In a post-pandemic world, the word “precarious” has taken the centre stage in feminist, queer and disability studies, in the field of global health and demography studies, amongst socialist-leftist thinkers, and within queer and trans activists. This workshop inquires precarious bodies as active sites that embody histories, archives, as well as the tensed discourse of power, in relation with the state. Within the simultaneous act of becoming both the site and the citation, the marginalized body here, maps alternative and multiple geographies of belonging that are lived and embodied, and not defined by the state. Challenging the traditional understanding of what constitutes an archive, precarious bodies act as “counter-archives” where they negotiate, resist, dissent, and transform state-systems, which are inherently discriminatory. “Precarious bodies as archives” make visible the state’s violence and its violating measures within legal and healthcare systems, in its targeted surveillance tactics, in its brutal measures to define national territoriality, and its role in racial capitalism and gendered violence. These counter-archives, survived through bodies, their memories, and lived experiences offer counter histories, maneuvering death, violence, displacement, migration, and constant challenges around the ideas of identity and belonging.
Our workshop seeks to gather and extend these unfolding conversations, weaving together the theories and practices of “precarious bodies as archives” and “archival precarity” at UW and across the wider community. It will do so through four interrelated forms: (1) a biweekly reading group to share emerging care theories and projects; (2) publicly engaged dialogues with leading thinkers and practitioners of care; (3) workshops devoted to particular dimensions of bodies as archives and archival bodies; and (4) community forums centered on these questions. In bringing these efforts together, the workshop would create a vital meeting ground among the humanities, the humanistic social sciences, and organizing communities at UW and beyond, making room for new concepts, new sites of inquiry, and new forms of practice to take shape.
Contact:
- Shrinjita Biswas, PhD Candidate, Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies; Mellon-Morgridge Fellow, sbiswas29@wisc.edu
Organizers:
Shrinjita Biswas, PhD Candidate, Interdisciplinary Theatre Studies; Mellon-Morgridge Fellow
Edwin Elizabeth Thomas, PhD Student, Gender & Women’s Studies
Bidisha Mukherjee, PhD Candidate, Asian Languages & Cultures
Christine Garlough, Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies; Director, Center for Research on Gender and Women; UNESCO Co-Chair for Gender, Wellbeing and a Culture of Peace
Beatriz L. Botero, Lecturer of Integrated Liberal Studies
Anthony Cerulli, Professor & Director of Graduate Studies, Asian Languages & Cultures; Director, Health and the Humanities Certificate
Langston Collin Wilkins, Assistant Professor of Folklore and African American Studies
Image source: https://uwmadison-photos.photoshelter.com/search?terms=Long_Harvey_archives16_8664&