Exhibition, June 1 and 2 | How can analysis take shape? The many different artefacts collected in Thinking Through Things together answer this question. As projects accompanying the theses of eleven rMA Cultural Analysis students from the University of Amsterdam, these artworks, images and objects are each products of individual thought processes, labour and archives: research in practice. Heterogeneous in both subject matter and form, the exhibition includes video essays, textiles, performance poetry, visual works, sculpture and photography — on topics as diverse as astrology, alt-right camp, smart cities, Islam Nusantara and drone cinematography.

Lecture and masterclass, June 6 and 7, 2018, 2 EC | In this lecture and masterclass, we reflect upon the meaning of decolonization in Caribbean contexts where political sovereignty is not the anticipated nor desired outcome. As we consider bitter contests over the etiology of same-sex desire in the region and the consistent framing of gender transgression and same sex desire as colonial imposition, we explore the forms of political maneuver that make desire the terrain for proxy debates about sovereignty, freedom, and decolonial futures.

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.

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.

Workshop, April 12 | The humanities has recently undergone a paradigm shift in its turn to ‘new materialism’. This new materialist perspective has had profound implications for humanities’ understanding of politics not as delimited to a specific domain of human activity but as a complex and scattered reality where power is thoroughly distributed between different entities. How can the humanities, by engaging with this new materialist understanding of politics, be relevant to urgent societal and scientific questions today?

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.

CFP, deadline March 26 | Radiotoxicity – the toxic effects of a radioactive substance on living cells or tissue – is notoriously intangible. Not only is ionizing radiation imperceptible to the unaided human senses, diseases caused by radiation exposure often develop only years or decades later, making it hard to make juridical claims. To complicate matters, radiotoxicity does not only rupture human time, but opens the inhuman perspective of a deep future, forcing thousands of future generations to live with the radioactive contaminants released today. What role does art and visual culture assume in debates on radiotoxicity and its complex temporalities? How have artists responded historically to the phenomenon of radiotoxicity and how has this changed with major ‘nuclear events’ like the detonation of the atomic bomb, the Three Mile Island accident or the Chernobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters? And what aesthetic strategies do artists develop to make radiotoxicity tangible? These and related questions shall form the frame for this workshop.

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.

Masterclass, May 22, 1 EC | In this masterclass we take Lyotard’s report on knowledge as a historical point of reference for a closer look at the performance of technology in our current knowledge culture, and the onto-epistemological implications of this role. We do so together with Jon McKenzie, who with his groundbreaking Perform or Else: From Discipline to Performance (2004) draws attention to technological performance, or Techno-Performance, as key to understanding performativity as legitimizing force.