DEAD LINE FOR APPLICATION: February 16, 2012
Applications should be sent to InterGender Managing Director Dr Pia Laskar Pia.Laskar@liu.se

Direct Link to complete COURSE DESCRIPTION

MAXIMUM NUMBER OF PARTICIPANTS: 20

ORGANIZED BY
The PhD course is organized by the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies (NOG) at Utrecht University, the Netherlands and InterGender (Swedish-International Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies).

COURSE COORDINATORS
Dr. Marta Zarzycka and dr. Bettina Papenburg, in collaboration with Senior lecturer Dr. Pia Laskar and InterGender Managing Director and Professor Nina Lykke, Director of InterGender, Linköping University, Sweden.

TEACHERS

Dr. Marta Zarzycka and Dr. Bettina Papenburg, lecturers and researchers at the Graduate Gender Programme in the Department of Media and Cultural Studies at Utrecht University.
Dr. Eugenie Shinkle, Senior Lecturer in Photographic Theory and Criticism, School of Media, Art and Design, University of Westminster, U.K.

COURSE DESCRIPTION

Art today is an increasingly multifaceted phenomenon, encompassing challenging works that intervene in war and ecological disasters, in inequalities and revolutionary changes in technology. Looking at digital photography, film, painting, video and multimedia art, we see a number of transgressive movements that significantly reconfigure the relationship between the body and the image, such as the dissolution of the boundary between ethics and aesthetics, the traveling of images, texts, sounds and concepts across time and space and across the boundaries of different media and genres, the disruption of normative cultural frameworks as instantiated by transgressive body imagery, as well as the breakthrough into new theoretical ground by exploring the transformative potential of alternative perceptual modalities such as multi-sensoriality, sensation and affectivity. How can feminist research methodologies open up fresh perspectives on these artistic and cultural practices? How can we think differently about our encounter with art, allowing for alternative sensory modalities beyond the visual? Employing recent theories of transgressive body imagery, trauma, affectivity and sensation, this course will analyse a wide range of case studies from contemporary visual culture. It will provide a novel approach to art and culture by challenging the primacy of vision and by injecting an intersectional perspective into the fields of visual culture, contemporary art theory, film and media studies as well as trauma studies. It will appeal to PhD students across these dynamic fields of exploration who deal with the socio-political nature of contemporary visual culture in their research.

The idea for this course originated from work on the volume Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics (forthcoming with IB Tauris: London, 2012), which the course co-ordinators are currently editing. In addition, this course takes further some of the issues that were explored at the Carnal Aesthetics Symposium, held at Utrecht University in March 2011.

COMPREHENSIVE READING LIST

Lecture Dr. Marta Zarzycka: Showing Sounds: Listening to War Photographs

Readings:
• Banes, Sally and Lepecki, André (eds) The Senses in Performance (New York & London: Routledge, 2007)
• Henriques, Julian, ‘The Vibrations of Affect and their Propagation on a Night Out on Kingston’s Dancehall Scene’, Body & Society, vol. 16 no. 1 (2010), pp. 57-89.
• Holzl, Ingrid, ‘Moving Stills: Images That are no Longer Immobile’, Photographies, vol. 3 no. 1 (2010), pp. 99-108.
• Papenburg, B. and Zarzycka, M. (2012, forthcoming) Carnal Aesthetics: Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics, Introduction.

Lecture Dr. Bettina Papenburg: Grotesque Sensations: Carnivalizing the Sensorium

Readings:
• Irigaray, Luce, ‘The Invisible of the Flesh: A Reading of Merleau-Ponty, The Visible and the Invisible, “The Intertwining – The Chiasm”, in: Ethics of Sexual Difference, translated from the French by Carolyn Burke and Gillian C. Gill (London, New York: continuum, 2005), pp. 127-153.
• Isaak, Jo Anna, ‘The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter’, in: Feminism & Contemporary Art: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Laughter (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), pp. 11-46.
• Massumi, Brian, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, in: Parables for the Virtual: Affect, Movement, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), pp. 23-42.
• Mercer, Kobena, ‘Tropes of the Grotesque in the Black Avant-Garde’, Pop Art and Vernacular Cultures (London: MIT Press, 2007).
• Russo, Mary, ‘Female Grotesques: Carnival and Theory’, in: Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina & Sarah Stanbury (eds): Written on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), pp. 318-336.
• Sobchack, Vivian, ‘What my Fingers Knew: The Cinesthetic Subject, or Vision in the Flesh’, in: Carnal Thoughts. Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), pp. 53-84.

Lecture Dr. Eugenie Shinkle: Uneasy Bodies: Affect, Pornography, and Contemporary Fashion Photography

Readings:
• Ahmed, Sara, ‘Imaginary Prohibitions: Some Preliminary Remarks on the Founding Gestures of the "New Materialism"', European Journal of Women's Studies 2008; 15; 23-39, available online at: http://ejw.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/15/1/23
• Hemmings, Clare, ‘Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn’, Cultural Studies, 19:5 (2005), pp. 548–67, available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09502380500365473
• Dennis, Kelly: Art/Porn: A History of Seeing and Touching (Oxford: Berg 2006).
• Paasonen, Susanna, ‘Disturbing, Fleshy Texts: Close Looking at Pornography’ in Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences. (London & New York: Routledge, 2010).
• Papoulias, Constantina & Callard, Felicity: 'Biology's Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect', Body & Society 2010; 16; 29-56, available online at: http://bod.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/16/1/29
• Shinkle, Eugenie, ‘Uneasy Bodies: Affect, Embodied Perception, and Contemporary Fashion Photography’, in: Bettina Papenburg & Marta Zarzycka (eds) Carnal Aesthetics. Transgressive Imagery and Feminist Politics (London: IB Tauris, 2012).

STRUCTURE OF THE COURSE
The course consists of three days of lectures and seminars. Students will be asked to have completed the course readings (distributed digitally) before the beginning of the course. The course will also include an evening trip to an exhibition/art performance/theatre performance (specified close to date).

PREPARATION
* Paper (2-5 pages describing research problems related to the PhD project of the participant) to be sent to InterGender Managing Director Pia Laskar (pia.laskar@liu.se) AT THE LATEST TWO WEEKS BEFORE THE COURSE START; remember to mark it with your name and the course name.
* All participants are expected to read the papers of their fellow group members before the course and be ready to give comments in the group sessions.
* The students’ papers and some of the other readings for the course will be available to all the participants via our intra net.
 Books must be bought or borrow. More info on this will be given to registered participants.

ESSAY

* 15 pages (to be handed in at the latest 3 months after the course); one copy should be sent to one of the teachers and one to InterGender Managing Director Pia Laskar pia.laskar@liu.se. The teacher in question has 3 months to evaluate the essay.
* The essay should strike a balance between addressing one of the themes, which have been part of the course (lectures, discussions, reading material), and be relevant for the PhD research of the student.
* The essay should, moreover, be considered as an exercise in doing a written presentation to an academic readership, which is not familiar with the author's PhD research. It should constitute a whole and explain relevant contexts.

ACCREDITATION AND EXAMINATION
a) 7,5 ECTS Credits is given for active participation, including presentation of a short paper, 2-5 pages.

b) 15 ECTS Credits is given for active participation, including presentation of a short paper, 2-5 pages (as above) + essay (evaluated as pass/fail). An essay should be 10-15 pages in length. The selected topic shall be related to the course content and readings.
The essay is to be sent to the teacher as well as to InterGender Managing Director Pia Laskar (pia.laskar@liu.se) no later than 3 months after the final day of the course. Note that you can either be examined for 7,5 ECTS Credits or for 15 ECTS Credits.

Info on admission and grants can be found here

Applications should be sent to InterGender Managing Director Dr Pia Laskar (Pia.Laskar@liu.se) no later than February 16, 2012.

InterGender: Swedish-International Research School in Interdisciplinary Gender Studies
http://www.intergender.net

The School is funded by The Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet). It is organized as a joint venture between Gender Studies Units and doctoral programmes at Linköping University (host university) and at eight other Swedish Universities: Blekinge Institute of Technology, Göteborg University, Lund University, Luleå Technical University, Stockholm University, Uppsala University, Umeå University, Örebro University and at three international partner institutions: Graduate Gender Program at Utrecht University (The Netherlands), The Finnish National Doctoral School of Women's and Gender Studies (Helsinki University, Finland) and Center for Transdisciplinary Gender Studies, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Germany)

LOCATION
Utrecht University, city centre.