Core Courses 2019-20
NICA Core Programme 2019-2020
Transformations of Trauma in the Age of Climate Change
Workshop with Stef Craps (Ghent University) | Friday 22nd November, 1-4 pm. | Location t.b.a. | The increasing visibility of climate change and scientists’ alarming warnings about it are taking a toll on people’s mental well-being. This lecture surveys the culturally resonant repertoire of new coinages that have emerged in recent years to name and communicate environmentally induced distress.
Transmission in Motion Seminar (2019-2020)
“Expanded Practices of Knowing: Interdisciplinary Approaches” | The Transmission in Motion Seminar is a more-or-less monthly gathering of researchers and students from across disciplines. To participate, please send an email to tim@uu.nl to receive additional information and readings. RMA Students can acquire 3 EC if they attend all meetings and write blog posts after each meeting. Please register at tim@uu.nl. For more information, contact Maaike Bleeker at m.a.bleeker[a]uu.nl.
Memory, Word and Image: W.G. Sebald’s Artistic Legacies
Seminar taught by Prof.Dr. Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes and Dr. Ilse van Rijn | Amsterdam, 6 December (Pre-meeting), 12-14 December (Conference), 16 December (post-meeting) 2019
Decolonizing & Indigenizing Justice: Confronting Colonial Injustice in an “Age of Reconciliation”?
NICA Masterclass with Patricia Barkaskas (Instructor & Director Indigenous Community Legal Clinic, University of British Columbia) | For: (research) master students / PhD candidates | Date: Friday, November 1, 2019 | Time: 10:00-12:00 | Location: University Library (Potgieterzaal), Singel 425, Amsterdam. | 1 EC | This masterclass considers questions connected to the project of a decolonial resistance pedagogy, and its significance in Canada for the project of decolonizing and Indigenizing justice.
Cultural Studies Now
NICA Core Course 6 EC | Murat Aydemir | October 29 to December 10, 2019|
What did crucial terms such as identity politics, interdisciplinarity, and popular culture mean in the 1960s, and what can they still mean today, a time when so much once-progressive notions may seem obsolete or co-opted by power?
Radical Interdisciplinarity
NICA core course 5 EC | Taught by Maaike Bleeker and Iris van der Tuin | November 2019 – February 2019
In this course we look at currently emerging interdisciplinary approaches that move beyond the borders of the humanities and investigate how they may challenge and reorient our thinking. How do certain ‘moves’ offered by state-of-the-art scientific approaches lead to radically interdisciplinary endeavors, change our understanding of the object of our research, the relationships between objects and concepts, and what it is that we do when we do theory?
Sustainability: Technocracy and Meditation
Public Talk and Masterclass with Allan Stoekl (Penn State University) organized by ASCA Political Ecologies Group & Environmental Humanities Center, CLUE+, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | September 20th, 2019 | Please note that we are in the VUMedical Faculty, room D-565 (building MF) at the Vrije University
Aesthetics and Politics in Critical Theory
Reading Group organized by Ben Moore, Marc Farrant, and Steyn Bergs | This reading group will explore a selection of seminal, and some lesser-known, works within twentieth and twenty-first century critical and cultural theory, with an emphasis on the intersection between the aesthetic and the political. | Research Masters students who take part in the group will be eligible for 2ECs via NICA. | First Session: 19 September 2019, 4-6pm.
Decolonial Studies and Political Philosophy
NICA Core Course 6 EC | Yolande Jansen | April – May 2020 | In the humanities, globalization has until quite recently been studied from two rather distinct perspectives: either from a postcolonial or decolonial cultural-historical perspective, or from a normative, political theoretical perspective, often rooted in the liberal and human rights traditions. Over the last years, it has been increasingly recognized by scholars from both the cultural and political-theoretical fields that integrating these perspectives would be helpful to enhance the humanities’ critical and practical potential in today’s world.
Queer Intersections
NICA Core Course offered by Toni Pape | Amsterdam | Thursdays 3 – 6 pm | 9 April, 16 April, 23 April, 30 April,7 May, 14 May 2020
In this course, we will explore a mix of seminal and very recent interventions in queer thinking. More specifically, we will study how queer theory can productively intervene in other fields, mainly critical race theories and disability studies. The aim is not to provide students with a comprehensive survey of queer intersectional interventions, but rather to give them a sense of how queerness and queer thinking are able to disrupt normative and oppressive assumptions in a variety of fields of study, including hopefully the students’ own research areas.