Mid-term Conference RN 20: Program of the online-workshop
Overview of the program
Round table discussion with keynote speakers
A round table discussion will take place on Wednesday, July 22, 2020 from 6 to 7:30 pm (UCT/GMT + 2hours). The keynote speakers (see below) and other participants will discuss the topic of „Seeing and the Other Senses“. If you want to participate, please register under ESAKassel2020[at]uni-kassel[dot]de.
Prof. Dr. Alia Al-Saji, McGill Univ., Canada
Touching the Wounds of Colonial Duration: Fanon and a critical phenomenology of racialized affect
Surrounding Frantz Fanon's work is a persistent (and at times reductive) debate on method. Was Fanon a phenomenologist? Or was his method psychoanalytic, and thus suspicious of the appearances with which phenomenology stuck? Does Fanon owe more to Sartre or to Merleau-Ponty? Is the afropessimist reading of Fanon reconcilable with the decolonial one, or are there different Fanons at stake (between Martinique, France, Algeria, Tunisia, Ghana)? What is often forgotten is that the originality of Fanon's philosophy comes from the multiplicity of approaches he was able to simultaneously weave together. More so, in attempts to read Fanon through Sartre or Merleau-Ponty, or through Lacan, his contemporaneity with these thinkers is elided. While we know that Fanon attended Merleau-Ponty's lectures in Lyon in the late 1940s, no one worries to ask how Merleau-Ponty could lecture in and about Madagascar in the late 1950s without referencing Fanon. In other words, it might be time to read phenomenology through Fanon, rather than centering analysis on Fanon's assumed debt to Merleau-Ponty's body schema.
In this essay, I focus on the question of phenomenological method (without assuming this to be the defining method of Fanon's work). My argument is not one from continuity. Rather, I want to show how Fanonian phenomenology is one of rupture with, and ungrounding of, the phenomenological tradition—how Fanon creates his own phenomenological method through a phenomenology of affect and touch that breaks with the perceptual spectacle at the centre of most phenomenologies before him. This is to say that Fanon's phenomenology is not mere description, that he invents a critical, distinctly temporal, method from the affective territory in which he has had to dwell.
Prof. em. Dr. Wolfram Fischer, Univ. of Kassel, Germany
Sensual construction of body and biography
In this lecture/paper I shall firstly try to outline some properties of the embodiment of senses. The concept of the living, animate body (in German Leib) - in contrast to other objects -, and it’s functions will be sketched, especially: the constituting of the self, enabling the interaction with others, and in general creating his or her world.
Secondly I try to bridge „body" to „biography" by especially taking into account the temporality of acting, experiencing, remembering, and the person’s being in the world.
Finally I shall consider consequences of this for empirical research, arguing a) for multimodal analysis and reconstruction of interaction and b) focusing in hermeneutical studies of personal accounts on bodily features and topics.
Prof. Dr. Vaike Fors, Univ. of Halmstad, Sweden
Sensory realities of automated technologies
New technological possibilities associated with automated technologies such as self-tracking and self-driving cars are generating new questions and imaginaries about automated futures. Until recently, technological-driven research has dominated the field, but there is now a growing interest for hitherto neglected perspectives, for example the sensory realities of these emerging technologies. In this talk, I will discuss a theoretical-methodological approach towards researching this context based in pedagogical design anthropological theory and sensory ethnographic practice. We have developed this approach to specifically target sensory and often unspoken perspectives on self tracking technologies and self-driving cars. During this talk I will discuss empirical examples from our research to demonstrate the approach as well as lessons learned from developing this approach in an interdisciplinary and applied context.
Dr. Michael Guggenheim, Goldsmiths - Univ. of London, UK
Translating the world: Towards a sociology of research media.
Sociology does not imagine itself as a multi-media discipline. Indeed, sociology does not have a theory of research media. It largely operates on the assumption that its primary output medium is text, and it does not have an elaborate theory how the world is turned into texts. Because of this assumption, all other senses and media become othered, as in need of a special justification. To move away from such unequal treatment of media, I would like to propose a theory of how the world is turned into research based on the notion of translation, and I would like to move away from asking questions about advantages and disadvantages of specific media, to ask questions of what happens in different translation steps. This assumes that any sociological research project translates across media and that the relevant focus should be on what translation as a practice is doing to the world.