Destructing/ Reconciling/ Transforming
Coordinators
Gender-, diversity- and queer-studies have a longstanding history of contesting the impartiality of mainstream knowledge production and social structures and processes, as well as the normativity of politics and economy as a way of interrogating imbalanced logics of power and naming inequalities, exclusions and marginalisations. As a contested and reflexive interdisciplinary and diverse field, gender studies have at times also failed to take into account intersectional, anti-racist or queer approaches. As a consequence, certain streams and experiences have been excluded and deemed outside the realm of ‘feminist knowledge’ and practice. Michel Foucault defines these as ‘subjugated knowledges’, namely forms of knowledge considered ‘inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated: naive knowledges, located low down on the hierarchy, beneath the required level of cognition or scientificity’ (Foucault, 1980: 82).
The aim of this panel is to explore how these ‘alternative’ knowledges/epistemologies, these ‘other’ practices, movements and politics destruct, reconcile and transform social processes, conflicts, war and post-war conflicts, and knowledge production as well as how such marginalised and misfitting knowledges, practices and politics are embodied and situated.
In this respect, we are particularly interested in theoretical and empirical papers engaging with ‘alternative’ and ‘radical’ epistemologies that counter single-issue feminist claims. This includes an exploration of knowledge and practices that may counterbalance mainstream history and approaches that may bridge the gap between activism and research and activism and theory as well as the gap between different gender approaches, feminisms and politics.
We particularly welcome papers that engage with the political economies of knowledge production and with questions of who benefits from certain kinds of knowledges and practices and how critical approaches are co-opted and resisted. We also invite papers on the topic of solidarity. We especially, but not exclusively, encourage contributions from critical race perspectives, postcolonial studies, queer studies, disability studies, oral histories of women* and mad studies.
Streams:
Back to: Overview call for papers
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