Published 12 August 2008
ASCA is a research institute and doctoral school devoted to interdisciplinary and comparative studies across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Cultural analysis enables us to formulate the necessary articulations between transnational theories, disciplines and objects of study. Our research projects on cultural transformations and globalisation investigate discourses on and representations of contested objects such as the local and the global, the human, the migrant, the European, the minoritizing of ethnicities, religions or sexualities. The rapid and uneven alteration of such systems creates new media, new discourses and new subjects. We are therefore interested in the articulations between: - The transformation of discourses (study of the ethical, moral, and political discourses and principles structuring contemporary societies, argumentation, and analysis of the problems involved in the normative conceptualisations of those transformations);
- The development of new media (with emphasis on the new conceptual apparatuses made possible by the resources of our digital age, sound technology and digital games) and;
- Multilingual and multicultural encounters including the transnational circulation of images or constructions of identity markers (ethnic and sexual minorities, gender and Islam, transgenre, queer theory and transdisciplinarity).
Wanda Strauven
Academic Director
Participants: Staff: Frans van Eemeren, Peter Houtlosser, Eveline Feteris, Francisca Snoeck Henkemans, Bert Meuffels, Bart Garsen, Leah Polcar, José Plug Postdoc: Jan Albert van Laar PhD Candidates: Marcin Lewinski, Constanza Ihnen Jory, Merel Boers, Dima Mohammed, Corina Andone, Bilal Amjarso, Yvon Tonnard, Lotte van Poppel, Roosmaryn Pilgram, Marian Pijnenburg. Description: The 2005-2009 research programme ‘Argumentation in Discourse' aims at acquiring normatively valid and empirically adequate insights in specific ways of strategic manoeuvring in argumentative discourse. Four research project clusters are distinguished that are interdependent because in each of them the research questions that are asked pertain to a specific aspect of one and the same theoretical notion, ‘strategic manoeuvring'. The general relations between the programme as a whole and its four components are that answering the research questions asked in project cluster (1) and project cluster (3) contributes to gaining the desired normative insights: in (1) the insights that are to be developed are primarily theoretical and conceptual and in (3) they are first and foremost institutional and practical in nature. Answering the research questions asked in project cluster (2) and project cluster (4) contributes to acquiring the desired empirical insights: in (2) these insights are in the first place qualitative and analytic in nature and in (4) they are quantitative and experimental. In addition, there are various kinds of more specific interrelations between the individual projects. Activities/Output: 10 dissertations, books, articles, conferences, monthly research seminar
The Beijing 2008 Olympics and 21st Century Imaginations of Place, Culture and Identity - VIDI project Participants: Staff: Jeroen de Kloet, José van Dijck, Stefan Landsberger PhD candidates: Gladys Chong, Wei Liu Description: The forthcoming Olympic Games in Beijing (2008) present a unique opportunity to analyze how an upcoming global power promotes itself to its citizens and to the world, and the voices of support and discontent this promotion will provoke. This study will analyze how Chinese authorities (re-)construct a rooted yet new Beijing that signifies a China ready for the 21st century. Given the communication potentials offered by old and, particularly, new media technologies, these imaginations are never fully under the control of the Chinese state but instead also instigate possibilities of protest. This study consists of three interlocking subprojects. The first project, on promotion, will analyze how China as an upcoming global power promotes itself nationally to its citizens and globally to the world. The second project scrutinizes the pivotal and potentially critical role of local, regional and global media - television and the Internet - in the Chinese Communist Party's attempt to present a new China, including the role of protest groups. The final project investigates voices of compliance and discontent by zooming in on how bloggers and visual artists in Beijing, Hong Kong and Taipei - two key actors in challenging official discourse in China - appropriate the Games. The research design includes production, text and audience, while a multi-method approach combines a critical discourse analysis with ethnographic field research. This project takes issue with the balancing act of the Chinese state between nation-building projects and cosmopolitan demands. It shows how journalists, protest groups, bloggers and artists respond to, that is: comply, appropriate, challenge and undermine, the state's attempt to create a unified imagined community. This project aims to understand the cultural impact the Beijing Games will trigger, which concerns not only the Chinese people but, given the increasing global importance of China, also the world at large. Activities & Output: International conference 2009 - provisionally titled "Chineseness and its Discontents - The Beijing Olympics and its Mediations and Appropriations" - in Beijing; Yearly expert meetings: early 2008 (Amsterdam); 2008 (Taipei); 2009 (Beijing); 2010 (Amsterdam); Internet publication: Wiki and project website; 6 journal articles, 2 PhD-dissertations, 1 edited volume, 1 monograph
Participants: Mireille Rosello, Jan Hein Hoogstad, Joost de Bloois, Esther Peeren, Joseph Früchtl and Murat Aydemir Description: This project is dedicated to the discussion of the possibilities and pitfalls for research in the aftermath of the theoretical, interdisciplinary, and cultural turns in the humanities. Participants, contributors, and guests are invited to engage in theoretical reflection as well as self-reflexive practice to put to the test the divergent methods we use to connect objects, culture and theory. We propose that our reflections on method may be enriched by acknowledging the non-coincidence of method and practice. What we do and what we think we do are rarely the same thing. Research may produce results despite, but also because of, the gap between the two. Indeed, the exorbitant, unpredictable connections between what we think we do (method), what we actually do (praxis), and the research results that emerge may be most valuable, both epistemologically and politically. Considering the gap between method and practice will help us to criticize ways in which the methodologies of the humanities function not only as neutral research protocols but also, in their capacity as normalizing determinations of the human subject, as disciplinary formations in a Foucauldian vein. Our engagement with methods of, as well as case studies in, cultural analysis inquires anew into the questions whether and to what extent the methodologies of the humanities may have disciplinary and/or critical effects. We invite proposals for new directions, priorities, affiliations and objects for cultural analysis, as well as a renewed reflection on our basic terms. Topics for debate may include: the relevance of the material specificity, textuality, and/or mediality of the object of analysis; cultural analysis in relation to close reading, criticism, critique, and hermeneutic interpretation; the place of the particularizing case study in relation to generalizing contextual and/or conceptual frames of knowledge; the place of ‘culture' in the practice of cultural analysis; the practice of interdisciplinarity in relation to aesthetic criticism, history, philosophy, the social sciences, and cultural studies, as well as to artistic, activistic, and everyday ways of knowing; and finally, the contemporary politics of the academy, the humanities, the disciplines, and of cultural analysis. Activities/Output: Series of meetings that combine position papers with roundtable discussion. All ASCA members are invited to attend and contribute to meetings, as well as to propose lecturers to invite and topics to debate.
Participants: Staff: Deborah Cherry PhD candidates: Takako Kondo This project interprets studies and analyses cultural translation in multiple and overlapping ways. In an increasingly complex period of globalisation in which art and artists migrate across borders, and national and cultural identities are increasingly heterogenous, the study of cultural translation has become a matter of urgency. Transnational developments have provoked the need for a deeper understanding of the ways in which the visual arts are translated - between cultures, between visual languages and between disciplines. Whereas translation is already a subject of investigation in the literary field, it remains under-researched and under-theorised in studies of the visual arts. Moreover the global stage for the visual arts - in international biennales, as Documenta X, Documenta XI or XII and the debates around them indicated, museums, or corporate and dealer galleries, alongside the proliferation of texts on art, in print and on line - creates localised scenes of translation for the visual in which curators and critics, gatekeepers and interpreters are increasingly important and in which visual and written artistic languages are vibrantly and controversially contested. The project examines the ways in which images, genres and visual forms and strategies are transformed by exchanges within and between cultures. It also examines art writings and curating as forms that ‘translate' the visual. Whether studying art, artists, events, institutions, and/or audiences, researchers consider diverse ‘scenes of translation' (Maharaj, 1994), ‘translatability' in the global market (Apter, 2001), and a wide range of strategies of presentation, curation, and interpretation. The project is linked to the Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN) at the University of the Arts, London, which is dedicated to the study of transnational art and the theories and practices of visual transmission. Partner institutions include the Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven. Activities/Output: PhD dissertations, organisation of seminars and conferences at ASCA and TrAIN, publications
A Comparative History of the Moroccan Literatures in Spanish, French, and Dutch - NWO Project Participants: Staff: Ieme van der Poel Postdoc: Fouad Laroui PhD candidates: Yasmina El Haddad, Marjan Nijborg Description: The highly-charged debate surrounding immigrant minorities in Europe has led to a growing interest in the literary production of these ‘new' Europeans. Over the last decade, this has resulted in a powerful marketing of so-called ‘ethnic' writers by the publishing industry, the media and the press. Also, an increasing number of scholarly publications have focused on the topic of diasporic or exilic writing. Most of today's criticism tends to approach the writings of these newcomers as a more or less homogenous body of texts, stressing what they have in common - their communal displacement and ‘in-between'-ness - rather than the specific national and linguistic backgrounds of each individual group. This current practice may be considered Eurocentric in that, by problematizing the link between the representatives of these new literatures and their European host countries, the scholars working in this field unconsciously privilege the immigrant writer's new background over the land of his or her ancestors. As a result, the writer's bond with their country of origin, which often still forcefully exists, is glossed over, but also the relationship between immigrants who share the same roots but have settled, or at least have published in different European countries. Because these ‘new' Europeans no longer use the same language of their country of origin and have become part of different cultural fields, their works are hardly ever studied in relationship to one another. This project aims to take into account the multiple external connections of the three literatures concerned, instead of focusing solely on the immigrant-status or ‘postcolonial' otherness of their makers. Paradoxically, by broadening the scope of our approach in this way, we will be able also to adjust its focus. For by concentrating on the ‘Morocanness' of these authors, this project will effect a noticeable change with regard to the current practice concerning the study of Moroccan writing in French and Dutch. Activities/Output: Meetings every six weeks, 2 disserations, 2 monographs
Participants: Staff: Richard Rogers, Jan Simons, Geert Lovink PhD Candidates: Esther Weltevreden, Sabine Niederer, Noam Knoller The Digital Methods project is a contribution to doing research into the ‘natively digital'. Consider, for example, the hyperlink, the thread and the tag. Each may ‘remediate' older media forms (reference, telephone chain, book index), and genealogical histories remain useful (Bolter/Grusin, 1999; Elsaesser, 2005; Kittler, 1995). At the same time new media environments - and the software-makers - have implemented these concepts, algorithmically, in ways that may resist familiar thinking as well as methods (Manovich, 2005; Fuller, 2007). In other words, the effort is not simply to import well-known methods - be they from humanities, social science or computing. Rather, the focus is on how methods may change, however slightly or wholesale, owing to the technical specificities of new media.
The initiative is twofold. First, we wish to interrogate what scholars have called ‘virtual methods,' ascertaining the extent to which the new methods can stake claim to taking into account the differences that new media make (Woolgar, 2002; Hine, 2005). Second, we desire to create a platform to display the tools and methods to perform research that, also, can take advantage of ‘web epistemology' (Rogers, 2004). The web may have distinctive ways of recommending information (Sunstein, 2006). Which digital methods innovate with and also critically display the recommender culture that is at the heart of new media information environments? See: http://dmi.mediastudies.nl Activities/Output: monthly seminar
University of Amsterdam, University of Casablanca Hassan II, University of Leeds Participants: Ieme van der Poel (ASCA), Patricia Pisters (UvA), Niek Pas (ICG), Yasmina el Haddad (ASCA), Fouad Laroui (ASCA), Mireille Rosello (ASCA). Description: For more than a century the respective histories of the Maghreb and Europe have been inextricably linked. Colonialism and then decolonisation have been followed by a migration which has continued to this day and has also affected European countries such as Holland, Belgium and Italy that, unlike France and Spain, do not share a colonial past with the Maghrebi countries. This interdependence has been reinforced by globalisation. Thanks to satellite dishes, the internet and an ever-growing mobility, the departures that emigration implies have become progressively less definitive than they were in the nineteenth century (think, for example, of the Irish and Italian populations who had to leave Europe forever in search of a better life in the United States). Although, in the political domain, ‘fortress Europe' has tended to show itself to be both impervious and impenetrable, in the cultural domain frontiers have never been so elastic and cross-fertilisations between Europe and the Maghreb are now ever greater in number. These encounters can occur in many different forms and are often as diverse as they are contradictory, ranging from dialogue to misunderstanding (though the latter is still capable of producing meanings) and from cross-fertilisation to segregation. In short, we have to accept now that the old opposition between centre and periphery is no longer applicable and that it has been replaced by a new configuration in which the Maghreb functions as a pivot point between sub-Saharan Africa and the West (with music for example). Beginning with the city (the theme of the first conference in Amsterdam in April 2008), the project wishes to consider this cultural dynamic above all as a dialectical one. Other themes - creolisation, visual/performing arts, new technologies - will maintain the view that the Maghreb-Europe dynamic is at once material, imaginary and political. Therefore we are not limiting our theme to one discipline nor to any particular period, though the project is aiming to combine, even confront, analyses that cover fiction and film, and social and political questions. As for periodisation, 1945 (the start of the decolonisation period and the end of the Second World War) up to the present day seems pertinent. In the first theme of the city for example, this will allow us to include the idea of the Maghrebi city and/or the European city as a site of multiple memories that are multidirectional (colonial cities; the Casbah in Algiers versus Paris during the OAS terrorist attacks; Tunis and Casablanca as cities for exiles during the Algerian war), as well as sites of transition between rural and urban life (shanty-towns on both sides of the Mediterranean, but also places where oral traditions persist). However the city is where new forms of babelism are forged, be it in the French-Darija mix found in the Moroccan context or, in the European context, a new urban lexicon is being developed by Amsterdam's Moroccan community. Furthermore, reference to the new urban lexicon illustrates, once again, the important link between the Maghreb and sub-Saharan Africa (albeit here, exported to Europe). The overall aim of the project then is to provide a counterpoint to the old, well-worn metaphor of a culture ‘shock' between North Africa and Europe. Instead we will use the idea of two shores of the Mediterranean washing over each other and in some sense reflecting each other, whether in historical terms or in terms of memory and respective imaginaries. We will then be able to use this dialectical dynamic to think outside of the traditional categories of postcolonial theory and to use those postcolonial concepts that have been overlooked such as ‘interculturalism'. Finally, and central to our work, the project will be a veritable exchange between researchers working on both sides of the Mediterranean and beyond. This exchange helps to confirm our original idea that the Mediterranean has become a fundamentally mobile frontier which is slowly but surely moving northwards. We consider that this original way of looking at the Maghreb-Europe dynamic will allow, inevitably, for a ‘triangular' understanding of Europe's relationship with the ‘Machrek' too. Output/Activities: - A first international conference took place at UvA, April 2008. This will result in a joint publication, 2008.
- Next meeting: Casablanca (April 2009).
- Creation of a European network.
Participants: Mireille Rosello, Sudeep Dasgupta, Guido Snel, Esra Almas, Lara Mazurski, Christine Taylor, Don Domonkos, Hugh McDonnell, Niall Martin, Maria Groutidou Description: This project studies European cultural spaces that can be defined as European, not because they are located or take place within the political borders of Europe, but because the cultural agents who produce and reproduce such spaces are inventing new transnational, European identification practices. The European cultural spaces that we intend to study in this project are transnational meeting places, both virtual and material, historical and contemporary, inhabited or visited by both members of national cultures and those who have been excluded from them or come from the outside. We wish to stress the process of "Europeanizing" and the spatial dimension in these cultural spaces. These spaces are in the process of becoming European and hence creating new definitions of Europe. The spatial dimensions are of importance since both the specific stages (virtual or material) on which cultural encounters take place and the context of these encounters give meaning to these encounters. A joint ICG\ASCA research group, we are interested in the agendas that cultural agents who move to these transnational meeting places implicitly or explicitly defend and in the process of inclusion and exclusion that they practices generate. Representative case studies would include: - - European or internationally orientated magazines and papers (anti-communist exile magazines in Paris or Rome, avant-garde groups -De Stijl)
- - International visual media: Eurovision
- - Film festivals and art exhibitions: returning exhibitions (Venetian Biennale), artist collectives (PEN)
- - Literary and cinematographic constructions (salons du livre, artists' colonies, transnational writers, literature and cinema by or about migrants and exiles that "queer" Europe, documentaries, television programs)
- - Academic projects (conferences, programs, series of publications: Franco-German history-books)
- - State (supported) initiatives (refugee centers, migrants' schools or community centers)
- - Meeting points (airports, consulates, Russendisko or Romanisches café in Berlin)
Activities/Output: 1 monograph/edited volume, 1 dissertation, NWO project
Transformaties in Kunst en Cultuur - NWO Project Participants: Staff: Ginette Verstraete, John Neubauer; PhD Candidate: Huub van Baar Description: This duo-project concentrates on globalization from the perspective of meaning- and identity-making. We want to study this central problem from an interdisciplinary perspective: what cultural forms does globalization take in East and Central Europe, and how does this relate to the region's need for new identity-formations? The project investigates how recent processes of globalization have influenced the formation of new identities in East and Central Europe. In particular, it looks at the ways in which the transition within the region from a predominantly verbal and nationalized cultural heritage to diverse visual, global multimedia practices has gone hand in hand with new transnationally oriented concepts, self-images and artistic expressions of identity. By at times subverting, at times affirming ethnic and national polarizations, these transnational cultural formations problematize earlier homogenizing regional generalizations such as "Eastern European identity" or "Balkan identity". Since 1989, it has become imperative to reconsider the ways in which cultural identities have been formed and politically represented in the region. The end of communism and the advent of global capitalism set in motion a range of radical political and cultural changes in the 1990s. To start with political transformations: On the one hand, the region's post-communist transitions have been accompanied by the rise of democracy, multi-party systems and market economies, by various opportunities for the emancipation of the region's minorities, and by the promise of imminent EU-membership for selected countries. On the other hand, however, the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia resulted in migrations and expulsions, in local, regional and national conflicts, and in new forms of belonging and exclusion, with adverse consequences for the region's most vulnerable minorities. Moreover, the EU-enlargement processes themselves have been accompanied by renewed strategies of inclusion and exclusion. The processes of Europeanization - embedded in the context of post-communist global capitalism - have created new external and internal political borders to separate "European" from "non-European" countries and to regulate rules of border-crossing, requirements for dual citizenship and the rights of national minorities.
Participants: Staff: Josef Früchtl, Kati Röttger, Ruth Sonderegger, Gerard de Vries, Michael Wedel Description: Since the beginning of history, human self-understanding has gone hand in hand with the imaginary creation and reification of the human being through images. In this connection as well as in general, the concept of the image has several meanings. Firstly and primarily, ‘image' means ‘visual image' or ‘picture'. This implies that an image can be lifted off the picture and transferred to another medium. It is in this latter sense that, secondly, Western culture since Greek antiquity has used the concept of image in a mental sense to explain sensuous perception, thinking, memory, imagination, fantasy and dreams. There is also, thirdly, a rhetorical and poetological function; in this case, ‘image' is an abbreviation for comparisons, allegories, parables and similar linguistic forms of illustration. And last but not least, the image has a metaphysical application; in Christian theology for example the human being is seen as the ‘image of God'. Concerning the concept of mankind it is obvious that debates about this concept are all but new. It has been questioned by various academic disciplines (e.g. ethnology, anthropology, cultural studies, post-colonial studies) as well as by non-academic activists (Marxists, feminists, black-liberation etc). Our starting point consists in the assumption that it is just in the light of these protests against the mostly hegemonic use of the concept of man that we have to re-address the category of mankind and its multifaceted images. We want to ask how the mutual entanglement between the humanities on the one hand and the production, distribution and reception of images of mankind on the other has to be conceived of. Activities/Output: The general aim is to establish a long running (usually 9 year) Graduiertenkolleg that will be financed by DFG/NWO/UvA and/or EU.
Participants: Staff: Wanda Strauven, Thomas Elsaesser, Michael Wedel, Tarja Laine PhD candidates: Jennifer Steetskamp, Laura Schuster, Pepita Hesselberth, Senta Siewert, Zeynep Gündüz, Maria Poulaki, Tina Bastajian Description:
Imagined Futures is a research project concerned with the conditions, dynamics and consequences of rapid media transfer and transformation. ‘Media' here encompasses all imaging techniques and sound technologies, with the cinema providing the conceptual starting point and primary historical focus. While changes in basic technology, public perception and artistic practice may often evolve over long historical cycles, our main assumption is that there are also elements not of steady and gradual process, but moments when transfer occurs in discontinuous, unevenly distributed fashion, during relatively short periods of time, and with mutually interdependent determinations. Imagined Futures initially identified two such periods of transformation taking place across a broad spectrum of media technologies: the period 1870-1900 and the period 1970-2000. The first witnessed the popularization of photography, the emergence of cinema, the global use of the telegraph and the domestic use of the telephone, the invention of wireless radio and of the basic technology of television, while the second saw the consolidation of video as a popular storage medium and avant-garde artistic practice, the universal adoption of the personal computer, the change from analogue to digital sound and image, the invention of the mobile phone, and the emergence of the internet and world wide web. A key characteristic of such periods of rapid media change is the volatility, unpredictability and contradictory nature of the dynamics between the practical implications (industrial applications and economic potential) of these technologies, their perception by the popular imagination (in the form of narratives of anxiety, utopia and fantasy), and the mixed response (eager adoption or stiff resistance) from artists, writers and intellectuals. These shifting configurations among different agents offer a rich field of investigation for cultural analysis, posing methodological challenges and requiring specific case studies. The basis of research conducted in the context of the Imagined Futures project is thus the triangulation of the avant-garde, the academy and popular application of media technologies. The cultural practices to be investigated are marked by a-synchronicity, anachronism, delay and anticipation, while location, place, displacement and mobility form another crucial set of coordinates. Currently, Imagined Futures is a cluster of three core projects which fall into a historical, a theoretical and an ‘applied' strand: 1) The historical strand relates to the ‘media and modernity' thesis: the contradictory concept of a compulsively ‘innovative' avant-garde and the (institutional) position as well as (self-) perception of the artist in relation to the memory function of culture. Throughout the 20th century, the artist, the work (and, by extension, the art world and its public) have been engaged in a dynamic-adaptive (and not merely antagonistic) relation with popular and commercial applications of the same media technologies. In this respect, the cinema serves as an implicit reference point in a much wider cultural field, including literature, museum practice, architecture and the fine arts. 2) The theoretical strand examines the texts and discourses produced by critics and academics in response to media technologies as cultural practice. The ambition is not only to have a clearer sense of the (technological, aesthetic, economic, indeed anthropological) implications of rapid media change, but to intervene in the debate around the different versions of ‘crisis historiography' (Foucault's concept of Archaeology, Luhmann's Systems Theory and Latour's Network Theory, as well as New Historicism and the growing interest in Counterfactual History). Special attention is given to the culture of performative theory and performative self-reference, promoted in avant-garde manifestos, by artist's statements and even instruction manuals. 3) The applied strand is product- and practice-oriented and is understood to include all manner of applications of (media) technologies, ranging from social issue uses, locative media projects, to commercial schemes, military applications, and public space projects. One additional common denominator of Imagined Futures research is the question how media articulate (public and private) space and modulate the (subjective and global) experience of time. Several of the ongoing research projects of our PhD candidates are concerned with non-linear temporalities in mainstream feature films, the temporal dimension of installation work and of video art; others trace the genealogy of locative media, and the bodies/identities ‘in formation' in the information society. All members of this project regularly intervene in the old media vs. new media debates with publications, forum discussions and conference papers. The long-term goal of Imagined Futures is to overcome the limits of traditional humanities scholarship with respect to disciplinary boundaries and isolated objects of study, aiming to re-energize by ‘synchronizing' the university, the art world and the general public, and thereby stimulate new forms of interaction between the avant-garde, the academy and the activist general users of image and sound technologies. Activities/Output: Monthly reading group, International workshop, 7 dissertations
Participants: Staff: Matthijs Engelberts Description: The growing weight of visual culture in contemporary society is a much debated topic. This project attempts to contribute to - and hopefully nuance - the study of this field on a precise topic: it adresses the relation between the contemporary literary word and two interconnected image-based art media that are technologically divergent but both in constant interplay with literature: a ‘new' art - film - and an ‘old' one - theatre. The aim is to analyse recent medial shifts in the position of the texts that are most frequently used in the making of stage and screen fiction - (film)script, drama and novel. These three kinds of print fiction have not been studied in coherence from an intermedial perspective, in contemporary culture since the eighties. The proposal focuses on the case of France, which has been chosen because of the longstanding, lively traditions in literature, theatre and cinema and the pronounced, sometimes tense relations between these traditions. The first sub-project highlights a major medial shift in contemporary drama, which in the last three decades has moved away from the literary domain and has medially come to depend more on its locus in the theatrical field. The second sub-project concentrates on the relation between the film script and the literary field, in which film texts have functioned as literary artefacts in different guises, but that now extends its power less than ever to film via the printed film script. The third sub-project focuses on the novel and its changing relation to film in the transition from the ‘nouveau roman' (and its incursions into the field of cinema) to the contemporary ‘post-avant-garde' novel (since the eighties), whose strategy towards film is much less expansionist. Activities/Output Conference presentations on Intermediality, 4 articles, raise funding for PhD project(s)
In collaboration with ICG Participants: Staff: Michiel Leezenberg, Ruud Peters, Richard van Leeuwen, Karen Vintges, Sipco Vellenga, Maaike van Berkel, Michael Kemper PhD candidates: Seda Muftugil, Rogier Visser Description: In popular perceptions as well as academic institutions, Europe and the Islamic world are usually treated as radically different entities. This enduring conceptual opposition, paired with an equally tenacious disciplinary division, is misleading, since Europe and the Islamic world have a common background in judeo-christian religious traditions and in the political and juridical institutions of the Roman empire. They also have a virtually continuous tradition of intensive contacts, in part friendly, through trade, travel, and translation; and in part conflictual, through crusades, colonialism, and Islamic resistance against Western rule. The different members of our group explore the various ways in which these contacts have influenced and transformed cultural, religious and political discourse and practice among both Muslims and Christians. By exploring how such interactions shaped and reshaped mutual perceptions, identities and cultural traditions, we hope to provide more historical depth and factual accuracy to contemporary debates about the place of Islam and Muslims in contemporary Europe. The fields that will be covered are especially inter-communal relations and bureaucracy in Andalusia, Dutch-Ottoman relations in the period of the Enlightenment, travel, cultural exchange and religious thought, mutual perceptions and the construction of images in various periods, the cultural and political role of non-Muslim minorities in the Ottoman Empire, and the history of Oriental studies. Activities/Output: 2 dissertations
Participants: Staff: Frank Huysmans, Frank van Vree (ICG), Eric Ketelaar (ICG), Ieme van der Poel, Pamela Pattynama, José van Dijck, Lisa Kuitert (ICG), Marie-Aude Baronian, Julia Noordegraaf, Nanci Adler (ICG), Marieke Bloembergen (ICG), Nathalie Scholz (ICG), Sophie Berrebi, Desirée Schyns PhD candidate(s): Olivier Nyirubugara Description: While museums, theme parks, re-enactment societies, historical novels and movies, cultural tours, antiquity markets and genealogical records attract more attention than ever before, cultural critics, philosophers and historians argue that we live in a culture of amnesia, and that historical consciousness is losing ground in western civilisation. The paradox seems to indicate that we are experiencing a process of structural change of social memory and historical culture, which overthrows ideas, concepts and hierarchies rooted in modern western culture of the eighteenth century. In this process, individual and collective memories are becoming increasingly intertwined with (and reliant on) media data and technologies. This project addresses the role of media in the way we remember past events and construct notions of self and community, trying to understand what forces and trends are determining our perception and conception of the past. We will welcome both theoretical, national (Dutch) and transnational perspectives on this theme. The project will deal with the following issues: - - the role of various media - from written and visual sources to digital media - in the shaping of individual and social memory and remembrance;
- - the role of technology in framing and storing information and memory;
- - the dynamics of cultural remembrance from an intermedial perspective, dealing with the question how different mnemonic practices interact with each over time and how cultural remembrance may be influenced by the introduction of new technologies;
- - the role and position of ‘memory institutions', like archives, museums, digital collections etc.;
- - the poetics of representation of the past by media, its imagery, techniques of mise en scene and re-enactment;
- - the role of users of mediated memories and media technologies.
Output/Activities: - Organize regular meetings with the group, at least once every two months, to present and listen to each others work. - Initiate an international conference on Media and Memory in 2009-10, which will result in several collective and individual publications. - Apply for several NWO projects on memory and media through open competition and support VENI and VIDI applications.
Participants: Staff: Kati Röttger, Bram van Oostveldt, Matthijs Engelberts Description: This research program aims to bridge the gap between recent interests in ‘the melodramatic' in visual culture studies and the historiography of melodramatic imagery in its ‘prime time': the nineteenth-century theatre. From the perspective of visual culture, the links between the early ‘cinema-of-attractions' and late-nineteenth-century panoramas, dioramas, wax-images and other visual spectacles have, at least for some countries, been well researched (e.g. Schwartz, 1998). However, the crossmedial transfer of melodramatic techniques between early cinema and contemporary popular theatre has still received surprisingly little attention (Singer 2001), while the impact of early-nineteenth-century melodramatic theatre in twentieth-century visual culture has been hardly studied at all. At the other end of the spectrum, most theatre historians still tend to look down upon popular theatre, while a number of scholars who have taken nineteenth-century melodramatic theatre seriously have focused almost exclusively on dramatic texts and plots, showing an astonishing blind spot for visual structures and the theatrical performance in general (e.g. Thomasseau 1984, Przybos 1987, McConaghie 1992, Hays & Nikolopoulou 1996). Because theatre historians have analysed American, English or French melodramatic plays almost always within a narrow national framework, questions on the cross-national transfer and appropriation of melodramatic plays, productions and visual techniques - often creating subtle or more overt shifts in the range of their possible political meanings - are still almost completely unexplored. This research program aims to address these new questions by detailed cross-medial and cross-cultural analysis of nineteenth-century melodramatic theatrical imagery, informed by and contributing to current questions and insights in the field of visual culture studies. Activities/Output: 2008 NWO Program application ‘Melodramatic modes': four projects. 2009 NWO Investment Subsidy application for a digital research infrastructure. Partners: Theater Instituut Nederland, the Library of the Universiteit van Amsterdam. 2009 Conference "Melodramatic Techniques and Pictorial Repertoires" 2010 Exhibition "Box Office Hits in the 19th Century", with a rich catalogue. Partners: Theater Instituut Nederland, Stadsarchief Amsterdam. 2010 Conference "Cosmopolitics and theatre"
Participants: Staff: Mieke Bal, Mireille Rosello, Deborah Cherry, Sudeep Dasgupta, Patricia Pisters, Catherine Lord, Saskia Kersenboom PhD candidates: Astrid van Weyenberg, Begum Firat, Noa Roei, Paulina Aroch, Niamh Kelly, Lucy Cotter Description: Migratory Aesthetics is an international project, funded by NWO, that brings together a considerable group of British and Dutch scholars in annual workshops, the first of which took place in January 2005. The aesthetic dimension of the social phenomenon of migration has not been studied enough in its own right. This dimension moves in two directions: the influence of newcomers to the host countries’ culture, especially the "look" of public space; and the influence of host countries on the subjective relationship, through memory, of migrants to their homeland, whether they have personal memories of that homeland or not; whether this homeland is imaginary or the product of "post-memory."
The theme of aesthetics avoids two pitfalls of the current interest in migration that I am very keen to keep at bay: exploitation and voyeurism on the one hand, and on the other, a do-goodish sense of political activism for which we are neither qualified nor positioned, often degenerating into heated discussions without any real impact or relevance. Not that activism is to be dismissed; it is just not best served in the context of academic analysis (although this may be a topic of debate). Most importantly, I think it is time to also acknowledge, even celebrate, the enormous cultural benefits of migration for the so-called host societies, so as to strike a more positive note. Activities/Output: Three international workshops and exhibitions, three edited volumes
NWO Project, The Futures of the Religious Past Participants: Staff: Rokus de Groot and Burcht Pranger, Postdoc: Sander van Maas PhD candidate: Jaël Kraut Description: With the advent of new ‘spiritual’ music (ca. 1970-present), the return of the religious in the field of post-World War II concert music has become apparent. This return represents a break with the 19th-century tradition of absolute music and its culmination in the secular, autonomous, and formalist art of serialism of the 1950s. While the latter tended to push musico-religious issues into the background—in spite of its spiritual foundations (Goeyvaerts)—the return of spiritual music in the public sphere two decades later, indicates that the old idea (or ideal) of a sacred music has not been eradicated. Although these many new — and explicitly musico-religious —practices often make use of traditional idioms and concepts, they are not easily identifiable in terms of particular traditions and/or religious or church music. They have lived through these processes of enlightenment and secularization, and have in many respects changed the face, and theoretical framework, of sacred music. This transformation of the sacred in the musical domain calls for a different type of analysis than traditional aesthetics, musicology and/or theology usually offer. Such an analysis has to show in which ways religious music has its place in present-day aural and musical culture, taking into account the effects of secularization, digitalization and interculturalism. The present project aims, first, at describing the particular ways in which practices of new music actively take part in the dynamics of the religious, of both Western and non-Western origin, within the largely secularized context of Western ‘classical’ music making; second, at designing and implementing theoretical strategies that open up the possibility to follow, describe, and assess the transformations of the conceptual network and (historical) practices of religious music in present-day Western musical and aural culture; and third, at enriching the debate on the limits of secularization with a discussion of the culture of the ear—the celebrated ‘sense of faith’. Activities/Output: dissertations, conferences
NWO application, 2008.
Participants: Deborah Cherry, Sanneke Stigter, IJsbrand Hummelen, Tanja Scholte Description: This research project, organised in conjunction with The Netherlands Institute for Cultural Heritage (ICN), Maastricht University, and The Netherlands Graduate Research School WTMC (Science, Technology and Modern Culture) explores the contending theoretical models engaged in the conservation of contemporary art. It considers the ways in which new genres of contemporary art pose profound practical and theoretical problems to museum conservation and curatrial practices, not only because of the ephemeral, fragile and experimental nature of their materials and technologies, and sometimes unknown propensities, but because their status as events, acts or installations challenge pre-dominant concepts of conservation which focus on the object, and on strategies which aim to ‘freeze' or at least maintain the object's material condition at an agreed point in its history. The project investigates a range of theoretical and philosophical approaches, testing them against selected empirical and scientific case studies, drawn from a number of specific museum collections. Through a series of sub-projects, the research interrogates what happens to works of art on entering these collections - when documented, stored, exhibited, re-installed (on loan or in house), researched and restored. It analyses the pressures from colliding forces: such as institutions, exhibitions, concepts of the spectator, curators, conservators, and artists and their representatives. Activities/Outputs 2 PhD dissertations; 2 publications; 1 policy document; expert meetings with international participants.
Participants: Staff: Beate Roessler, Ruth Sonderegger, Govert den Hartogh, Frans Jacobs, Gijs van Donselaar, Veit Bader, Karen Vintges, Gerard de Vries, Michiel Leezenberg Postdocs: Jelle de Boer, Henri Wijsbek, Dorota Mokrosinska, Thomas Nys, Marc Davidson Pieter Pekelharing PhD candidates: Iris Tomlow, Bastiaan Hoorneman, Rob van Someren Greve, Piet Joustra, Dennis McIntosh, Kauppinen, Wouters Description: A common characteristic of many contemporary social problems is the uncertainty about the extent in which these problems are public affairs, and thus where, by whom and how they have to be dealt with in a liberal democracy. This is particularly pressing in questions about religious diversity and fundamentalism, biotechnology and modern medicine, to name but a few examples. In spite of their obvious differences in content, problems in areas such as these jointly call for serious reconsideration of political, moral and ethical concepts. The principles of liberalism and democracy, distinctions like the ones between the private and the public, fact and value, science and politics, and between individual morality and the normative neutrality of liberal democracies have to be interpreted against the background of the new societal problems. Established institutions and practices to deal with public concerns need to be re-evaluated. These include the sovereignty of the national state, the autonomous individual as the basic unit in normative theory, the view that democratic politics is execution of aggregated individual preferences, and the role of expertise in democracy. Activities/Output: Activities/Output: Organization of a lecture-series; of different workshops; various articles and monographs
Participants: Sophie Berrebi, Julia Noordegraaf, Marie-Aude Baronian, Ariana Noel de Tilly, Mark-Paul Meyer Description: Photography, Film and Displacement aims at bringing together research projects concerned with still and moving images and their production, circulation and presentation in contemporary culture. Photography and film's prominence in visual culture is coupled with the ubiquitous status of its objects and the shifts of meaning that occur with their displacement from one context to another. Aimed at researchers from various disciplines from the humanities and beyond, this project provides a meeting place for researchers who examine photography and film and creates an environment for discussion through research workshops and conferences. Contributing to the development of a theoretical corpus around photography, film and displacement through publications is the principal aim of this research project. To this purpose, a research proposal will be submitted to the NWO. Activities/Output: 2005: Conference with Didi-Huberman 2006: Lecture series with Michaud and Rancière
Participants: Staff: Rokus de Groot, Wim van der Meer, Saskia Kersenboom PhD candidates: Clarence Charles, Dominic Phyfferoen, Alexandra Markovic Charlotte Vignau Description: Within the European community, the concept of "cultural identity" takes on ever increasing importance. The cultural traditions of various countries and/or regions are important means of counterbalancing the possible negative effects of development towards economic and cultural globalisation; in other words, understanding the bases of cultural traditions may stimulate a constructive approach towards many serious problems in today's world. Within the concept of cultural identities, the meaning of the past for the present and the future is important; the heritage of the past informs the present and thus profoundly influences decisions taken in the perspective of the future. In the field of music, the twentieth century produced some very radical bifurcations. Some composers continued to make use of elements of traditional tonality, sometimes with the aid of even older elements of modality and of the folk song heritage; other composers felt it was time for a radical break with these established patterns. Within the more encompassing framework of the artistic avant-garde, a style of musical modernism developed in which musical elements were intended to relate to each other rather than to any exterior context. How do European traditions relate to the manifold influences of different cultures, which are more emphatically present in Europe today, compared to the last century? What role, if any, should be played by the expectations and desires of the public? And, last but not least, how are we to deal with the tradition of breaking traditions? Activities/Output: 4 dissertations
(e altre piste di una generazione di narratori italiani) Participants: Staff: Ronald de Rooy, Viva Paci (Université de Montréal), Beniamino Mirisola (Università Ca' Foscari, Venice) Description: This project focuses on the most successful and remarkable writers of present-day Italy: Niccolò Ammaniti, Sandro Veronesi, Melania Mazzucco, Aldo Nove among others. From different perspectives the three participants of this project will explore recurrent styles, themes, images, narrative techniques and peculiar uses of genre in the works of these authors. The concepts of formation and deformation are a common point of departure for several methodological trajectories. These trajectories include for example "stories of (de)formation", in which particular attention is being given to the representation of children and adolescents often living inside families in deformation. Another trajectory focuses on the "deformation of the senses" in these authors' narratives. The concept of deformation also emerges if we look at these texts from the perspective of literary genre: in this trajectory, "deformation of genre", particular attention will be given to the detective and to the alternation of fiction and reportage in several authors. This project covers the two decades between 1988 and 2008. One of the reasons to start in 1988 is the posthumous publication of Italo Calvino's Lezioni americane (Six Memos for the Next Millennium) in that year. Some of the basic concepts of Calvino's essays will be used in the analysis of these narratives of (de)formation. Activities/Output: Several conference papers Aim: book publication in 2008/2009
Participant: Staff: Elke Huwiler Description: The aim of this research project is to develop a methodological terminology, based on both cognitive narratology and a cultural approach to literary texts, with which to examine historical performance texts in a way that leads us to insights about how historical urban societies reflected on their social conditions. The basis of the project will be a detailed study of secular plays from sixteenth-century Switzerland. Activities/Output: 1 monograph
Participants: Staff: Govert den Hartogh Postdoc: Thomas Nys PhD: Iris Tomlow Description:
NWO Project, Transformaties in Kunst en Cultuur Participants: Staff: José van Dijck, Karin van Bijsterveld (UM) PhD: Bas Jansen Description: This dual research project (postdoc, PhD student) will examine how various sound and recording technologies have affected transformations in the cultural practice of listening and making music in Western Europe between 1945 and 2003, and will theorize how these technologies helped shift boundaries in people's active/passive participation in music culture. The postdoc project will focus on the role of sound technologies in the creation of art music; more specifically, it will question how analogue and digital technologies affect the boundaries between production and reproduction of music as well as the roles of the creator, technician, producer and distributor of music. The PhD project will thematize the impact of various recording technologies (tape, cassette, compact disk, computer) on the (re)creation of pop music. The boundaries between recording and rerecording, between listening and re-creating, and between copying and editing music will serve as a node of inquiry. Combining a historical-technological perspective with a social constructivist and cultural analytical approach, the dual project aims to innovate current theoretical insights in the role of technology in everyday cultural practices. Although the theoretical questions are tailored specifically to sound and recording technologies, they also address broader concerns regarding our understanding of the (historical and contemporary) interrelation between media technologies (visual, audio, text) and their socio-cultural proliferation or quotidian use. Activities/Output: 2 dissertations, bi-monthly meetings
Participants: Esther Peeren, Jan Hein Hoogstad, Joost de Bloois, Maria del Pilar Blanco (University of Aberystwyth) Description: This project is inspired by the way ghosts seem to be everywhere in contemporary culture: from Rachel Whiteread's plaster cast of the inside of a Victorian drawing room (entitled "Ghost") and Bret Easton Ellis' updating of the haunted house trope in his latest novel Lunar Park, to numerous films and television series featuring communications from beyond the grave (The Sixth Sense, The Others, The Ghost Whisperer, Medium). Ghosts - located in the ambivalent realm between life and death - have always inspired cultural fascination as well as theoretical consideration. In psychoanalysis, the ghost has been crucial to Freud's uncanny, Lacan's discussion of desire and Abraham and Torok's theory of intergenerational trauma. There is also the rich field of Gothic studies, where the ghost is a key genre characteristic. In these cases, however, the ghost is one element among others, part of a larger theory to which it is inextricably bound. With the appearance of Jacques Derrida's 1994 Specters of Marx, the ghost not only acquired a deconstructive dimension but was transformed into a discipline in and of itself: hauntology or spectral studies. This project expands the emerging field of spectral studies, which today encompasses much more than Derrida, by examining the theoretical potential of spectrality, specifically in the contemporary context. We are interested in exploring how literal appearances of ghosts in a variety of different media (literature, film, television, Internet, pop music, visual art, animation) can prompt, develop and supplement the existing use of spectrality as a concept to theorize questions of inheritance, mourning, hospitality, justice, identity, agency, race, gender, sexuality etc. Primary areas of interest include the spectrality of new media and popular culture, the specification of the ghost (to prevent it from becoming a catchall), and the spatial dimension of the ghost. Activities/Output: Essay collection Popular Spirits: The Haunted Spaces of Everyday Culture (edited by Esther Peeren and Maria del Pilar Blanco), workshop(s), monograph (by Esther Peeren)
Participants: Staff: Athalya Brenner, Jan Willem van Henten, Jonneke Bekkenkamp, Caroline Vander Stichele Richard van Leeuwen PhD candidates: Emma England, Ingeborg Löwisch, Sara Szmodis, Pieter de Vries Description: Notwithstanding the ongoing secularisation and individualization of Western culture, what is often called "the Bible" still has an enormous cultural impact. In fact, "the Bible" is an umbrella term and an abstraction, since de facto several bibles function as a collection of authoritative writings (i.e. a "canon") for Jews, Christians and to a certain extent also Muslims. Bibles not only help to find meaning in life, but also have a significant cultural importance, since they are inextricably bound up with the genesis and ongoing transmission of European culture. Even for non-believers "the Bible" still functions as an important frame of reference or even a source of inspiration for various forms of art. Remarkably, theologians and cultural historians pay very little attention to the actualised meanings of bibles. They focus mainly upon the origin of the biblical writings and their meanings in the original social and cultural settings, or in confessional contexts. The present research program endeavours to problematize the actual authoritative and cultural meanings of bibles by focusing upon the processes of transmission and actualisation of biblical texts up to and including the twenty-first century. Activities/Output: 2006 Seminar (with Tel Aviv University, Haifa University and others), Narrative and Memory in the Bible and beyond; 2007 All Saints' Day Conference; Since 2006 Book Series with Sheffield Phoenix Press, Amsterdam Studies in Bible and Religion; 2006 Book of essays published in series (seminar of 2004); 2008 Book of essays to be published in the series (seminar 2006); 2008 Book by a US scholar to be published in the series.
NWO project. Participants: Staff: Govert den Hartogh Postdoc: Henri Wijsbek Description: Although unbearable suffering has been a requirement for lawful euthanasia and physician assisted suicide (PAS) for at least ten years in the Netherlands, it is as yet by no means well defined. In the Brongersma-case, the Supreme Court excluded suffering caused by neither somatic nor psychiatric illness as a justification for euthanasia and PAS with the motivation that the assessment of this kind of ‘free-floating' existential suffering does not belong to the medical competence of doctors. The recent Dijkhuis-commission assigned by the Royal Dutch Medical Association (KNMG) to investigate existential problems at the end of life, challenged the judgement of the court as being premature and lacking a firm embedding in the medical profession. But controversy runs deeper than this. The reasons for patients to request either euthanasia or PAS include such conditions as fear of future decay, loss of dignity, extreme dependence and being a burden for relatives. Can these conditions be understood as aspects of unbearable suffering? If they cannot, is it morally defensible to reject all requests based on such reasons, or should we conclude that the existing legal framework for euthanasia and PAS is too restrictive? We will study these questions as they arise within the framework of the legal requirements for euthanasia and PAS. But many of them are relevant for other medical decisions at the end of life as well, for example for terminal sedation, and stopping or not starting treatment. All such decisions may at least require physicians to assess the severity of the patient's suffering. Our exploration of the possible grounds for granting requests for euthanasia or PAS will consist of two parts: a philosophical analysis of these grounds, aimed at a clarification of why they are so difficult to handle; and second, an empirical investigation of how doctors, prosecutors, and members of the Regional Euthanasia Review Committees apply them in practice. Ultimately, the outcome of these two parts of the research will lead to considerations relevant for the construction of guidelines as to what should count as legitimate grounds for euthanasia and PAS. Activities/Output: Eight articles in international ethical and medical journals; Dutch publications, including on-line publications, addressed to physicians, particularly SCEN-physicians (physicians specially trained to apply the legal requirements), and palliative physicians, as well as prosecutors and members of the Regional Euthanasia Review Committees; Presentation of provisional results for the same target groups; Final report.
In collaboration with ICG Participants: Staff: Jaap Kooijman, Joost de Bloois, Magriet Schavemaker, Marieke de Goede (ICG), Deborah Cherry, Joyce Goggin (ICG), Jan Teurlings, Thomas Vaessens (ICG) PhD candidate(s): Jenifer Chao Description: "Nous sommes tous américains" declared Le Monde after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. For a short moment, we were all Americans. On the political level, this transatlantic solidarity between Europe and the USA proved to be short-lived, as it was soon challenged by the unilateral stance of the Bush administration - its War on Terror and the war in Iraq - resulting in a revival of European anti-Americanism (Kroes 2006). On both sides of the Atlantic, however, significant new security practices and modes of governing are emerging in the name of the ‘fight against terror.' This research group has assembled around the premise that a thorough understanding of contemporary modes of governing in Europe has to include an analysis of the diversity of ways in which visual culture and cultural representation play a role in their constitution. Immediately after 9/11, it was asserted that art and literature ‘could not matter much ... in the face of so much murder and alarm' (Kunkel 2005). However, six years on it has become clear that the politics of fighting the war on terror intimately depends upon a landscape of cultural production (Retort 2005; Campbell and Shapiro 2007). If the spectacle of 9/11 was a symbolic targeting (Baudrillard 2002; Žižek 2002), then so too have been the political and military responses taking place in the name of the "war on terror" (Buck-Morss 2006). Moreover, the televisual media spectacle of 9/11 has become inseparable from our understanding of "what happened" on September 11th (de Bloois 2006; Campbell 2002; Kooijman 2008). Starting from the premise that cultural production is essential to the constitution and challenge of contemporary modes of governing in Europe, this group has organized its activities around two closely related sets of questions, one from the perspective of politics and one from the perspective of the arts and literature. Activities/Output: 1 Dissertation
Participants: Staff: Mireille Rosello, Tarja Laine, Esther Peeren, Marijke de Valck, Murat Aydemir, Laura Copier, Maaike Bleeker (Utrecht University) PhD candidates: Eliza Steinbock, Jules Sturm, Noa Roei, Cigdem Bugdayci, Jillian St-Jacques, Maryn Wilkinson, Ingeborg Lowisch (Utrecht University) Description: Issues of gender and corporeality have taken root in every discipline housed at the university. As fields of study that cross through the sciences and humanities they are exemplary of the state of interdisciplinary work. Since the close of the Belle van Zuylen Reasearch Institute for the Multicultural and Comparative Gender Studies, the Universiteit van Amsterdam has scattered scholars of gender. ASCA has often brought these far-flung researchers together in the theory seminar where feminist perspectives in anthropology, visual culture, postcoloniality etc. are regularly highlighted. In this context, gender as it relates to corporeality is one axis of inquiry where an interdisciplinary trajectory is necessitated and deliberated. As such, embodiment and gender has a bearing on nearly every cultural object, forming diverse and widespread analyses in ASCA's research. This project began as an investigation of corporeal literacy under Maaike Bleeker's NOW project "See Me, Feel Me, Think Me: The Body of Semiotics" that productively brought together scholars from performance studies, art history and gender studies, among other fields. With an expanded aim, "Theorizing Bodies and Genders" is currently an umbrella project that will function as a meeting point for researchers of various levels that approach the issue of gender and/or the body in their work. As such, it seeks to foster critical engagement with the full range of approaches that inform contemporary body and gender theory, such as feminism, phenomenology, semiotics, and performativity. Scholars are welcome from all areas of disciplinary interaction (e.g. film and media, art history, literature, music, theatre, anthropology, the sciences). This umbrella shelters the possibility for enriching one's research by encountering new perspectives and for networking with like-minded scholars. It provides the opportunity to anyone involved to organize a reading group, seminar, course, symposium, conference, or other such academic event that has a gender, body, and/or sexual politics concentration. This project will also see alliance with pre-existing gender-focused programs by working together with scholars at the Utrecht University, Maastricht University, and Radboud University in Nijmegen. Activities/Output: Reading groups: "The Anatomical Theatre Revisited" (Fall 2005 and Spring 2006), "Desiring Images: Reading Deleuze and Guattari" (Fall 2007), and "Desiring Images II: Image and Affect: Deleuze's Grin without the Cat" (Spring 2008). Conference: The Anatomical Theatre Revisited (Spring 2006). Journal: Issue of University of Leeds's parallax journal ‘Installing the Body' edited by Maaike Bleeker and Eliza Steinbock (Feb 2008). Graduate Course Development: ‘The Persistence of Identity' Short Intensive Course (June 2008) Seminar: (provisional) "Areas of Interaction: Bodies and Genders" (Jan 2009- ongoing) Symposium: "Trans/cinema" (19 May 2009) Contact Person: Eliza Steinbock (e.a.steinbock@uva.nl, office no. 020 525 3878)
Participants: Staff: Ronald de Rooy Description: This project analyzes and reconstructs the widespread popularity of the medieval Italian author Dante Alighieri and his world famous Divine Comedy in Western postmodernist culture. Dante's presence in postmodern culture is incredibly diverse and invades both popular and intellectual contexts. His persona, texts, characters, images, narrative structures, forms and ideas live on in a wide array of postmodern cultural expressions: literature, visual art, cinema, television, internet, music, politics, proverbs, everyday language, etcetera. Activities/Output: Aim: several articles and a book publication
Participants: Staff: Patricia Pisters PhD candidates: Jay Hetrick, Ils Huygens, Theisje van Dorsten, Gozde Onaran, Nicolas Kolonias Description: Taking Gilles Deleuze's claim that ‘the brain is the screen' (Flaxman, 2000) as a starting point, this project aims to look at audiovisual images from a ‘rhizomatic' perspective. While the concept of the rhizome as a metaphor for the grass like network structure of the organization of the brain is by now an established and even inflated term for referring for instance to the organization of the internet or the global flows and complexities of money, goods, people and information, little research has been done so far to all the other references to the brain in Deleuze's philosophy. Already in work as early as Difference and Repetition the brain is central to Deleuze's philosophy in his attempt to get away from philosophies of representation. In the last book Deleuze published together with Guattari, again the brain is of utmost importance. The brain is the junction between art, philosophy and science, the three domains of thinking. Art, philosophy and science all think in their own ways (through percepts and affects, through concepts and through functions) and they all need each other in order to receive a better understanding. The methodology of this project is therefore profoundly interdisciplinary in that it establishes active collaboration between a humanities approach of cultural/media analysis (mainly but not exclusively through the work of Deleuze) and experimental neuroscientific methodologies (mainly cognitive neuropsychology). Collaboration is established with the Helmholtz Institute at University of Utrecht and neuroscientists of the University of Amsterdam. In that sense, this project wants to be a ‘rhizotorium', a sort of rhizomatic laboratory in which art, philosophy and science meet at the moment where similar problems are encountered. The aim is to work in both directions. On the one hand film- and media theory can learn from findings in neuroscience to map out new directions in film and media studies by investigating the implications of what we name the ‘neuro-image'. This includes investigating new methods of analysis, the implications of neuroaesthetics in terms of perception (visual illusion), (pattern) recognition, (pre)cognition, affect and memory and the relationships to certain brain diseases such as schizophrenia and epilepsy. On the other hand film theory can offer new experimental models and methods for neuro-scientific research by proposing film (or media) related experiments. And film-philosophical reflection can think through the possible wider implications of neuro-scientific findings by proposing very concrete case study analyses. Activities/Output: Expert meeting, pilot project neuro-film, dissertations, monograph, conference participation
Genealogies of Self, State, and Society in the Contemporary Islamic World NWO project, The Futures of the Religious Past Participants: Staff: Ruud Peters, Michiel Leezenberg, Peter van der Veer (UU) Postdoc: Yolande Jansen PhD Candidates: Mariwan Kanie, Cevat Kara, Description: This project aims at a genealogical history and critique of secular modernity and its religious challenges in the contemporary Islamic world, which tries to escape the empirical and conceptual confines of the nation state, and explores the role of the shared experience of (quasi-) colonial modernization. The approach of the project may be characterized as genealogical and interactional. It is genealogical in so far as it not only traces the historicity of such central categories as those of the state, society, religion, and secularism, but also systematically analyzes these as constituted by and in practices of government and knowledge. Moreover, it traces how specific forms of subjectivity have been constituted in and through such practices, rather than presupposing a fixed and unchanging form of human agency or freedom. The project aims at the formulation of a coherent and substantial alternative narrative of the modernization of both the Islamic world and Europe, and of the rearticulation of both religion and secularism in both. It will suggest both conceptual and normative alternatives for the currently dominant liberal and secular modernist framework of much of the current public debate on Islam. As this framework tends to prejudice the very questions at stake, the project's relevance is thus not just academic but also societal. In the recent past, all members of the research team have actively intervened in the Dutch public debate. Activities/Output: 7 articles, 1 monograph, 2 dissertations, 1 edited volume, a public event, academic workshop
Participants: Staff: Charles Forceville; Yuri Engelhardt Prospective PhD candidates: Liselotte Doeswijk; Gunnar Theodór Eggertsson; Raúl Niño Zambrano Description: Increasingly, verbal means of presenting information and arguments give way to multimodal means. Graphics and pictures in newspapers, commercials, manuals, course books, and airport environments carry a substantial information load. Documentaries and news reports convey their "facts" via a mix of images, language, and music. TV channels and broadcasting organizations create their identities largely via audiovisual designs. Websites and blogs combine verbal information with visuals and sometimes sounds, often providing considerable freedom in the order in which information is accessed. On the assumption that no representation is innocent or neutral in the sense that each has some purpose or objective, it is important to inventory and analyse how multimodal discourses are structured and (attempt to) achieve their rhetorical or aesthetic aims. Areas of particular interest are: (1) Multimodal metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson (1999) claim that we think metaphorically - indeed, that we cannot conceive of abstract things without metaphor. But their cognitivist metaphor paradigm hitherto largely ignores non-verbal manifestations. Forceville is particularly interested in the Source-Path-Goal schema (in film and games) and in the metaphorical representation of emotions (see Forceville 2005). (2) Relevance Theory (Sperber & Wilson 1995). Hitherto, the very fruitful RT has mainly been applied to verbal communication in face-to-face situations. It needs to be applied to multimodal discourse genres, because both the theorization of these genres and the theory itself can benefit from the application. (3) Graphic design. Engelhardt (2002) has charted and theorized the meaningful visual elements in maps, charts, and diagrams. His findings require further (dis)confirmation, and the link between visuals and language needs to be explored in more depth. (4) The role of language in films. This area is vastly under-researched in film studies. One of the few exceptions is Kozloff (2000). Elements such as subtitling, dubbing, intonation, language options on DVDs, as well as the pragmatics of film language require sustained scholarly attention. (5) Genres of special interest are (i) the documentary film - because of its supposedly privileged relation to "reality," as well as because of the rhetorical and ethical perspectives it invites; (ii) comics & animation film - because they are considerably more under the control of their makers than photographs and live-action films, and thus are ideally suited for studying how non-mimetic signs convey significant information; and (iii) advertising - because this is the multimodal genre of persuasive discourse par excellence. Activities/Output: Launching PhD projects via ASCA and other funding sources; publication of Multimodal Metaphor (eds. Charles Forceville & Eduardo Urios-Aparisi); organization of Researching and Applying Metaphor, international workshop (2009, to be confirmed); article publications; Participation in the Centre for Creative Content and Technology.
Participants: Staff: Kati Röttger, Mireille Rosello, Patricia Pisters PhD candidates: Götz Dapp, Daniela Schulz, Hein Goeyens Description: Unlike languages, images can cross national boarders without any need for direct translation. The resulting increase in the use of images in global communication networks and their importance calls for research into culture-specific interaction with images. The research network we propose aims to interconnect and channel the current initiatives and ongoing research projects. Based on first approaches to image critique, the goal of this research network is to provide an appropriate interdisciplinary and international culture-analytical framework to react efficiently to the current scope and explosiveness of handling images in the context of both information-technological and cultural globalization. To achieve this goal, the still new image-theoretical focus will be widened and expanded by intermedial and intercultural perspectives that, until now, were restricted to single disciplines such as film studies, theatre studies, art history, philologies or media studies. Activities/Output: International conferences, establishing a European network with Mainz preparing an EU K7 program.
Participants: Staff: Jan Simons, José van Dijck, René van der Vall (UM) PhD's: René Glas, David Nieborg Description: This interdisciplinary research program will investigate how digital technologies have transformed cultural perception and participation by focusing on the history and characteristics of an important cultural phenomenon, the digital game. It will develop a theoretical framework and vocabulary for the analysis and understanding of the way players' engagement with games is structured, as an exemplification of digitally mediated cultural perception and participation in general. Activities/Output: Articles, 1 monograph, 2 dissertations, 1 conference, meeting every six weeks
Participants: Staff: Patricia Pisters, Jaap Kooijman, Frank van Vree PhD candidates: Andrea Meuzelaar, Emiel Martens, Maryn Wilkinson, Walid el Houri, Anik Fournier, Cigdem Bugdayci, Levent Yilmazok, Gozde Onaran Description: This project focuses specifically on the role of media (film, television, video art and internet) in relation to questions of identity. All projects deal with tensions between the national and transnational dimensions of the media. Both cinema and television, for much of their history have been closely bound to the nation and national territory. Although cinema has always already been a transnational medium (film prints cross borders easily) it was also very much related to the idea of the Imperial Nation. Since the beginnings of cinema in the late nineteenth century, national film companies send their cameramen and directors to every corner of the world in order to bring back images from the colonies. And, inversely, films from the colonizing nation were brought to the colonized nations to show the European ways of life. Television has been related to national territories even more strongly. Born in the period of decolonization, television was strictly bound to national broadcasting companies and considered as the medium to imagine (a new) domestic national identity. Although programs and series were exchanged for a long time, no country had the right to broadcast into foreign territories directly. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, cinema is no longer related to the historical colonial project. Under the influence of globalization and migration however, the global market is dominated by Hollywood. At the same time an increasing number of films are marked by the multiplicity of movements of migration of its director and large groups of people he or she speaks for. With the advent of satellite television and the internet (especially Web 2.0, but also the possibilities for artists to present their work online) the national territorial borders of the medium have been crossed. Since the beginning of the 1990s cross-border TV channels are addressing global communities. Television and Web 2.0 have become a deterritorializing media, since it is no longer confined to its national broadcasting location. At the same time it has territorializing powers, since many communities in diaspora are now much more closely connected to their home countries again by satellite television. In all the sub-projects that are part of this project several questions return: What is the place of the nation and national identity (including American identity through Hollywood) when media (and their contents) cross massively all borders? Can we think beyond the Nation and how then would we define a more cosmopolitan philosophy? What is the function of these media (and a different view on the nation) for questions of multicultural and intercultural identity? How can colonial and post-colonial legacies still be traced and challenged by these media? What is the relationship between these questions of national/transnational identities and questions of gender-, religious or political identities? Theoretical underpinnings and methodologies include postcolonial theory, questions of third cinema, feminist media theory and (critical) discourse analysis. Activities/Output: Monthly peer review group, dissertations, monograph, symposium
Participants: Staff: Hanneke Grootenboer, Murat Aydemir, Marga van Mechelen, Deborah Cherry Description: The project aims at analyzing the ways in which images (painting, contemporary art, photography, film) through their rhetoric, anticipate our modes of looking and interpretation. Rather than asking what we want from the overwhelming number of images surrounding us, this project starts from the question of what images demand from us, following WJT Mitchell in this regard. Going beyond the evident propagandistic use of "demanding" images in advertisements, this project's goal is to expand current visual theory by exploring ways in which images or art works offer us new theoretical insights. Seminars to be held at regular intervals focus on a visual analysis of particular images, as well as classical and recent theoretical texts on visual analysis. Activities/Output: Seminar
Participants: Staff: Murat Aydemir, Jaap Kooijman, Sudeep Dasgupta, Mireille Rosello, Laura Copier PhD candidates: hanneke Stuit, Jules Storm, Eliza Steinbock Description: The advertising slogan for the 1998 exhibition From the Corner of the Eye at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, "What's Queer Here?" brings to the fore the deployment of queer as a political signifier that refuses to identify or represent. The phrase seeks out a what rather than a who: some or other thing, phenomenon, inclination, tendency, or potential. Moreover, it binds that what to a here, suggesting that what's queer here may not necessarily be queer there, and vice versa. The cover of the exhibition catalogue shows Ugo Rondinone's Don't Live Here Anymore (1997), a photograph of a wispy guy who looks away from the camera and outside the frame, as if to displace the identifying gaze to elsewhere; or, as if to focus attention on something more interesting that is happening just outside our, but not his, field of vision. Prevalent and contested in activism and academia since the late 1980s in variegated guises, ‘queer' questions and suspends the fateful bonds between what and who we like and who we are, and perhaps most productively refuses to decide in advance what is and what is not politically and/or epistemologically ‘serious.' This project will continue, critique, and extend the legacies of what has become known as ‘queer theory,' critically appropriate these for our ongoing research projects, as well as propose and try out new priorities, affiliations, objects, and concerns for the field. Those may include a renewed focus on sexuality in relation to class and labor, to the state and civil society, to activist practices and alternatives, to postcolonial migration, tourism, and globalization, to the biopolitical discipline of the (re)production of ‘healthy' bodies and minds, and to the liberal politics of identity that enshrines, some have argued, a new ‘homonormativity' in the West. Our goals are to facilitate exchange and debate between scholars working with queer theory (comfortably or uncomfortably), both within and beyond the Netherlands; to organize a future edition of ASCA's yearly Soiree meetings; and to reflect intently on what's queer here, now, in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam. Activities/Output: Organization of seminars (starting in March with a seminar with Judith Halberstam)
Participants: Karen Vintges, Aziza Ouguir
Source: ASCA
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