“We are all in this together” – Connectivity and Community in Isolation

ASCA Workshop 2021, 23-25 June 2021, (Wed to Fri).
Organizers: Jori Snels and Lok Yee Wong

As our global crisis continues, it seems that the social order and our sense of self is changing. We celebrate family birthdays via Skype, demonstrate for social justice on Instagram, and visit art exhibitions in Animal Crossing; meanwhile, we are condemned to living twenty-four hours a day with our partners, roommates or alone, in a home turned office, habituated to uncertainty and fear. Through this experience, we have become keenly aware of both digital technologies’ previously untapped potentialities for connecting us and their seemingly unbridgeable boundaries; we are learning to live in and with entrapment, experiencing both unprecedented distance and closeness.

How can we mourn, how can we protest, how can we engage deeply, when we cannot show up with our bodies, when we cannot step out of our homes? As David Harvey stated in ‘We need a collective response to the collective dilemma of coronavirus’: “I am in a frustrating position of personal isolation, at a moment when the time calls for collective forms of action.”

We want to use this moment to start thinking about how to overcome or reconfigure distancing and isolation from the perspective of embodied connectivity and the embodiment of connectivity. Bennett and Segerberg’s (2012) studies on social connectivity shed insightful light on people’s civic and political participation with digital media as organizing agents. In today’s world, apart from mass protests, connectivity pervades our everyday practices. More than a logic to organize and coordinate online actions, it is increasingly intertwined with our offline world, including our affectivity and bodily experiences. As Van Dijck has stated (2013), the layer of platforms influences human interaction on an individual and a community level, as well as on a larger societal level, as online and offline worlds are increasingly interpenetrating. How does embodiment, in its entanglement with connectivity, prompt us to rethink ourselves and our societies for the future ‘new normal’?

In the 2021 ASCA workshop, we seek to interrogate the notions of connectivity and community in all facets of society in order to reimagine power structures, technological infrastructures, and social systems, and to explore what we may learn from the creative forms of embodied connectivity and embodiment of connectivity we encounter as we move into the future.

Keynote speakers

Prof. dr. Lance Bennett, University of Washington
Dr. Alexandra Segerberg, Uppsala University
Prof. dr. Iris van der Tuin, Utrecht University
Prof. dr. Sally Wyatt, Maastricht University

Artistic interventions

Workshop

Interpersonal Fictions and Imagined Choreographies by Sabrina Huth & Ilana Reynolds

Film screenings

The Balcony and Our Dreams by Aylin Kuryel
The Wangs by Bo Wang

Creative talk

When in Doubt, Take a Walk by Sampson Wong

Timetable

Day 1: Wednesday 23 June 2021                                                       

Day 2: Thursday 24 June 2021   

Day 3: Friday 25 June 2021                                                                                  

The 2021 ASCA International Workshop is organized by Lok Yee Wong (yveswly@gmail.com) and Jori Snels (j.snels@uva.nl).