Announcement | NICA Core Courses 2023-2024
We are very pleased to announce this batch of new and returning core courses for the 2023-2024 academic year. We look forward to welcoming you to one or more of these wonderful events, and are extremely grateful to all involved instructors for continuing to offer NICA and its members the very best they have to offer.
Please note that registration for our semester 1 courses will open August 1st. For further announcements about the Semester 2 registration dates, keep an eye on our website and monthly newsletters.
Registration will be made possible through our website. Please refrain from contacting individual instructors, as they will not be able to secure students a spot in their course.
Semester 1
Autotheory and its Negativity
Dates: 11, 18, 25 September; 2, 9, 16 October 2023
Time: 11:00-15:00
Location: University of Amsterdam (Bushuis D3.06)
Instructor: Marija Cetinic (UvA)
Contact: marija.cetinic77@gmail.com
Credits: 6 ECTS
This course will study the transmedial form of autotheory, pursuing both its historical lineage as well as its proliferation since the 2010s. Close reading the autotheoretical turn, this course asks how autotheory, in its unsettling of generic and affective expectation, can be a site or practice of non-identity and the de-functionalization of subjectivities done and undone by the theoretical.
Archaeologies of AI: From Bots to Spectres
Dates: 18, 25 Sept, 2, 9, 30 Oct 2023 + exhibition visits
Time: 15:15-18:15
Location: Utrecht University (Janskerkhof 2-3) & MCW Lab (Muntstraat 2A)
Instructor: Evelyn Wan (UU)
Contact: p.y.wan@uu.nl
Credits: 5 ECTS
Who are we really interacting with when we chat with a bot? What lurks behind the interface of AI? What drives the anthropomorphic understanding of machines as intelligent beings? The course approaches AI from a media archaeological perspective, and studies media histories that might help us understand the medium of AI, such as chat-based AI like ChatGPT, Bard, Replika, Insomnobot-3000, and beyond.
Attention: Economies, Media, Affect (2023)
Dates: 12-17 November 2023 (intensive one-week course, online) + 24 November live meeting in Tilburg
Location: Online & Tilburg University
Instructor: Inge van de Ven (TSHD)
Contact: i.g.m.vdven@tilburguniversity.edu
Credits: 6 ECTS
In this intensive, one-week core course, we explore the meaning of present-day attention economies and their psychological, sociocultural, political, aesthetic, and ethical implications. To this end, we examine theories of attention and attention economies through a close reading of core texts from different disciplines, including philosophy, psychology/cognitive science, media theory, film theory, gender studies, and literary studies. Key readings include texts by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Gaston Bachelard, Dan Sperber, N. Katherine Hayles, Maryanne Wolf, Steven Shaviro, and Lauren Berlant.
Politics of Withdrawal?
Dates: November 8, 22, 29, December 6, 13, 20 (2023)
Time: 13:15-16:00
Location: Pieter de La Court building – SA.29 (Leiden University)
Instructor: Joost de Bloois (UvA)
Contact: j.g.c.debloois@uva.nl
Credits: 6 ECTS
At first glance, a “politics of withdrawal” appears to be somewhat of an oxymoron, as withdrawal entails non-action, inoperativity, dis-engagement. Doesn’t this place withdrawal at the opposite end of politics—generally understood to be, precisely, all about engagement, intervention in real life issues, a struggle over the manifold ways in which to organize society, about agency and direct action? This course investigates ‘withdrawal’ (and related concepts such as ‘exodus’, ‘autonomy’ or ‘retreat’) as anything but depoliticized: Withdrawal emphasizes and increases antagonisms, but it does so by displacing the terms in which antagonism is conceived.
Cultural Analysis Now!
Dates: Nov-Dec, 2023 (dates to be announced)
Location: Leiden University
Instructor: Pepita Hesselberth (UL)
Contact: p.hesselberth@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Credits: 5 ECTS
Cultural analysis is a vibrant research practice across the humanities and social sciences. Its principles include interdisciplinarity, social and political urgency, a heuristic use of theoretical concepts, the detailed analysis of cultural practices and objects, and a sharp awareness of the situatedness of the scholar in time and space. But – so the editors of the soon to come out volume Cultural Analysis 2033 Murat Aydemir (NICA’s former director), Aylin Kuryel,and Noa Roei, ask –, in a rapidly changing world, can cultural analysis still rise to current and imminent challenges? Is the practice still suited to the spiraling of social, political, economic, and environmental crises that marks our time?
In this course we invite cutting-edge scholars from NICA’s various partner universities in various stages of their career to share their thoughts and present their latest work(-in-progress) in the form of a series of lectures, workshops and roundtable discussions. The course aims to offer a unique opportunity to meet and greet leading scholars in an environment of intellectual exchange and open discussion. The final assignment of the course comprises a presentation and a research paper.
Semester 2
*Trans* Archives, Arts, Affects (in collaboration with NOG)
Dates: 21, 28 Feb, 6, 13, 20 Mar 2024
Location: Maastricht University
Instructor: Eliza Steinbock (UM)
Contact: e.steinbock@maastrichtuniversity.nl
Credits: 5 ECTS
*for registration, a short motivation of 150-200 words will be required.
This core course is organized in collaboration with the Netherlands research school of gender studies NOG
“We were there – erasing us is a real act of violence,” claimed scholar Syrus Marcus Ware about the lack of records on transgender community members in the Canadian national queer archive (2017, 174). The message that transgender people “don’t exist,” even within queer archives, has been echoed by institutional archives worldwide (Hayward 2017). As actress-activist Laverne Cox explained in the New York Times, “At the heart of the fight for trans justice is a level of stigmso intense and pervasive that trans folks are often told we don’t exist — that we’re really just the gender we were assigned at birth” (2013). The discriminatory perspective of the archive and of media is a powerful means to enact a cultural “erasure” that amounts to an “epistemocide” of particular knowledge and lives, which has had dire social consequences (Namaste 2000; Lewis 2014; Santos 2014).
Making Texts Work: Life Writing, Media Affordances, and Circulation
Dates: 28 February; 6, 13, 20, 27 March 2024
Instructors: Anna Poletti (UU), Erin La Cour (VU)
Location: VU, plus field work in Amsterdam
Contact: e.l.lacour@vu.nl & a.l.poletti@uu.nl
Credits: 6 ECTS
This course works with Stuart Hall’s fundamental insights into the circuit of culture to consider how stories of lived experience are shaped in specific media forms, how those forms are circulated and exhibited, and what meanings are collectively made from them (or not). Combining an exploration of scholarly discourse on life writing with a focus on methods derived from cultural analysis, cultural studies, and creative practice, this course is both theoretical and hands-on. Besides close-reading specific cultural artifacts and texts while tracking their production, circulation, exhibition, and reception, the aim of the course is to a) better grasp the role of media affordances in the process of making personal stories; and b) develop skills in observing and analysing the circuits of production, circulation, and reception that these texts traverse. To this end, the course includes a number of creative workshops in which we engage in the actual making of media objects like zines and comics within an academic context, and visits to a variety of spaces in Amsterdam in which life writing is exhibited and sold. Participants will have the opportunity to develop an independent research project based on their own interests in the role of personal storytelling in cultural debates.
Aquatic Thinking in a Fluid Age
Dates: Semester 2, 2024, weekly meetings on Thursdays (dates to be announced)
Location: Radboud University
Instructors: Jeroen Boom (RUN), Laszlo Muntéan (RUN)
Contact: jeroen.boom@ru.nl & laszlo.muntean@ru.nl
Credits: 5 ECTS
In the wake of what Cecilia Chen calls the “hydrological turn”, in this course, we reflect on the discursive function of water and how thinking with water can help to counter the solid assumptions of terrestrial epistemologies. We map out different aquatic metaphors and critically navigate the oceanic worlds that they evoke, celebrating their potential to unground earthly forms of knowledge while also reflecting on the dangers of their performative power. We ask, for example, how an adjective such as “amphibious” helps to think beyond anthropocentric worldviews or how a term like “leakiness” erodes the fixed borders between nature/culture, yet we also want to acknowledge the slipperiness of such words, asking how the watery metaphor of “flows” connects migration policies to a seamlessness that conceals the obstructions that refugees experience, or how the concept of “streams” hides the inherent frictions within digital platform infrastructures. We will discuss such watery wor(l)ds in aesthetic, political, forensic, and ecological contexts to start thinking about how their aquatic material resonance trickles into the ways we think about the realities they aim to describe.
Field Theory
Dates: April 2, 4, 9, 11, 16, 18 + final presentation days on April 23 and 25
Time: 11:00-14:00
Location: University of Amsterdam
Instructor: Jeff Diamanti (UvA)
Contact: j.diamanti@uva.nl
Credits: 6 ECTS
Traditionally, “the field” of research has been treated as the raw material from which objects and cases are drawn in order to advance knowledge in a given discipline. A forest, tribal territory, archive of literature, or body of water, for instance, yields data and patterns in need of an analytic. That data demands interpretation, theorization, and disciplinary vetting. In Kantian epistemology, the world is coherent and legible but verifiably not self-evident. In this orientation, the lab, library, or desk is the site where information becomes knowledge, and it is for this reason that “the field” has remained an opaque realm for philosophical inquiry and epistemic habit (even as “the world” begins to force itself back into disciplinary reckoning). Any epistemic culture bears a determinate (and determined) relation to the field, but how exactly remains and under-examined question. Will time in the forest, the archive, or body of water modulate assumption, expectation, concept formation, or conclusion? Can the field write itself into our analytic disposition? Ought we assume a normative orientation toward what often bifurcates field frequencies, embedded relation, biosemiotic idiom (in short, the world) from the stylistics of disciplinary habit (what we make of it)? What might motivate the recent imperative in feminist science, new materialist philosophy, and ecological theory to find commensurabilities and reciprocities between the field and the interpretive apparatus?
Summer school – ‘Creative Work(s): Cultural Production Studies Across the Disciplines’ (2024)
Dates: 1-4 July 2024
Location: Rijksuniversiteit Groningen
Instructors: Sara Strandvad (RUG), Kathryn Roberts (RUG)
Contact: s.m.strandvad@rug.nl & k.s.roberts@rug.nl
Credits: 5 ECTS
The COVID-19 pandemic has inspired new forms of artistic practice through technology (Zoom ballet! Streaming concerts!) and a renewed appreciation for the role the arts play in our collective life. Yet with the closing of performance spaces and the hospitality industry (where many artists have day jobs), creative workers, already precarious, find themselves in dire circumstances. Although creative work is almost universally celebrated, it is financially sustainable for very few creators. Meanwhile, platform-based home entertainment generates massive profits for multinational corporations. This Summer School explores the way artists and scholars have dealt with these contradictions: through protest and critique and explanation; through innovative creative and scholarly practice; through building new kinds of institutions and collectives.