Core Courses 2017-18
In the academic year 2017-18, NICA offers three 6 EC core courses for research master students.
PhD Work in Progress 2018
CFP, PhD Workshop, June 15, 2018 | We’d like to invite all NICA PhD members for our ‘Work in Progress’ meeting on Friday, June 15, 2018. The idea is simply for PhD researchers to share a sample of their own work in progress, with joint discussion and feedback to follow. Feel free to present work that’s genuinely in process: fledgling, under way, unfinished, partial, fragmentary, patchy, stuck.
Gina Dent: The Idea of Africa
Lecture and masterclass, May 16, 2018, 1 EC | Scholar and organizer Gina Dent will give a masterclass at the University of Amsterdam called The Idea of Africa (May 16). Besides a masterclass, she will present from her forthcoming book Anchored to the Real: Black Literature in the Wake of Anthropology (Duke University Press) in a lecture at the Black Archives (May 16) and participate in the Public Dialogue: Radical Solidarity and Intergenerational Coalitions at the Tropenmuseum (May 13). The masterclass, lecture, and public dialogue are part of the weeklong program Moving Together: Activism, Art and Education – A Week with Angela Davis. The masterclass —the title of which is taken from V.Y. Mudimbe’s classic text of the same name—will focus on the epistemological and political position of Africa in cultural studies, the role of anthropology, and the simultaneous processes of over- and under-representation of the continent that mark enunciations of the global and the local.
The Energy Commons, with Ashley Dawson and Jeff Diamanti
Public event, May 24, 2018 | The struggle for democratic control over energy production, distribution, and use is consequently a key front in the fight for a better, sustainable world. In order to make this power shift, we need to stop thinking of energy as a commodity and instead conceive of it as part of the global commons, a vital element in the great stock of air, water, plants, and collectively created cultural forms like music and language that have traditionally been regarded as the inheritance of humanity as a whole.
Ashley Dawson: Can New York Be Saved?
Masterclass, 1 EC, May 24, 2018 | Taking New York City as a paradigmatic example, this masterclass explores the question of the urban condition in the Anthropocene Age. If the urban communities that will face the gravest threats are those already coping with entrenched forms of economic, social, and environmental injustice, what role do urban movements for just adaptation have to play in an era of climate chaos? And how can such movements best challenge the disasters brought on by a capitalist system run amok?
Politics of Boredom
CFP, deadline May 20, 2018 | The punk youth of the 70s, with no prospect on a future, but with a fiery desire to reject, shouted “London’s burning with boredom” in unison with the Clash song. In the 2000s, the Apple factory claimed that the workers in China committed suicide “out of boredom”, even though their working conditions were “just fine.” Can boredom work as a collective force for creativity? Can it be an affective entry point to build new political subjectivities?
Elvis Lives in Amsterdam
CFP, deadline May 21, 2018 | We aim to have an interdisciplinary discussion about the various ways in which our understanding of musicians taps into the imaginary, and what case studies about musicians can teach us about the imaginary constitution of our everyday experiences. Our interest will not be to debunk myths, but to understand what role imaginary representations of musicians play in our personal lives, in society and the arts in general.
Moving Together: Activism, Art and Education, with Angela Davis
Week-long programme, May 12-17, 2018 | Artists, educators and activists have often been at the forefront of challenging social and cultural hierarchies within society. Events of the past decade have highlighted a noticeable increase in authoritarianism, racism, sexism, environmental disasters and economic hardship at local and global levels. This turbulent climate has prompted significant responses in the form of social movements calling for more inclusion, decolonization, and liberation within cultural and educational institutions. Moving Together aspires to amplify ongoing conversations on refugee, anti-racist, feminist, queer, trans*, anti-border, anti-nationalist, prison abolition, and environmental justice struggles through sharing knowledge and strengthening connections between arts, activism and education.
As Slowly As Possible: Entangled Temporalities
Workshop, May 24, 3 EC | In a comparative analysis, we will discuss the four keynotes’ different approaches towards the interrelation of the temporality of media on the one hand, and human temporality on the other. We will analyze how the different media these scholars and artists scrutinize (sound, moving image, literature, performance) are related to different approaches towards mediated, embodied, and experienced time, as well as towards natural, human, and technological concepts of time.
Florian Cramer: Weaponization of the Carnivalesque
Public Lecture, April 20 | Florian Cramer is a reader in 21st Century Visual Culture at the Willem de Kooning Academy Rotterdam. This lecture will map the network and history of the large white suprematist subculture of the “Alt-Right” along with related currents and subcultures, break down its deliberately hermetic linguistic and visual codes, and explain their relation to popular visual culture on the Internet.
Interpretation Today
May 16, Conference | Increasingly in the last decades, scholars have written about the limits of interpretation. Recent forms of ‘distant reading’ in Digital Humanities, experiments in machine reading, critiques of historicism, and narratives of the ‘turn away from the linguistic turn,’ all foreground the epistemological restrictions inherent to the practice of interpreting individual texts. We will critically assess these orientations and try to rethink the uses and misuses of hermeneutics in the present moment.