocating atmospheres of our times.

Inspirational forms of creating alternatives to the existing social and political structures demand time, involvement and active participation in dismantling the structures of oppression we are implicated in. In neoliberal societies time, however, is a scarce resource, involvement requires existence of and access to the spaces for breathable engagements, and active participation demands extra bodily and affective energy. Considering the differential distribution of resources of quotidian, social and political survival, what are the possibilities for a feminist transformation of the social and political suffocation and resistance to the growing right wing populism, racism, xenophobia, and state and regional protectionism?

The 26th edition of the NOISE Summer School seeks to address experiences of social and political suffocations, as well as accompanying strategies of resistance, through a series of lectures by scholars and activists who are all also embodied practitioners in their critical practice(s). With these, the five-day program of NOISE 2018 will offer innovative interventions into the debate on political involvement as theory and embodied practice, as well as a discussion of strategies of organizing in the face of individual, institutional and structural enclosures.

Deadline: April 30th, 2018

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