Core Course | Cultural Analysis Now! – ‘Engaged Research, Active Hope, and Moral Ambition’

Core Course | Cultural Analysis Now!
Dates: 13, 20, 27 September, 11, 18, 25 October 2024
Location: Leiden University (Sterrewacht/Observatory, Room A0.06)
Time: 13:00-16:00
Instructor: Pepita Hesselberth
Registration: NICA website here, starting June 26th 13:00
Credits: 5 ECTS

In this course, we invite cutting-edge NICA scholars in various stages of their careers to present their work(-in-progress) and reflect on the future of our field. Cultural analysis is a vibrant research practice. Its principles include interdisciplinarity, social and political urgency, a heuristic use of theory, detailed analysis of cultural practices, and a sharp awareness of the situatedness of the scholar in time and space. But, the editors of the forthcoming volume on The Future of Cultural Analyis (AUP 2024), ask in a rapidly changing world, is our practice still liable and viable? Can cultural analysis still rise to current and imminent challenges? Is it still suited to the spiraling social, political, economic, and environmental crises of our times?

Organized as a series of  lectures, workshops and roundtable discussions, this course aims to offers a unique opportunity to meet and greet early, mid-career and established scholars in an environment of intellectual exchange and open discussion. Where the nucleus of the previous iteration of CAN! (2023) revolved around the issues of method in cultural analysis and research as a collaborative praxis, the speakers of this years rendering of CAN! converge in that they are all involved in what we could call engaged research and they all address, in one way or another, the issue of hope.

In adition to weekly reading assignments, the final assignment of the course comprises a collaborative and an individual component (weight 20% | 80%). Continuing our collaboratioin with Soapbox this year, students will be asked to propose an imaginary special issue for their journal, and each will write an individual research-based contribution towards the same end.

Program

• 13/09 Pepita Hesselberth (LU) – Engaged Research, Active Hope, and Moral Ambition
• 20/09 Noa Roei & Aylin Kuryel (UvA) – Pedagogy & The Future of Cultural Analysis
• 27/09 Maria Boletsi (LU/UvA) – The Politics of Weird Aesthetics in Recent  Protest and Activism
• 04/10 No class (Leids ontzet)
• 11/10 Maaike Bleeker (UU) & Ruowen Xu (UU) – Robotics, Imaginary Futures and Engaged Research in an Interdisciplinary Context
• 18/10 Ruby de Vos & Risk Hazekamp (Hanze Hogeschool) – Bio Based Materials & Practice Based Research
• 25/10 Quinsy Gario (VU) & Daniela Agostinho (Aarhus, Denmark) – Practices of Care, Repair and Restitution: Colonial Archives, Art, Curation