Lecture and masterclass, 2 EC, April 3 and 6 | Richenel Ansano is the UNESCO Facilitator on Intangible Heritage in Curaçao and an expert on heritage and memory. The lecture examines the landscape of 20th century critical thought in Curaçao in relation to regional, Kingdom and global developments, its own unique traditions, and how this vital thought-action culture is forgotten by a society marked by a history of slavery, colonialism and rapid industrialization. The masterclass discusses various concepts of opposition, repression, romanticization, decontextualization and appropriation in the Curaçaoan context, and dives into the contentious relationships among critical Curaçaoan thinkers. Additionally, the active construction of forgetting in Curaçao will be taken into account.

Seminar, 1 EC, March 21-22 | Porn has gone mainstream. Its tropes and narratives increasingly appear as unmarked in everday culture. The seminar shall analyze specific texts in which porn tropes and narratives are carried over into mainstream culture to better comprehend why porn has become so ubiquitously visible that its presence is rendered invisible due to its regularity. 

Elective, offered by the VU, 6 EC, starting February 6 | Sound Heritage explores what sounds and sound concepts have been approved in the past; under what conditions these might be considered heritage today; and what saving such concepts for future generations actually means.

25-26 January 2018, Amsterdam | Journalists, artists and scholars, among others, tend to refer to iconic events or images from the past in order to better understand present-day developments. For example, in the wake of the American elections media repeatedly referred to the iconic ‘years of crisis’ of the thirties of the last century. Also, they recalled George Orwell’s iconic depiction of a dystopian society from his novel 1984 to contextualize the use of ‘alternative facts’. In this respect, the icon functions as a model that generates cultural meaning by connecting past and present. But the icon not only shapes our (collective) image of the present, nor does it merely re-evaluate our image of the past. It also opens up potential scenarios for the future – be it brilliant or gloomy.

Masterclass, 3 EC, 7-9 December 2017 | Ann Laura Stoler is Willy Brandt Distinguished University Professor of Anthropology and Historical Studies at The New School for Social Research in New York. She has worked for some thirty years on the politics of knowledge, colonial governance, racial epistemologies, the sexual politics of empire, and ethnography of the archives. During this masterclass, Stoler will address the trajectory of her work and how subjects change both the form and content of the writing process. How do words, concepts, and style matter?

Public Lecture and Masterclass, November 9-10, 1 EC | Erez Tzfadia teaches and researches spatial policy and politics at the department of public policy and administration at Sapir College, Israel. The lecture will address practices of territorial control and dispossession, based on ‘gray spacing’: temporal and informal development of land in which the logic of ethno-nationalism, and not the logic of law, determines the future of development – formalization or eviction. The masterclass will include a screening of a recent documentary that reveals the story of Israel’s “development towns” – 30 new localities that were planned and built in 1950s as part of colonization and present the price that immigrant-families often pay for colonial projects. A short introduction on frontiers and periphery will precede the film, and a discussion on colonialism, territory and cultural hierarchies will follow.

Conference workshop, 3 EC, October 12, November 2-4 | The conference explores the ‘worlding’ of the brain, the mutual influence of the extra-cerebral world on the brain and the brain on the world. The themes of affect, care and engagement indicate that the interaction between world and brain is never neutral but always mediated by concerns, interests and emotions in different ways.

Lecture and masterclass, 1 EC, January 10, 2018 | As the phenomenon of Pokémon Go made clear in 2016, videogaming now takes place not in a separate sphere, isolated from the mainstream of modern capitalist society, but at society’s very centre. The structure of dream consciousness promoted by gaming inescapably shapes our world, arising from the multitude of screens that surround us and mediate the way we perceive the everyday world, as well as its possible futures and our role within them. Alfie Bown’s new book argues that such ubiquity should not be understood purely in terms of ideological control however, or as merely another way in which leisure time is commodified for the benefit of narrow economic interests; rather, drawing on Lacanian dream analysis, we can find videogaming to be a subtle and even subversive space, which holds the potential to reshape the politics of the Left even as it serves the domination of a hegemonic capitalist consensus. Drawing on insights from Bown’s work, this event provides a chance to explore the link between videogaming, psychoanalysis and capitalism, and to reconsider the relevance of what we might call ‘capitalist dream analysis’ for cultural analysis and practice more widely.

Seminar, 5 EC, starting September 20, 2017 | How can we assess the status of interpretation in the Humanities today? Increasingly in the last decades, scholars have written about the limits of interpretation. We discuss various orientations toward reading that oppose some of the hallmarks of the hermeneutic tradition—such as depth, consciousness, the primacy of language, humanism, interpretation, mediation, epistemology, and historicism. Instead, these theories value surfaces, description, cognition, affect, materiality, nonhuman entities, the natural and social sciences, and speculative thought.