Hemi GSI Convergence 2015 | Collectivities in TransMigration: Animating Bodies Across Borders
November 19-22, 2015 – Austin, Texas, USA
Applications for Convergence 2015 are now closed. See below for the description of the event and work groups.
Convergence 2015 | Collectivities in TransMigration: Animating Bodies Across Borders attends to the myriad points of connection among bodies, ideologies, and spiritualities beyond (and within) national borders. Despite the specificity of the politics practiced in different countries, some social and political scenarios—such as the genocide of black and indigenous populations, the criminalization of social movements, and capitalism and its multiple forms of dispossession—operate beyond the borders of the nation-state. As a consequence, different forms of collectivities have emerged, united by the convergence of their political and affective experiences and by the exchange of resistance strategies that have TransMigrated through different means. The prefix “Trans-” in “TransMigration” expands our understanding of what and who can migrate, and of when, where, and how these migrations occur. Across the Americas, collectivities are animated, for example, through shared racial, gender, and sexual experiences, ideologies, foodways, memories, transtemporalities, and politics, resulting in expanded nationalities that respond to but also resist geographical and physical boundaries. TransMigration creates these multifaceted relationships and communities, which may exist in a single geographic location, straddle national and cultural borders, or be imagined communities emerging from various networks and communions.
Convergence 2015 is an invitation to animate collectivities throughout the Americas. Animation evokes multiple processes of multimedia creations, animism, corporeal and transcendent states of being, and geographical mapping. This Hemi GSI Convergence draws together activism, scholarly discourses, and artistic practices in order to animate TransMigration. Our guiding questions include: How do collectivities experience transferences across borders? How do socio-political scenarios build transnational collectivities? How do new configurations of socio-political networks question the very notion of “collectivities” and offer new forms of connections and communions? How do migrating ideas, experiences, and collectivities disrupt binaries? In what ways are bodies transtemporal? How does a whole collectivity TransMigrate into a single body, and vice versa? How do we animate migrating ancestors? How is our Convergence part of these TransMigratory collectivities?
The Convergence 2015 organizers invite interested scholars, artists, and activists to submit proposals to participate in one of our workgroups or workshops. While workgroups facilitate discussion and theorization through the sharing of academic research, workshops encourage discussion and theorization through practical/physical work. Workgroup and workshop participants will begin collaborating online in the months prior to the Convergence to explore methods that will collectively produce new strategies for innovating both knowledge and practice. Descriptions of our workgroups and workshops can be found below.
Organizers (The University of Texas at Austin)
Co-chairs: Gustavo Melo Cerqueira and Verónica Rivera-Negrón
Executive Committee: Bart Pitchford, Brianna Figueroa, Gabby Randel, Lydia Nelson, Maya Berry, Nicole Martin, Samuel Blake, and Sebastian Gallardo.
The 2015 Hemi GSI Convergence is made possible by the generous support of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics (NYU); Canadian Consortium for Performance and Politics in the Americas, funded in large part through Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC); the Performance as Public Practice program (Department of Theatre and Dance, UT Austin); The College of Fine Arts (UT Austin); The Warfield Center for African and African American Studies (UT Austin); and JGS Photography.
Visit our Hemi GSI Convergence 2015 page, our Facebook page, or https://hemigsi.wordpress.com for more information and updates.
PHOTO/FOTO: J Griffin Stewart, courtesy of JGS Photo
If you have questions, please contact us at hemigsi@gmail.com
Workgroups/Workshops Descriptions
1) Workshop: Dancing Black Diasporic Experiences
Co-conveners: Agatha Oliveira (UT Austin), Evani Tavares Lima (Universidade Estadual de Campinas), Luiz de Abreu (Universidade Federal de Uberlândia-MG)
By engaging with practical experimentation and theoretical reflection, we will facilitate artistic/scholarly sharing between artists/researchers interested in Black performance. Through body/movement, we will investigate possibilities and strategies for reinventing Black experiences in the African Diaspora. We understand Black experience to be the historical and social political experiences of dispossession, racial discrimination, exclusion, (imposed) invisibility, criminalization, exoticization, and commodification of the Black body, as well as the experiences of resistance that allow a reconnection with ancestral memories, Black identity affirmation, and socio-political agency. From this perspective, the Black body is not only a central catalyst for all of these experiences but also a space for transformation and transgression. Moving Black bodies reinvent themselves in order to open up a space to create and reimagine beyond borders imposed by dominant culture. Moreover, this workshop will investigate how non-Black bodies benefit from, react to, identify with, transform, and share in Black experience in the African Diaspora.
This workshop will happen in four stages: 1) sharing of materials and reflections related to the main theme; 2) introduction of elements of Capoeira Angola (balance, impulse, strength, weight, agility, flexibility, among others) and elements of Effort according to Laban Movement System (weight, flow, time, and space); 3) investigatory exploration of the elements introduced in the previous stages; and 4) individual and/or collective composition inspired by these elements, with an aim to developing autobiographical performances.
Upon awakening the body for self-perception and interaction, we also expect to awaken the spirit, intellect, and memory. Each body’s way of combining gestures and movements with its own memories, inspirations, and stories should culminate in the construction of transnational autobiographical performances connected by the experience of blackness in the African Diaspora.
To apply, please submit:
1. CV
2. Short bio (200-300 words)
3. Statement of research/artistic interest (200-300 words)
2) Workshop: Digital Collectivities
Co-conveners: Ana Carolina von Hertwig (independent artist), Alex Santana (Tulane University), Santiago Tavera (Concordia University)
This group explores the effect that technology and media have on our perception of the world. This enhanced perspective enables the creation of our own spaces without differentiation between fact and fiction. This digital identity allows for a perception of spaces and times as containing both physical and virtual realms that only exist symbiotically. Cultures emerge from the communication and movement between multiple places, histories, and subject positions. These cultures are always being transformed and are in a constant process of translation. A doubling or splitting of cultural identities and the national selves is always occurring, in this way denying the world's materiality and the body's physicality. One always finds oneself in the here and there, even as the here and there are found within oneself. This use of technology as a tool of experimentation within a stage of infinitudes allows for the disembodiment or dislocation of the self, through a mediated vision and the making of other possibilities. Technology does not provide answers or solutions, but rather ambiguities between what is taken as truth and what is taken as fiction.
More than just a functional tool, technology is a device that stimulates the imagination and stages the envisionment of infinite or multiple possibilities. Spaces and bodies have been experienced digitally as a “second life,” an illusion of space through stereographic images, and as a network of multiple distant and digital spaces that have become our virtual realities. With an increased access to spaces experienced through mediated technology, what effects should we expect in terms of how we inhabit, understand, and perceive architecture, space, art, and culture? How do artists, museums, and other cultural institutions adapt to these changes? What happens when artistic activities abandon physical materiality and instead take the form of digital files and documents, experienced outside of physical space?How do developments in net art, New Institutionalism, post-internet theory, hacktivism, and digital dissidence reflect these changes?
This workshop stages an exploration among theory, materials, technology, the body, space, and the Convergence itself. Thinking about the effects of the digital, our aim is to engage in a web-based collective performance, through the use of both the technical equipment available, and the participants' own technological gadgets and devices. Our objective is to connect different times and spaces through the web, as well as to include physical interaction with an urban environment, person-to-person engagements, and digital possibilities.
To apply, please submit:
1. CV
2. Short bio
3. Statement of interest
4. Portfolio/ Website (specifically, five images and/or video clip links)
3) Workshop: [Female] Bodies + Borders [of Femininity]
Co-conveners: Luiza Prado de O. Martins (University of the Arts Berlin), Natália da Silva Perez (Freie Universität Berlin), Sandrine Schaefer (Art Institute of Chicago)
Exploring the body as a site of provocation, this workshop investigates different ways in which gender is constructed/challenged/destroyed within this site.Using borders between femininity and queerness, as well as fertility and contraception, as guiding themes, this workshop utilizes site-specific strategies to investigate how these concepts have shifted and changed between past and present, and to imagine how they might continue to change in the future. With the goal of collaboratively creating a broad account of these possible futures, as well as imagining speculative accounts of the past, this workshop immerses participants in a speculative timeframe, rather than asking them to approach the subject through a removed, present-day perspective. In order to do so, it explores how the ‘suspension of disbelief’ might intersect with the site-ing of one’s knowledge by creating collaborative narratives. Departing from an analysis of their individual experiences, participants will be asked to approach the intersecting subjects of body, fertility and contraception by writing, abstracting, speculating, and performing their past and future.
In addition toacknowledging how time lives in the body, this workshop locatestransient spaces on campus as sites of tension and curiosity to realize site-sensitive body-based actions. This approach to transient space addresses fluid/liminal expressions of the self, leading participants to developstrategies to enunciate with the body in various environments in ways that confront/explore/gain power from/challenge/dismantle/wreck concepts of femininity in performance.
To apply, please, submit:
1. A statement telling us who you are, what your interests are, how you think you can contribute to the workshop, and what you expect the workshop will contribute to your work/interests
2. If you like, you can also submit a small sample of your work (pictures, videos, links to your website)
4) Workshop: Transnational Panic, Violence, and State Crimes: Forced Sterilization
Co-conveners: Jon Irigoyen (Aalto University), Natalie Goodnow (UT Austin)
This collaborative workshop will develop an artistic performance/event/intervention on the topic of forced sterilization in the context of the United States. The performance/event/intervention will take place in a public space in Austin, Texas.
This type of population control policy is still implemented in the U.S.––the first country to concretely undertake forced sterilization programs with eugenic underpinnings. In 1926, the U.S. Supreme Court passed a sterilization law. Since then, thousands of indigenous and black women have been sterilized against their will while being hospitalized for diverse reasons, including childbirth and/or surgery, in this way furthering a racist project. Some sterilizations have taken place in prisons and penal institutions, with the supposed objective of “fighting crime.” From 1927 to 1972, more than 650,000 people were sterilized in 33 states, through state programs of “racial purification.” Doctors contracted by the Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation sterilized more than 150 inmates between 2006 and 2010 without the required State authorizations, according to the Center for Investigative Reporting.
The work will begin prior to arrival in Austin, with the exchange of articles and documents between participants. These documents should address: 1) the history of forced sterilization and human rights assaults on incarcerated women and mothers in the U.S.; 2) the festivals, traditions, and cultural artifacts of the Texas/Austin area, with an aim to working with them as tools for raising awareness about forced sterilization in the U.S. We will work in solidarity with Austin-based groups and individuals using art as a tool in their work on incarceration and maternity––working to protect the rights of incarcerated women and mothers.
The issue of forced sterilization is a topic that is often ignored in the public arena, and needs to be disseminated because of its transnational nature. With that objective, we will use art as a tool for change, awareness, and social development.
To apply, please submit:
1. CV
2. Short bio (300 words)
3. Letter of intent (300 words)
Note: No previous experience or specialized knowledge about the topic is required.
5) Workgroup: Border Trauma
Co-conveners: Andrés López (Indiana University), Christine Wheatley (UT Austin), Isabel Gil- Everaert (CUNY), José A. Centeno-Meléndez (UT Austin)
This workgroup engages with borders, border trauma, and migrations.We are interested in exploring the various manifestations and reconfigurations of borders in everyday life including the repurposing of borders in immigrant communities and the state’s expansion of territorial borders to the interior, such as hyper-policing, ICE raids, and monitoring/surveillance. We pay attention to the fluidity of borders and the movement of people, narratives, and ideas across borders. We bear witness to the various forms of trauma—including physical, emotional, psychological, social, and cultural—that occur because of borders, often created through state violence and silences.We also consider the embodiment of trauma, its lingering effects and presence in the lives of people that it touches, as well as the resilience and forms of pushing back by those who have suffered trauma.
We are also interested in breaking down borders among research, art, and activism. In this workgroup, researchers, artists, and community activists will have the opportunity to collaborate in an effort to co-create new forms of knowledge and expression that enrich our understandings of borders, border trauma, and migrations. More than just an academic exercise, this workgroup will blend theory with practice––academic inquiry with artistic expression and real-world work around these themes. It is our hope that through this collaboration, participants can re-think how research, art, and community work can inform and influence each other in mutually beneficial ways. As such, we ask participants to submit a short proposal that articulates your interests in one or more of the topics mentioned with the option to propose a collaborative project.Based on the proposals submitted, we will create sub-groups to begin work on collaborative projects during our time together.The expectation is that these projects will continue after the Convergence 2015.
To apply, please submit:
1. CV/Resume
2. Short bio (150-200 words)
3. A proposal (200-300 words) that articulates your particular interests within the themes of borders, border trauma, and migration (with the option to propose a collaborative project)
Note: Proposals can include but are not limited to: applied theater methods, empirical/theoretical academic papers, portfolio samples, visual art mediums, music, other forms of writing (fiction, poetry, etc), film (cinematic or documentary)
4. Your expectations for the workgroup: What would you like to get out of this workgroup? (Please limit your response to a few sentences.)
6) Workgroup: Crossing(s): Dancing Across Borders
Co-conveners: Daniel Costa (Universidade de São Paulo), Rachel A. Oriol(Miami University)
To dance is to move and to express one’s body rhythmically, literally crossing through time and space while performing cultural identities including gender, ethnicity, nationality, sexuality, etc.
We define the border (crossroads) as a place, a value, an option, a line of work, a field of action, a front, a zone of conflict and negotiations, or even a state of mind.
The “Dancing Across Borders” workgroup will explore how shifting, changing, and inter-related boundaries or definitions delimit the notion of loose territories. We will furthermore contemplate the ways in which dance resides between places, thoughts, and times within these territories. We are interested in breaking with the causal, linear time of dance as understood from a Western framework. Instead, we give weight to non-linear modes of movement that permit cross-fertilization, hybridization, contamination, and a mediation between the dancing body and other intercultural elements across space and time (geopolitical and aesthetic discourses,ways of making,myths, symbols, rituals, performances, etc.).
In this workgroup, we aim to foster dialogue and curiosity about the variety of perspectives in the study of dance, as it crosses both tangible and figurative borders. We are looking to form a research group that will exchange their work on how embodiment becomes a conduit for crossing(s) and transfers of culture. In order to do so, members of this workgroup will: 1) engage in discussions with other scholars on the theme listed above; 2) conduct useful exchanges of works-in-progress (in a variety of media) with group members before and during Convergence; 3) practice critical editing of our own work in order to more clearly articulate our thoughts and movements; and 4) reflect thoughtfully not only on our work itself, but on the purpose of our work, as well as the ways knowledge is built and re-built through workgroup community.
To apply, please submit:
1. CV (1-2 pages)
2. Short description of research interests (150 – 200 words)
3. Artist portfolio or example of work (if applicable)
Note: Performance pieces should be submitted using a virtual platform (blog, website, YouTube, etc).
7) Workgroup: Global Crossings: Decolonial Identities in (Trans)Atlantic and Hemispheric Perspectives
Co-conveners: Célia Carmen Cordeiro (UT Austin), Daniela Meireles (UT Austin)
This work group aims at exploring identities that are constructed from personal stories of migration in the transatlantic and hemispheric worlds. Taking into account Walter Mignolo’s definition of decolonial identities as counter-hegemonic identities formed and processed through an “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo 2011) that produce a border gnosis and subaltern reason (Mignolo 2000), this workgroup’s purpose is to generate interdisciplinary dialogues that challenge and deconstruct Eurocentric definitions of identity.
We seek to understand how memory, place, and/or personhood are constructed and enacted by ethnic communities in ways that create possibilities for defining a decolonial praxis dissociated from hierarchies that reproduce neocolonial manifestations of identities across Europe and the Americas. We will examine ethnic subjects intersectionally and take into account categories of gender, race, class, nationality, sexuality, and indigeneity. We ask: in what ways are decolonial identities promoted without reiterating existing forms of colonialism? How are new “states of being” reconstructed through the migration of bodies and cultures? How do diverse areas of study interpret the interface between power relations and identity formations? What are the socioeconomic, political, and cultural consequences of the re-mapping of localities for migrants?
Our work group looks for graduate students, activists, artists, and/or cultural critics who share interdisciplinary approaches to examining decolonial identities represented in contemporary films, documentaries, literary texts, artistic performances, and art exhibitions.
To apply, please, send:
1. CV
2. Short bio
3. Statement of interest
8) Workgroup: Exploring the Limits of the Body
Co-conveners: Christina Baker (University of Wisconsin-Madison), James McMaster (NYU), Lilia Adriana Pérez-Limón (University of Wisconsin-Madison), Sarah Manya (Concordia University), Shelley Liebembuk (University of Toronto)
The axioms of migration studies call us to critically interrogate the displacement and disposability of people and bodies that have long been involved in circuits of labor and exploitation. Similar to the TransMigrating bodies of the Hemi GSI Convergence 2015 which are “animated bodies across borders,” we ask participants to consider the contemporary political valences of transnational concepts. In doing so, we must pay attention to the influences that shape the way bodies reconfigure cartographies of belonging by destabilizing concepts of being, by existing within or beyond boundaries, by “passing” as someone other than one’s self, and through situations of (im)permanence. This working group will also explore disembodied acts as performative and as performances themselves. Where does the body begin and end? What are its limits? How do performance and its attendant technologies challenge us to think expansively about the body? Drawing from the vast context of the Americas, this working group seeks to analyze performative elements such as sound, photographic materials, video recordings, memorial sites, installation works, etc., in order to consider what counts as a body and how performative acts exist beyond the limits of the physical body. How do practices of sonic, visual, tactile, and olfactory interventions redefine the civic? Can these sensory works enact social responsibility? How can we begin to theorize such sensory functions in order to attune to the sensorium of neoliberal capital and its representational regimes?
To apply, please submit:
1. CV
2. Short bio
3. 250-word essay about how your work fits within the theme of this workgroup
4. Online artistic portfolio or a video link of artistic work (if applicable)
9) Workgroup: Indigeneity Across Borders
Co-conveners: Andrea Chamorro (Universidad de Tarapacá), Gisselle Vila Benites (Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú), Sara Campbell (Indiana University), Sylvia Richardson (Simon Fraser University)
This workgroup invites individuals to discuss the struggles of indigenous peoples. We invite artists, scholars, and activists from any discipline whose work rethinks and reimagines the contemporary borders that define Indigeneity. We aim to transcend rigidity and invite solidarity in our processes of knowing and practices of community/communion with the world. As co-learners, we will explore opportunities for responding to and overcoming the historical scripts of colonialism and monotheistic notions of development that entrap our imaginations––hindering our ability to create pluralistic ways of being. In this walking and wandering together, new visions, concepts, and understandings emerge from our collaborative work. Gadamer (1989) says that we are “always already” in transition, learning to mediate between cultures.We aim to discuss the following themes/questions/ideas: what aesthetics and experiences connect the performances of Indigeneity or indigenous performances? How can bodies, identities, and artifacts be used to bring political struggles to a new arena? How might physical sites of embodied, performed, observed, and contested ethnicity or heritage––like tourist destinations––be seen as spaces of border crossing? How can the continuities or frictions that the Internet proposes for identity politics be revealed? How do indigenous communities mobilize in virtual scenarios? To what extent are identities instrumental when mobilized through the Internet? What possibilities does the online world––when seen as a living space for co-creation––offer indigenous communities?
To apply, please submit:
1. CV
2. short bio
3. statement of interest (250 words)
10) Workgroup: Laughter Without Borders
Co-conveners: Fabio Salvatti (UFSC), Danielle Roper (NYU), Lía La Novia (UNAM)
"The human race has unquestionably one really effective weapon: laughter…. Against the assault of laughter nothing can stand," wrote author and humorist Mark Twain. Even if conceptualizations of what is humorous vary according to cultural context, humor, and laughter are shared human characteristics. Humor, in particular, functions as a voice of fun or festivity and as a medium of transmission. It may very well be a tool of resistance, as well as the instrument for the reproduction of particular ideologies. Laughter Without Borders interrogates the work that humor is made to do in relation to structures of power within nation-states and across transnational borders. How might an examination of racial humor across the hemisphere reveal ideologies that extend beyond the imagined borders of nation-states? What is the role of humor in local and transmigratory activism? What are the particular affective structures that humorous practices evince and what function do they serve in activism?
This workgroup invites critical engagements with various types of humor, including acts of impersonation, racial and gender crossing or passing, and masquerade. Its activities include: 1) collecting specific examples of humorous interventions that criticize nation, class, gender, sexuality, or race in transnational or hemispheric contexts; 2) discussing conceptual frameworks that support the connection between humor and activism; 3) developing a collective action to perform during Convergence 2015.
To apply, please submit:
1. Short biography stating current artistic/academic/activist affiliation(s) and main research/aesthetics/political interests (200 words)
2. Self portrait in which the applicant is required to make the silliest face possible
11) Workgroup: Music Across Borders
Co-conveners: Juan Camilo Agudelo (UT Austin), María Sol Bruno (Universidad Nacional de Córdoba), Noé López (UT Austin), and Shelagh Pizey-Allen (York University)
This workgroup will allow participants to dialogue about and collaborate on the challenges and possibilities of considering music as a practice that is inherently transgressive of boundaries. While recognizing the ways in which music, defined as “humanly organized sound” (Blacking, 1973), has been used historically to fashion borders (of the self, the collective, the nation), we encourage participants to think about how music works across boundaries to reorganize society. As a point of departure, we outline three broad types of borders crossings with which we would like participants to engage.
Disciplinary borders: Music research occurs in an increasingly diverse disciplinary landscape from musicology to area studies, from history to psychology, from sociology to queer studies. Despite the academy’s best attempts, musical practice resists easy categorization. Most striking perhaps, is the potential for music to challenge the boundaries between inquiry and practice, between investigation and performance.
Sonic borders: As a practice grounded in the production and experience of sound, music can be thought of as bounded––distinct from noise and sound. Who creates and polices those boundaries? How do artists, activists, and scholars use sound and listening as critical strategies and categories? How are sound and music used to collapse or construct difference? How might we conceive of a politics of resistance rooted in sound?
Bodily borders: Whether resulting from musical enculturation or sheer sonic force, music mobilizes and activates bodies into collective engagement. This embodied dimension of sound and music is one of its most powerful effects and simultaneously one of its most contested boundaries. How can we understand the relationship between music/sound and bodily movement? How can we strategically deploy music/sound toward collective political movement? What are the limits of this relationship?
We encourage applications that engage with these issues through researched case studies, performances, and/or reflections from applicants’ experiences as activist organizers or community arts practitioners.
To apply, please submit:
1. CV
2. Short bio
3. Statement of interest that demonstrates how your background/research connects to these themes (300 words)
4. Artistic portfolio (if applicable)
12) Workgroup: The Politics of Fiction
Co-conveners: Andrés Jurado (Universidad Javeriana de Colombia), Olivia Gagnon (NYU), Amelia Bande (NYU)
This work group invites artists, writers, activists, and scholars to engage in both the theory and practice of fiction-making as a political process that animates transmigratory collectivities. This year, the workgroup will pay close attention to the circulation of fictions concerning the cosmos, sidereal and extraterrestrial space, and the figure of the "alien"––as well as their influences on the construction of colonial, national, and transmigratory discourses. We will explore the ways in which processes and practices of fictionalization participate in the production of both space and time, asking how cosmic maps, psychogeographies, imageries, and imaginaries have informed and disrupted our mythologies and discursive formations. How have they produced narratives that both describe and produce movement, affects, encounters, performances, and collectivities? What cosmogenic vision have we inherited? Where have we inscribed our stories about the traditions and communities that we have lost? Although fiction has often been deployed as a disciplinary mechanism, it is not only the powerful who have recourse to its transformative potential. We hope to learn about fictional strategies used across the American continent, social classes, ethnic groups and political struggles, as well as work to generate and explore new strategies. Fictional modes include but are not limited to: parodies, “fake” archives and documents, simulations, situations staged in the flow of the everyday, faked photographs and documents, installations, imagined and imaginary spaces (urban, theatrical, architectural, domestic, etc). Structured according to the logic of practice-based research, this workgroup will allow participants to develop strategies, interventions, and experiments to be staged (individually and/or in groups) over the course of Convergence 2015.
To apply, please submit:
1. CV
2. A paragraph explaining your current research, its relationship to the theme, and what you expect from the workgroup
13) Workgroup: Strategies of Counter-Hegemonic Storytelling in Borderscapes
Co-conveners: Adriana Trujilllo (Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona), Christina Sisk (University of Houston), Emily Sevier (UCSD), Kate Clark (Storylines TJ/SD), Sara Solaimani (UCSD)
La frontera existe para transgredirla...
The border exists to be transgressed...
A fronteira existe para ser transgredida…
To understand the lived reality of a border, whether national or local, physical or social, the border must be understood not as an ideologically and physically impermeable militarized edifice, but rather as a porous entity that is constantly transgressed. Everyday transgressions, legal and extra-legal exchanges, material and invisible flows of goods, people, and cultures––all cut openings in the predominant narratives of/about/along a border—outlining its limitations, and highlighting gaps in/through which new binational/transnational imaginaries can be elicited. As researchers, artists, activists, and educators, what are the methodologies and platforms that we can employ to deconstruct and open these rifts? How do we communicate meta-narratives, the subaltern, and/or resistance in territories laden and cross-freighted by dominant hegemonic narratives? How do processes of translation, interpretation, and editing become an inherent part of both research and creative processes?
This working group will serve as an opportunity to discuss and share theoretical approaches, strategies, and methodologies born from regional particularities and local specificity, that nonetheless share solidarity and points of contact through an interest in storytelling, documentation and/or (re)presentation of counter-hegemonic narratives within borderized landscapes.
To participate, please include:
1. CV
2. Short bio
3. Statement of interest (200-300 words)
4. An example project (all forms of media are accepted: text, video, performance documentation, etc.)