Photos

Conference venue Mont Fleur - Seen from a bit up the mountain

Lindsey, Ronelle, Vivienne, Michalinos and Jakob enjoying lunch

Vivienne and Michalinos

Time for some fresh air - Veronica, Jakob and Karin on the daily "Walk with Michael"

Community map drawing by Siddique on the second day of the seminar

Ending a long day with wine tasting!

Another "Walk with Michael" through entangled and not very smooth terrain

Bit of chatting before braai

Michalinos and Karin at dinner

The sauna - Some delegates' preferred work space during evenings! 

Another popular work space - the pool

Human/Inhuman/Posthuman course - Utrecht Summer School 2015 - The Netherlands

For those who are travelling to or located  in Europe during August 2015 this course by Professor Rosi Braidotti may be of interest:

Organizing institution: Utrecht University, Faculty of Humanities (UU)

Period: 24 August 2015 - 28 August 2015 (5 days)

Course location(s)

» Utrecht (Utrecht city campus), The Netherlands

Credits: 2.0 ECTS credits + Certificate of Attendance

Course code: C30

Course fee (incl. housing): € 500

Level: Advanced master level

Please see original post here:

Human/Inhuman/Posthuman course - Utrecht Summer School 2015 - The Netherlands

Research Colloquium: Silenced Voices: Diversity and Social Justice in Higher Education Call for Papers (invited scholars)

29-30 January 2015, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

Conveners: Frans Kamsteeg (VUA/Organization Sciences, Amsterdam, Netherlands), André Keet (UFS, IRSJ, South Africa), and Charles Alexander (UCLA, Los Angeles, US).

Background

It is acknowledged, globally, that higher education institutions are complex organisations, with complicated systems and surfaces on which the intricate social dynamics amongst a growing body of heterogeneous peoples, knowledges and experiences, and between people and structures are played out. This heterogeneity is, at one and the same time the energy of and condition for the academic project, and, the major challenge to which universities have to respond. Nevertheless, universities have been hesitant in taking up this challenge, and tend to convert it into diversity management discourses, thus effectively silencing diversity. Working against this trend, the colloquium wants to contribute to critical studies on diversity in higher education that pursue  insightful, innovative, interpretive schemes on which bases more socially just academic policies and practices can emerge.

  

Comparison and interdisciplinary approach

This colloquium  will explore how scholars from various disciplines engage in studying the patterns of silenced voices that dovetails with a range of discriminatory categories, and differences. These studies may focus on curriculum, pedagogy, communication, organization and institutional culture.  We welcome contributions from engaged scholars who support comparative and interdisciplinary approach to share the results of their work, the way they disseminate their views and make them available to both the scientific and the broader community. The organizers – researchers from UFS, VUA, and UCLA – have joined forces in studying diversity in settings as different from one another as the Netherlands, South Africa and the USA.

Themes and proposals

We invite abstracts of no more than 400 words on one of the following themes:

1. Institutional culture

2. Students’ experiences.

3. Diversity strategies, policies and practices.

4. Inclusion and exclusion: HEIs as communities.

5. Transformation and human rights.

7. Situated identities: students, scholars, managers.

8. Researchers’ responsibilities

9. Teaching-learning and research

10. Migration studies

However, we also welcome contributions in other themes not mentioned here. Contributions may be theoretical, methodological, empirical and/or policy driven.

Organization and Outcomes

The colloquium is a co-effort between VU, Amsterdam, UFS, Bloemfontein, and UCLA, Los Angeles. It will be held at the VUA campus, Amsterdam, in cooperation with VUA Diversity Desk (Wim Haan).

The outcomes of the colloquium will be:

·       Sharing of and engagement with research papers

·       Peer collaboration and collaborative learning

·         An increased awareness of contemporary themes in diversity in higher education.

·       Special edition (journal) and/or edited compilation (book)

Deadline

Please submit your abstract ASAP (preferably before 1.12.2014) to: keeta@ufs.ac.za, frans.kamsteeg@vu.nl and CAlexander@college.ucla.edu

Keynote speakers at the Colloquium will be:

Melissa Steyn

Professor of Critical Diversity Studies

Wits Centre for Diversity Studies (WiCDS)

University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg

M. Belinda Tucker

Professor of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences

Vice Provost, Institute of American Cultures

University of California, Los Angeles

Karen van Oudenhoven-v.d. Zee

Professor of Intercultural Competence

Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences

VU University Amsterdam 

Principles for data analysis using critical post humanism and affective turn

Engaging with the complex theories from critical post humanism and affective turn theories the project team set out to develop a set of principles, as a basis for an analytical framework. In this process Google Docs were used in the conference venue - One for critical posthumanist perspective and one for affective turn perspective; team members were requested to work on these two documents, outline principles and questions for further exploration. This process took about an hour and the outcome was subsequently discussed. 

Based on critical posthumanist theories team members outlined these principles for the foundation for an analytical framework:

1. Descriptions/interpretations never to be located with a particular object but within the relation/intra-action in between (cf. e.g. Davies, 2014 p.5)
2. The material and the discursive are both important and mutually constitutive of each other in data analysis
3. The entanglement of the human and the non-human - entanglement of relations
4. Attention on how discourses materialise, how they work, not what they mean
5. Data are not neutral, objective, speak for itself, but framed technically, economically, ethically, temporally, spatially and philosophically ‘situated’/framed (Kitchin, 2014)
6. We are transformed through the intellectual energy and both made and unmade by data analysis, which is an embedded and embodied (Braidotti, 2012) process. There are no divisions between theory, thinking, writing, participants and data - they work together and make one another to create ‘new analytical questions’ and constitute us to produce different ‘researcher selves’ (Jackson & Mazzei, 2012: 118).
7. Data illustrates theory and vice versa - you need to stay with both in analysis
8. Collaborative data analysis helps in this process
9. The process is unpredictable and intense ‘As readers in an intensive mode, we are transformers of intellectual energy, processors of the ‘insights’ we are exchanging’ (Braidotti, )
10. As humans we don’t have a unidirectional relationship with materiality we affect and are affected by it - this impacts on conventional notions of agency, choice and acting on the world. Agency is an enactment and is distributed over human and non-human forms (including data and writing) - it is not something that is possessed by an individual, something someone has and is not exclusive to humans. Matter is vital.
11. Understanding the linkages and connections between subjectivity and other things and bodies
12. Using diffraction (patterns of difference) to ‘move away from habitual normative readings’ grounded in the discursive to reading ‘insights through one another’ (Barad, 2007) rather than critical self-reflection (mirroring/sameness).
13. knowing, being and ethics are not separate but are mutually implicated

From the affective turn perspective the following principles were outlined:

1. Emotions as socially / historically/culturally constructed
2. Emotions as moving between/in bodies
3. Emotions as practices/praxis
4. Emotions as public and political
5. Affects and emotions as intersections of language, power, bodies, social structures, subjectivity, materiality
6. Focus on relationality / the in-between
7. Acknowledging the (im)possibility of language to translate/map emotions?

References:

Post-humanism:

Barad, K. (2007)

Blagaard, B. and van der Tuin, I. (eds.) (2014).  The subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts. London: Bloomsbury.

Braidotti, R. (2002). Metamorphoses: Towards a materialist theory of becoming. Malden: Polity Press.

Braidotti, R. (2012). The Posthuman.

Butler, J. (2014). Reflections on ethics, destructiveness, and life: Rosi Braidotti and the Posthuman. In B.Blagaard and I. van der Tuin (eds.) The subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts. London: Bloomsbury.

Davies, B. (2014). Reading Anger in Early Childhood Intra-Actions: A Diffractive Analysis, Qualitative Inquiry, 

Hemmings, C. (2014). Reading Rosi Braidotti: Returning to Transpostions. In B.Blagaard and I. van der Tuin (eds.) The subject of Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts. London: Bloomsbury.

Lenz Taguchi, H. (2013). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data, Feminist Theory,13(3) 265–281. 

Affective turn:

Childers (2014) Promiscuous Analysis in Qualitative Research, Qualitative Inquiry, 

Lenz Taguchi, H. (2013). A diffractive and Deleuzian approach to analysing interview data, Feminist Theory,13(3) 265–281. 

Ivits, S. (2009). Disturbing the comfortable: an ethical inquiry into pedagogies of discomfort and crisis. Unpublished Masterthesis from The University of British Columbia (Vancouver).

     

First face-to-face meeting at Mont Fleur, Stellenbosch 26 - 29 November 2014

On the 26 November 2014 the principal researcher invited all project members to join a face-to-face seminar at Mont Fleur in Stellenbosch, South Africa. For three and a half days project team members productively engaged in developing an analytical framework, planed future activities and received training by analysing data. This seminar also gave an opportunity to engage with theories on the post-humanism and the Affective Turn and engage with presentations by fellow project team members. Three PhD students were given an opportunity to present and receive feedback on their work

In preparation for the seminar the following areas were highlighted for discussion:

• Creation of an analytical framework for socially just pedagogies based on post humanism, social justice and the affective turn
• Engagement with and analysis of CSI and ET data collected by principal researcher using participatory action learning techniques.
• Engagement with critical post-humanist theories and affective turn theories
• Planning and review of current project plan
• Preparation for a submission of an application for ethical clearance by the NRF   

    

Present at the seminar (from left to right):

Abdullah Bayat, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Jakob Pedersen, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Daniela Gachago, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa
Karin Murris, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Veronica Mitchell, University of Cape Town, South Africa
Paul Prinsloo, UNISA, South Africa
Siddique Motala, Cape Peninsula University of Technology, South Africa
Lindsey Nicholls, Brunel University, United Kingdom
Tammy Shefer, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Ronelle Carolissen, University of Stellenbosch, South Africa
Michalinos Zembylas, Open University of Cyprus, Cyprus
Denise Wood, Central Queensland University, Australia
Vivienne Bozalek, University of the Western Cape, South Africa
Brenda Leibowitz, University of Johannesburg, South Africa

Via Skype: Professor Rosi Braidotti, Ultrecht University, The Netherlands