One of the current Research Projects:
Slowing Down (in) Academia
The aim of this collaborative project is to further our understanding of the normative habits of the university in terms of speeds and time-management, by explicitly naming the consequences such norms have on students and teachers, and by pointing at the contradictions within the institution. In doing so, we wish to contribute to imagining and plotting new feminist and critical strategies to live (in) the university, if not to refuse and undo what the neoliberal university is and does altogether.
Projecten
Project
ERC Digital Crossings in Europe: Gender, Diaspora and Belonging
Rol
Promotor
Financiering
3e geldstroom - EU ERC consolidator
Project
NOISE Summerschool 2019
Algemene projectbeschrijving
Politics of In/Visibility
Dates: August 26 –30, 2019
Coordinators: Domitilla Olivieri & Eva Midden
This year, the 27th edition of NOISE examines the politics of in/visibility: what do we see, what is left unseen, what do we no longer see, what do we choose not to see and what is left to be seen? We will question what is made visible and what is left invisible in a contemporary social and cultural environment, informed more than ever by the emergence of new strategies of visibility and technologies of visualization, as well as by political debates and repressive practices that dictate who is allowed to occupy certain spaces or be represented in the public arena. By approaching this matter in an interdisciplinary manner, at the intersection of gender studies, feminist theory, postcolonial theory and media and cultural studies, we seek to address how certain bodies, collectivities, identities or perspectives are marked, either because they remain invisible or become hyper visible. We will discuss how scholarly, activist and artistic practices of giving space, voice or visibility to underrepresented communities, histories, or subjectivities can challenge (or reproduce) contemporary dynamics of inclusions and exclusions.
Various theorists have compellingly elaborated upon the interconnections between visibility, knowledge and power. What is made visible and what is left invisible, in processes of knowledge production as well as in the public arena, is entangled with, if not determined by, normative ideas and political forces, frequently reproducing homophobic, ethnocentric and racist discourses, as well as gender inequalities. As feminist scholars have pointed out for decades, this unequal distribution of representation, wealth, privilege, and social and political agency and recognition takes place along intersectional power dynamics structured by, for example, gender, race, class, mental and physical dis/ability, sexuality.
This NOISE Summer School will introduce students to cutting edge scholarship around questions such as (but not limited to): why are trans* and queer subjectivities more visible than ever in popular culture while they at the same time struggle to be recognized in the public space/discourse? How does the hyper-visibility of those who identify, or are read, as religious become a source of generalization, misrepresentation and violent backlash? How can activists and artists make visible certain practices of resistance and alternative communities and subjectivities without in turn subsuming them in consumerist dynamics that depoliticize their radical potential? And what are the implications of remaining invisible in a context where new and more pervasive technologies of surveillance enforce visibility as a mean of control?
Rol
Onderzoeksleider
Financiering
Anders NOG
PhD dissertation extended abstract [2005-2011]
HAUNTED BY REALITY.
TOWARD A FEMINIST STUDY OF DOCUMENTARY FILM: INDEXICALITY, VISION AND THE ARTIFICE
Feminism, documentary film and visual anthropology are the three domains that this study connects. The multifaceted relation between these three fields can be summarised as revolving around the debates on reality, truth, representation of the Other, knowledge production and power.
Domitilla Olivieri’s dissertation explores such intricate interrelations through the analysis of three films: Kim Longinotto’s Sisters in Law (2005), Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage (1982) and Ursula Biemann’s Europlex (2003). To different extents, and in multiple and overlapping ways, these films address the issue of representation(s) of non-Western, and especially female subjects, the relation between sign and reality and the power dynamics implicit in documentary filmmaking.
The dissertation shows that the relation between reality and the documentary sign can be understood as one of ‘haunting’. Haunting here refers to the specific indexical quality of the relation between sign and object, the manner in which the object affects or determines the sign (Peirce 1958, 8.177), or the way in which “the world presses on” the cinematic sign (Comolli 1999, 40). Borrowing and expanding upon Mary Ann Doane’s definition of the indexical sign as one that is “haunted by its object” (Doane 2007b, 134), Olivieri presents several examples in which the filmed reality inhabits, intrudes upon, and makes itself continually present in the filmic documentary sign.
As the particular focus of this research is on anthropological feminist documentaries, Olivieri considers them as films haunted by reality and regarding feminist issues to do with the politics of the Other and processes of Othering.
These films are, to borrow Trinh’s concept, “inappropriate/d” (Trinh 1986, 9). They cross labels and categorisation; explore and perform borders; let themselves be haunted by reality without falling flat into the hegemonic pitfalls of realism; they imagine and represent invisible realities while pointing attention to the power of vision and visuality; they escape rigid definitions while providing the space to redefine meanings and realities; and while these films are determined by the social world, they can also be “transformative of that same world” (Gaines 2007, 19). These are the potential effects of such “inappropriate/d” films, as well as the possibilities opened by a critical perspective that inhabits the space between feminist theories, documentary studies and visual anthropology. Ultimately this is what this research investigates and performs.
Exploring the interconnections between the politics and aesthetics of documentary, this study emphasises what audio-visual representations can do, highlights the links between documentary practices and the processes of knowledge production and, finally, the critical and transformative promise that resides in the encounters between feminism and documentary.
1st supervisor: Prof. Dr. Rosemarie Buikema
2nd supervisor: Prof. Dr. Rosi Braidotti