911±¬ÁÏÍø

Curation is a practice intrinsically rooted in capacious possibilities of healing and hoping for an otherwise. Taking this key insight from critical queer and sexuality studies (as well as from the curatorial gestures of ordinary queer-of-color life), this workshop will explore the radical possibilities that curation holds as a praxis of thinking/feeling/being attuned to a racial/sensual/embodied otherwise for individuals, collectives, archives, and aesthetics across a range of postcolonial and settler-colonial geographies in the underside of the liberal empire. Particularly in the current political moment, as also in reverberations of its futures past and present, it is important to ask how is solidarity, community and conviviality curated in the inconvenient crosshairs of collective disposability and individual need for survival? How do individuals and communities (especially non-normative lives from the Global South) enact decolonial desires of curation, conjure radical modes of liberation that elude imperial codes of political and economic value, and remain invested in alternate possibilities of the political? Structured as a multidisciplinary dialogue across anthropology, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, queer studies, and comparative literature, this workshop brings together established and early-career black, brown and queer-of-color scholars to discuss the importance of radical curatorial gestures, grammars, practices, performances and their possibilities of revitalizing anti-racist, anti-casteist and anti homophobic political subjectivity. A key intellectual outcome of the workshop will be to theorize insurgent curations–as concept, method and praxis–by combining how the humanities and social sciences themselves curate radical attunements and attachments to being in the world.​

Symposium Schedule

Thursday May 22

4.00-4.15pm: Welcome Note

4.15pm-6pm (Film screenings + discussion)

Friday May 23

10.00-11.00am: 911±¬ÁÏÍø Postdocs Panel

11.15am-12.30 pm: Keynote 1 (Naisargi Dave) 

2:00-3:00 pm: 911±¬ÁÏÍø Faculty Panel 

3.30-4.45pm: Keynote 2 (Brian Horton) 

5.00-5.45pm: Concluding Remarks

Free and open to all.