Date:
November 23-26, 2009

Deadline for application:
August 31, 2009

Number of participants:
10

Venue:
Umeå University, Sweden

Organized by:
Umeå Centre for Gender Studies, Umeå University
in collaboration with Department of Cultural Sciences/Gender Studies, Gothenburg University

Workshop leader:
Naomi Scheman
Professor of Philosophy and of Gender, Women's, & Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota

Co-teachers:
Prof. Ulla M. Holm, Gothenburg University, Sweden
Assoc. prof. Hildur Kalman, Umeå University, Sweden

Coordinators:
Assoc. prof. Hildur Kalman - in collaboration with Director of the Research
School, Prof. Nina Lykke, and Dr. Anna Lundberg, both at Linköping University, Sweden

Course description:
The workshop will engage the following set of issues:
Social constructionist accounts (of categories such as gender, race, and sexuality, as well as of persons and their psychological states, such as emotions) have been central to feminist theorizing of the past thirty years. Some recent theorizing has called these accounts into question, on the grounds that they cannot make sense of the materiality of our lives and that they leave us without adequately robust (politically usable) notions of, e.g., reality, identity, power, and objectivity. Our aim in the workshop will be to call into question the dichotomy between the material world and discursive practices, by exploring ways in which the material is articulate and the socially constructed is robustly real. Feminist notions of relationality will be central to this ontological exploration and to its epistemological consequences, including a focus on trustworthiness and on the value of community-based participatory research.

In parallel with lectures and discussion on these topics, we will discuss the relationships among three sets of essays: Naomi Schemans’ forthcoming collection of work since Engenderings (1993); theorizations of identity by the Future of Minority Studies group in the U.S., in terms of what they call “post-positivist realism;” and explorations in the emerging area of “material feminisms.”