ASMCF x SFS Postgraduate Reading Group 2024
The ASMCF and SFS are excited to announce ‘Contemporary Critical Approaches’, a new postgraduate reading group taking place online in Spring 2024. This interdisciplinary reading group for postgraduates explores contemporary critical thinking around four central themes: archives, the posthuman, decoloniality, and pedagogy. Each session will be an opportunity for resource-sharing and discussion in a friendly and informal environment. The full programme can be found below.
This series is open to all. We hope to see many of you there!
PROGRAMME
SEMINAR 1: Archives of the Body
Wednesday 24 January 2024, 6pm–7.15pm (GMT)
- Allan Sekula, ‘The Body and the Archive’, October 39 (1986): 3–64
- Saidiya Hartman, ‘Venus in Two Acts’, Small Axe 12.2 (2008): 1–14
- Ann Laura Stoler, 'Chapter 1: Prologue in Two Parts' in Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 1–16 [optional]
SEMINAR 2: Posthuman Ecologies
Wednesday 7 February 2024, 6pm–7.15pm (GMT)
- Rosi Braidotti and Iu Andrés, ‘Interview with Rosi Braidotti: "What is necessary is a radical transformation, following the bases of feminism, anti-racism and anti-fascism"’, CCBC (2 April 2019)
- Cecilia Åsberg, Redi Koobak, and Ericka Johnson, ‘Beyond the Humanist Imagination’, NORA: Nordic Journal of Feminist and Gender Research 19.4 (2011): 218–30
- Marie-Claire Messouma Manlanbien, ‘L’être, l’autre et l’entre’, exhibition, Palais de Tokyo (2023) [optional]
SEMINAR 3: Decoloniality
Wednesday 21 February 2024, 6pm–7.15pm (GMT)
- Achille Mbembe, 'Avant-Propos' and 'Introduction' in Sortir de la grande nuit: Essai sur l'Afrique décolonisée (Paris: La Découverte, 2010) pp. 9–29
- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, ‘What, After All, Is Decolonisation?’ in Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously (London: Hurst & Co., 2022) pp. 24–49
- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, ‘Decolonise This! Taking History and Agency Seriously’ in Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously (London: Hurst & Co., 2022) pp. 113–34 [optional]
SEMINAR 4: Pedagogy
Wednesday 6 March 2024, 6pm–7.15pm (GMT)
- bell hooks, ‘Introduction’, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom (New York; London: Routledge, 1994) pp. 1–12
- Eugenia Zuroski, ‘"Where do you know from?" An exercise in placing ourselves together in the classroom’, MAI Feminism (27 January 2020)
- Jacques Rancière, Andréa Benvenuto, Laurence Cornu, and Patrice Vermeren, 'L'actualité du “Maître ignorant”: entretien avec Jacques Rancière’, Le Télémaque (2005)