Penn Ip | My research studies how spaces control and enable lower class single migrant women’s intimate lives in contemporary Shanghai. The project focuses on single migrant women at the age of 20-35, in Shanghai who work in 3 distinctive sectors: factories, bars/night clubs, and domestic services. By employing affect theory to bridge city spaces to migrant studies and singlehood, the research objective is to unfold how single migrant women encounter the spaces in contemporary Shanghai, thereby not only shaping, modifying, and manipulating their intimate lives (particularly at the affective level), but also allowing for moments of agency and sites of empowerment.

Essayism at the dusk of catastrophe

“The essay is the strictest form attainable in an area where one cannot work precisely” – Robert Musil

Thijs Witty | Despite a long and varied history, rooted in sixteenth-century France via the writings of Michel de Montaigne, essays are usually associated with highly derivative activities: school assignments, newspaper commentaries, or other standardised modes of opinionated thinking. From its inception, the essay has however appeared in numerous permutations, inhabiting virtually every discourse and material expression available. The essay tests the notion of genre, merges disciplines by conflating art, philosophy and science, and continuously revises its systems of logic by experimenting with stylistic and rhetorical codes.

The essay as a form incessantly undoes and resets the range of subjectivity, judgment and truth within the complexity of experience. But then there are those experiences that inscribe a limit on possible subjectivity: the traumatic, the sublime, the impossible, the ecstatic. These and other limit-experiences can be so severe that they tear the linguistic subject from itself, leaving the “I” in a state of frayage. Such fraying is generally deemed to render all genres of expression incapable of repairing or restoring subjectivity. Whilst the relative possibility of aesthetics, politics and ethics in relation to limit-experience has been widely questioned in theology, criticism, psychoanalysis, and philosophy, very few studies exist on its form of expression. The dyad I propose as a departure point in this troubling negotiation of subjectivity is that of essayism and limit-experience.

My dissertation project implies a wide variety of knots between limit-experience and essayism. This is partly motivated by a peculiar dialectic: prevailing conceptions of the essay (both as a distinct intellectual form and type of personal expression) have praised its continuous self-questioning, openness, and intellectual indecisiveness, while key studies in the phenomenology and hermeneutics of limit-experience inversely consider similar or sometimes even identical attributes as main impediments in the struggle with frayed ipseity. It is the task of this research to test the troubling co-constitution of frayed ipseity between limit-experience and essayism. By taking a comparative approach, the study brings together relevant case studies in both literature and visual arts, handling the research through the practice of cultural analysis.

A History of the Construction of the Idea of Dutch Design, 1945-2010

Joana Ozorio de Almeida Meroz | VU University

This research examines the history of the construction of the idea of Dutch Design, 1945-2010. It advances from the premise that Dutch Design is the product of a discursive construction rather than the natural result of a ‘typically Dutch’ identity or culture. Accordingly, this research traces the development of ideas about Dutch Design as well as the actors involved in the production and institutionalisation of those ideas. Ultimately, the aim is to develop an empirical understanding of the actual relationships between Dutch Design and its socio-cultural contexts without relying on stereotypes of national culture and of design. The broader relevance of this study is that it contributes to the development of a theoretical-methodological framework within which the relationship between design and society can be studied scientifically. This is key to the development of the new academic field of Design studies in the Netherlands and abroad. This research is funded by the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (Nederlandse Organisatie voor Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek, NWO) programme Mosaic.

Melle Jan Kromhout | ‘Noise’ is often referred to in opposition to ‘sound’ and ‘music’: an abject, transgressive or disruptive element, a threat to identity. Contrary to this view, recording practices, musical developments and listening habits show that noise is actually an important feature of recorded music. Based on this, the project argues noise is not just the antithesis of identity, but also a formative agent in the formation of singular identity in recorded music. The importance of noise is based on its decisive role in defining the identity of sounds: its noisy first instance (the ‘attack’) influences each sound’s specific overtones. This ‘noise-logic’ – noise determining sonic identity – became pivotal in recorded music, since recording is all about specific sound. The resulting concept of ‘noise identities’ is used for assessing the meaning of sound in the age of technological media: recorded music only seems to become meaningful when noise is accounted for.

Although the importance of noise for the formation of identity in recorded music was discovered in practice, it has hardly been theorized. This project aims to do so by asking: how to conceive identity in an age of noise? It entails an historical and theoretical revaluation of noise in a mediaparadigm and introduces the concept of ‘noise identities,’ which is developed through several case studies as a tool for the analysis of musical, as well as non-musical practices.

Supervisor | Sander van Maas

Annelies Kleinherenbrink | The aim of this project is to trace and reflect on the many different ways in which the notion of ‘neuroplasticity’ is conceptualized, deployed, circulated, shared, contested, rejected or ignored when the relationship between sex / gender and the brain is at stake. Referring to the ability of the brain to undergo functional and structural changes in response to experience, neuroplasticity has become a central concept in (popular) neuroscientific explanations of diverse and flexible human behaviors. Surprisingly, the potential role of this phenomenon is rarely discussed when it comes to the development, endurance and variability of gendered traits. As such, the popular view that binary sex is simply ‘hardwired’ in the brain remains largely unchallenged by counter-evidence. Critics, mostly feminist scholars, advocate and actively contribute to a more rigorous scientific practice, one which actively explores the question of plasticity. By blurring biological development and social experience, plasticity puts feminist and neuroscientific concerns into close contact  – for example, questions about the ‘neuronal embodiment’ of social relations immediately arise. Plasticity thus opens up a multidisciplinary space from which the relationship between sex / gender and the brain can be reappraised. However, critical scholars have raised concerns about the ramifications of approaching sex / gender through the plastic brain. What exactly does neuroscientific knowledge add to feminist scholarship about gender identity or sexuality?  What kind of subjectivity does the trope of neuroplasticity, with its associated norms and values (malleability, flexibility, therapeutic intervention, self-improvement), constitute? Driven by a desire for more complex understandings of the brain, yet apprehensive about the implications of the ‘neuro-turn’ currently imposing itself upon the humanities, I explore the potential – bot promising and perilous – neuroplasticity has for feminist theory.

Supervisor | Patricia Pisters