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In Between Understanding and Practicing Gender: Intersectionality and Interdisciplinarity
Programme
The NOISE Summer School is an advanced training course, which offers a diversified, but coherent programme
of study from an interdisciplinary perspective. It is meant for advanced MA students and
PhD students and provides special and separate tuition seminars to these two groups.
Download the programme here.
FORMULA
- Two lectures in the morning
- Separate MA- and PhD-specific seminars in the afternoon
- Social programme
- All participants are expected to fully participate in the entire programme during the two weeks
- Students prepare before the summer school by reading and collecting material for assignments (approx. 70 hrs of work).
After fulfilment of all requirements (preparation of assignments and reading, active participation and final essay
of 10 - 15 pages), participants receive the NOISE Certificate for 240 hours of work, equalling 9 ECTS
CLUSTER ONE
Intersecting Identities: Transnationalism, Gender and Power
Coordinated by Prof. Dr. Gloria Wekker (Utrecht University, the Netherlands) and Dr. Sarah Bracke
(Utrecht University, the Netherlands)
In this first interdisciplinary cluster Intersecting Identities: Transnationalism, Gender and Power,
we will explore how transnational and intersectional feminist theory can help us to make sense of
`notions of the self’ and of various bodies of knowledge and their relationship to power. Among the
diverse bodies of knowledge that we will address in this cluster are feminism and intersectionality
as traveling theory; the academic construction of intersexuality and sexual politics; and memory and
migration.
Moreover, a number of theoretical concepts run through this cluster and the different concrete subjects
it addresses. Intersectionality as a critical, interpretative body of theories and methods, takes as its
point of departure that it is not enough to take gender only into account, but that the complex nature of
reality, whether in cultural artefacts or in academic accounts, demands simultaneous attention to other
axes of signification, e.g. “race”/ ethnicity, class, sexuality, nation, etc. Secondly, we work with
feminist conceptualizations of identity, that recognize that identities are never fixed or completed, but always in formation, and analyze identity as a process, multiplicitous, contradictory and unstable, lacking coherence, as well as a narrative, a representation. Identity in this approach is a way of understanding the interplay between our subjective experience of the world and the cultural and historical settings in which shifting subjectivities are formed. Thirdly, we discuss subjectivity as the terrain where conscious agency and subjectivation are understood in relation to each other. This approach to the self allows us to discuss questions of consciousness and experience, and it enables us to inquire into modes of subjectivation, and notably how subjects get gendered and ethnicized. Finally, we attend to questions of representation, and in particular the ways in which identities and subjectivities are mediated by memories, knowledges, texts, images, as well as the relationships and processes though which representations are produced.
Lecturers from a variety of backgrounds will utilize approaches from the Humanities, Social Sciences and
Cultural Studies, focusing on representations and identity – formations in various bodies of texts.
Confirmed teachers for this cluster are:
Dr. Sarah Bracke, Gender Studies in the Humanities, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Dr. Kathy Davis, Senior Researcher at the Research Institute for Culture and History, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Lena Eckert, MA, Gender Studies in the Humanities, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Angela Melitopoulos, Independent filmmaker & Goldsmiths, University London
Prof. Dr. Gloria Wekker, Professor in Gender and Ethnicity, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
CLUSTER TWO
Interdisciplinarity in Gender Studies: Poetics and Ethics
Coordinated by Prof. Dr. Svetlana Slapsak (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Lubljana, Slovenia), Sanne Koevoets, MA (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)
and Domitilla Olivieri, MA (Utrecht University, the Netherlands)
In the second cluster Interdisciplinarity in Gender Studies: Poetics and Ethics, we will attempt to understand
the potential and problematics of interdisciplinarity in terms of knowledge production, academic practices and
feminist ethics. The starting point of the cluster is the understanding that interdisciplinarity is a problematic
concept, which nevertheless offers great potential, particularly for feminist researchers. While it has become
the current standard in historical and literary studies, it raises specific epistemological and ethical questions
regarding knowledge production and academic practices. This begs the question of whether interdisciplinarity is
merely a matter of research skills and the accumulation of knowledge, or if there is more at stake. With regards
to feminist research, interdisciplinarity offers distinctive discursive and ideological potential, especially
insofar as it reveals itself as anti-colonial and counter-hegemonic. In this cluster we will explore this potential
of interdisciplinary approaches in feminist research by attempting to deconstruct stereotypes of research practices
and the over-evaluation of acquired skills. We will also rethink humanist research ethics in terms of contemporary
feminist theory, as well as address the notion of pleasure as it relates to research practices. The aim of the cluster
is to explore the possibilities of interdisciplinarity, to construct a toolbox for feminist interdisciplinary research,
and to reappropriate the pleasures at the center of feminist knowledge production and research practices.
Confirmed teachers for this cluster are:
Dr. Cecilia Asberg, Department of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden
Sanne Koevoets, MA, Gender Studies in the Humanities, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Prof. Dr. Nina Lykke, Department of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden
Prof. Dr. Maureen McNeil, Centre for Gender and Women's Studies Deprtment of Sociology, Lancaster University, UK
Domitilla Olivieri, MA, Gender Studies in the Humanities, Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Dr. Liedeke Plate, Institute for Gender Studies, Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands
Dr. Sandra Prlenda, Centre for Women's Studies, Zagreb, Croatia
Prof. Dr. Svetlana Slapsak, Professor of Anthropology of the Ancient Worlds and Anthropology of Gender, Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Lubljana, Slovenia
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