Dear list members,
We are looking for one or two more participants for a panel discussion for the upcoming AAG meeting in February, 24-28, 2012, in NYC. The topic is on thinking with and translating the borders of knowledge making (see
call below). Please contact the organizers Alvaro Reyes ([log in to unmask]) and/or Gaby Valdivia
([log in to unmask]) by September 25, if interested.
Translating, crossing and thinking with borders: Knowledge-making as journey
This roundtable discussion investigates the possibilities and existing limitations of working across linguistic, socio-cultural, and north-south borders, and of disciplines and disparately located and/or compartmentalized
sites of knowledge production. Researchers who support processes of self determination often find that such border crossings within dominant university discourses are often informed by presuppositions that reinforce the very hierarchies challenged by political
movements, organizations, and people in struggle. Furthermore, these encounters are quickly framed into hierarchical dualisms intended to neutralize the disruptive potential of those who refuse to accept their status as objects of inquiry and instead force
open an inquiry into the existing structures of the “University” and their accepted norms and research methods (theory vs. daily life, university vs. “the field,” research vs. activism etc). Without attempting to resolve these divides by simply conflating
these various sites, we ask what it might mean to initiate collaborations and to successfully translate across borders and boundaries imposed by our multiple sites so that our work both furthers the interruption of the order of things and strengthens alternative
practices of social change as demanded by us and those with whom we share political projects and commitments.
We invite participants to join us in a discussion that addresses the following questions and topics of discussion:
- How can we as researchers (within and without the university) translate across the divide between the formal knowledge of the university and those spaces of resistance that are often dismissed as mere sites of
“politics” or “activism?”
- What are the dominant practices of “the University,” how do they function to delegitimize alternative sites of knowledge production, how can these practices be redirected as a resource for these alternative sites?
- What are the challenges faced by those working within the University to support projects for self-representation and self-determination of marginalized subjects?
- What are the sites and conditions under which knowledge is produced and translated but which are often deemed inconsequential for the public representation of that knowledge?
- What methods do we have at our disposal to understand the production of new knowledges (ethnography, participant observation, discourse analysis, etc.); how do we understand and nourish the scope and potential
of new knowledges when we encounter them in their initial moments of gestation?
Chair: Richa Nagar, Gender, Women and Sexuality Studies, University of Minnesota
