Seminar
2023-2024 IRW Seminar Call
Possession
Possession is a complex phenomenon that takes multiple forms, both material (land, money, bodies) and incorporeal (knowledge, reputation, lineage). It conveys a variety of meanings (economic, emotional, legal, medical, political, spiritual, sexual, territorial). It implies a gendered relationship of power between possessor and possessed. Historically, societies have understood children, women, queer people, and men from subordinated classes, castes, races, and religions to be particularly susceptible to possession: the condition of being controlled, seized, and owned as property, as well as the state of being dominated or inhabited by a spirit. Possessed people are often ascribed the status and condition of femininity, incapacity, vulnerability, and/or dependency.
Yet, possession in its religious connotation also means to invoke, access, and channel power and authority that the possessed are otherwise denied. The very state of being controlled by a divine or otherworldly force—of losing the autonomous self and submitting to the will of another—allows the possessed, if only temporarily, to transgress prescriptive norms and categories, express forbidden desires, and engage in what are often viewed as deviant and subversive patterns of social behavior and relations. As an act of communicating with the immaterial world, spirit possession also sustains relations and communities across temporal boundaries, reanimating and reclaiming ties to and memories of human and nonhuman kin. As such, possession is a potent site in which to challenge the logic of secular modernity, heteropatriarchy, and the (neo)liberalism of individualism and private ownership. Possession is a modality of disempowerment, but potentially of empowerment and refusal too.
Over the last decade, a growing body of literature has emerged on the cultures, histories, landscapes, laws, economies, and politics of dispossession that interrogates racial capitalist, (neo)colonial, and heteropatriarchal modes of accumulation by dispossession. The subject of possession has not become a widespread subject of feminist, queer scholarship in the way that dispossession has. This seminar will explore feminist and queer frameworks for analyzing and theorizing possession and its intersectional dynamics. How might feminist and queer analyses of possession complement and complicate existing understandings of dispossession and how it ought to be studied and redressed? How might feminist and queer approaches to possession diverge?
We invite applications from faculty and advanced graduate students (ABD status required) whose projects explore aspects of our theme. Such studies may examine any time period(s) or geographical location(s) and be rooted in any disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach(es), including anthropology, art and art history, childhood studies, economics, geography, history, law, linguistics, literature, medicine, political theory, psychology, religious studies, and women's, gender, and sexuality studies. Individuals from all Rutgers campuses are welcome to apply.
The seminar will support up to six Rutgers Faculty Fellows and up to four Graduate Fellows from the New Brunswick, RBHS, Camden, and Newark campuses. Seminar fellows are expected to attend all Thursday morning seminar meetings during Fall and Spring Semesters 2023-2024, provide a paper for discussion in the seminar, and open a seminar session with an extended response to another scholar’s paper.
Graduate students will receive a $5,000 stipend for the year as seminar fellows. Faculty fellows will receive either $4,000 in research support or a one-course teaching release for one semester to enable them to participate in the year-long seminar. In the latter case, departments will be reimbursed for instructional replacements at the minimum contractual PTL rate. Financial arrangements will be made in advance of the seminar with the department chairs and/or appropriate deans.
Applications should include a project title and 150-word abstract, a project description of up to five double-spaced pages, a reference list of five key books/articles or five scholars/activists whose work speaks to your project and the theme, and an updated curriculum vitae. Applications should be received at IRW by Friday, January 27, 2023. All decisions of the selection committee are final. 2023-2024 Seminar Fellows will be notified by Friday, March 3, 2023. Please contact IRW at
**Download application materials for the 2023-24 seminar**
2023-2024 IRW Seminar
Possession
Possession is a complex phenomenon that takes multiple forms, both material (land, money, bodies) and incorporeal (knowledge, reputation, lineage). It conveys a variety of meanings (economic, emotional, legal, medical, political, spiritual, sexual, territorial). It implies a gendered relationship of power between possessor and possessed. Historically, societies have understood children, women, queer people, and men from subordinated classes, castes, races, and religions to be particularly susceptible to possession: the condition of being controlled, seized, and owned as property, as well as the state of being dominated or inhabited by a spirit. Possessed people are often ascribed the status and condition of femininity, incapacity, vulnerability, and/or dependency.
Yet, possession in its religious connotation also means to invoke, access, and channel power and authority that the possessed are otherwise denied. The very state of being controlled by a divine or otherworldly force—of losing the autonomous self and submitting to the will of another—allows the possessed, if only temporarily, to transgress prescriptive norms and categories, express forbidden desires, and engage in what are often viewed as deviant and subversive patterns of social behavior and relations. As an act of communicating with the immaterial world, spirit possession also sustains relations and communities across temporal boundaries, reanimating and reclaiming ties to and memories of human and nonhuman kin. As such, possession is a potent site in which to challenge the logic of secular modernity, heteropatriarchy, and the (neo)liberalism of individualism and private ownership. Possession is a modality of disempowerment, but potentially of empowerment and refusal too.
Over the last decade, a growing body of literature has emerged on the cultures, histories, landscapes, laws, economies, and politics of dispossession that interrogates racial capitalist, (neo)colonial, and heteropatriarchal modes of accumulation by dispossession. The subject of possession has not become a widespread subject of feminist, queer scholarship in the way that dispossession has. This seminar will explore feminist and queer frameworks for analyzing and theorizing possession and its intersectional dynamics. How might feminist and queer analyses of possession complement and complicate existing understandings of dispossession and how it ought to be studied and redressed? How might feminist and queer approaches to possession diverge?
2024-2025 IRW Seminar Call
Knowing Otherwise: Haunting, Conjuring, and Spectral Encounters
To connect with ancestors, spirits, and ghosts entails intergenerational remembering that transcends individual memories and experiences and disrupts the space-time continuum. It involves tending to both the dead and the living, presence and absence, matter and trace, and past and future. It calls into question notions of discrete selfhood, human agency, and linear temporality, the anthropocentrism and humanistic possessive individualism of Eurocentric, colonial, heteropatriarchal systems of knowledge. It demands that we reimagine our relationship not only to time, knowledge, and the non-human but also to the object of our study. We should be prepared to be surprised, affected, changed, and hailed by that which lingers and haunts, instead of expecting intellectual mastery and command. Engaging with non-material and spectral forms of existence requires knowing, relating, and doing in ways that may transcend our training in the academy.
Knowing Otherwise will extend our discussion of our 2023–2024 annual theme, Possession, to explore interstitial ways of knowing, feminist and queer theorizing, and world-making. This seminar will explore how haunting, conjuring, and spectral encounters challenge us to think beyond the limits of what is already comprehensible and conceivable and refuse the epistemic exclusion of knowledge frameworks and practices that come from outside of the academy. We will reauthorize embodied knowledge and subaltern memories that elude documentation and verification, while straining to apprehend that which cannot be fully grasped, yet cannot be ignored.
We invite applications from faculty and advanced graduate students (ABD status required) whose projects explore aspects of our theme. Such studies may examine any time period(s) or geographical location(s) and be rooted in any disciplinary or interdisciplinary approach(es). We welcome work that centers ways to revive and reclaim lost or suppressed histories, memories, relations, epistemologies, and practices through a range of modalities, from poetry and the creative arts to genome science and archaeology. Topics may include but are not limited to: hauntology; rememory; conjure feminism; queer temporality; restorative nostalgia; grief work; spectral justice; spiritualism; the occult; writing about ghosts; dark tourism; deathscapes; traumascapes; ghost species; ecocide; artificial intelligence; and multispecies justice.
The seminar will support up to six Rutgers Faculty Fellows and up to four Graduate Fellows from the New Brunswick, RBHS, Camden, and Newark campuses. Seminar fellows are expected to attend all Thursday morning seminar meetings during Fall and Spring Semesters 2024-2025, provide a paper for discussion in the seminar, and open a seminar session with an extended response to another scholar’s paper.
Graduate students will receive a $5,000 stipend for the year as seminar fellows. Faculty fellows will receive either $4,000 in research support or a one-course teaching release for one semester to enable them to participate in the year-long seminar. In the latter case, departments will be reimbursed for instructional replacements at the minimum contractual rate for a Lecturer 1. Financial arrangements will be made in advance of the seminar with the department chairs and/or appropriate deans.
Applications should include a project title and 150-word abstract, a project description of up to five double-spaced pages, a reference list of five key books/articles or five scholars/activists whose work speaks to your project and the theme, and an updated curriculum vitae. Applications should be received at IRW by Monday, January 29, 2024. All decisions of the selection committee are final. 2024-2025 Seminar Fellows will be notified by Friday, March 1, 2024. Please contact IRW at
**Download application materials for the 2024-25 seminar**
Frequently Asked Questions about the IRW's Seminar
General Questions About the Seminar
When does the seminar meet?
The IRW seminar meets every week of Fall and Spring semesters on Thursday mornings from 10:30 to noon. Faculty and Seminar Fellows must arrange their teaching and other departmental commitments accordingly. We strongly encourage seminar members to structure their schedules so that they can remain at the IRW to continue the seminar conversation over lunch from noon to 1:00 p.m.
Who participates in the seminar?
Rutgers faculty and graduate students are selected through a competitive process to join the seminar. IRW visiting scholars are also invited to participate and provide work-in-progress for discussion. Other Rutgers faculty and postdoctoral fellows are sometimes supported as seminar participants by their departments or deans in conjunction with IRW. Interested members of the Rutgers community may attend occasional seminar sessions with advance notice and permission from the seminar's conveners.
How are seminar meetings structured?
The seminar often begins with a couple of weeks of outside readings selected by the seminar conveners to stimulate to cross-disciplinary considerations of the multifaceted seminar theme. For the balance of the year, each seminar member in turn provides the IRW with a draft 25-to-30-page article or chapter for distribution to seminar members a week in advance of the discussion. Each author also provides a one-page letter outlining the larger project and guiding feedback by indicating problem areas, specific questions, and/or requesting methodological or bibliographic feedback from colleagues with different disciplinary backgrounds. On the scheduled day, the author makes a few introductory remarks, followed by an initial 10-15 minute response by a seminar member who has prepared remarks in advance. The balance of the seminar meeting is devoted to questions and suggestions from participants, clarifications from the author, and general discussion of the project’s research methods, findings and implications.
Questions About Applying to the Seminar
I’m interested in the seminar, but I’m not sure that my research project fits the theme; what should I do?
Contact the IRW with a brief description of the work you propose to share with the seminar; we’re available to consult with prospect applicants and explore ways to situate a proposal within the parameters of the seminar call. The seminar is designed to be broadly inclusive of a range of projects and approaches; we welcome projects that address the seminar theme in unanticipated ways.
What do you mean by “advanced graduate students”?
Successful graduate student applicants are generally doctoral candidates (students in Ph.D. programs who have passed their qualifying exams and are writing their dissertations). Graduate student applicants should be pursuing a project for publication or other professional public audience that demonstrates both breadth and depth and that engages with the seminar themes.
I’ve been in the seminar before. May I reapply?
We accept applications from people who have participated in the seminar previously, but ask that they include in their proposals a description of how that experience influenced their own research and teaching and how they propose to help build constructive dialogue with colleagues whose disciplinary approaches, methodologies, and topics will address the seminar theme from a variety of different perspectives.
How competitive is the seminar application process?
Each year is different, but we always receive more excellent applications than we can accept since we have a very limited amount of funds with which to support the seminar. In addition, in order to maintain the multi-disciplinary, multi-campus characteristics of the seminar, we have been forced to turn down very strong proposals from some of our colleagues who are long-time IRW affiliates.
I'm a graduate student at Rutgers. Do I need to attach letters of recommendation from faculty members?
No; just follow the directions on the application form.
My department has just hired a new faculty member whose work is relevant to the seminar and who would benefit from participating in a regularly scheduled discussion of research with an multi-disciplinary group of colleagues, but she/he wasn’t able to participate in the formal seminar selection process. What can we do?
Please email the IRW with additional information about your new colleague (c.v. and description of seminar-related research-in-progress, if available). We will be happy to explore possibilities with you.
I’m not able to attend regularly, but I’d like to present my work at the seminar. Is that possible?
No; all of the seminar meetings are scheduled with discussions of either published articles on the seminar topic from a variety of disciplinary perspectives or work-in-progress written by seminar members. You are welcome to check the schedule of seminar discussions (generally available by mid-October) and attend discussions of any papers that might be relevant to your scholarly concerns.
Questions about Seminar Funding or Special Arrangements
I’m already scheduled to be on leave one semester next year, but the seminar theme matches my work perfectly. May I participate during the semester I’m on campus and get a course release or half the annual stipend?
No; our intent is to create a yearlong conversation between faculty and graduate students from a variety of disciplinary locations who would not normally have the opportunity to benefit from regular interactions over an academic year. Those interactions develop and become even more meaningful during the second semester of participation so it is important that the core seminar members participate for the entire academic year.
I’ll be returning from a funded research leave in October; can I apply to the seminar?
This is generally not possible for the reasons outlined above; you may contact the IRW if you wish to have further conversation about your schedule and the seminar design.
I’m not a Rutgers professor/graduate student, but I’m at another institution of higher education. May I apply to the seminar?
Yes, but only as an IRW Visiting Scholar. Visiting Scholars do not receive stipends, but may enjoy the use of private offices at the IRW as well as participation in the IRW seminar. We can only provide teaching release or research funds to Rutgers faculty members and graduate students. Please consult the description of the Global Scholar Program on our webpage and contact us if you'd like more information.
May I “bank” my course release and use it during the following academic year?
No; our seminar funds are for the current fiscal year and must be expended in full during the academic year. We are unable to make any carryover arrangements with individuals or departments. Any alternate arrangements must be made between seminar faculty members and their departments.
I don’t need a course release (or, my department doesn’t allow course releases); can I get an award of research funds instead?
Yes; a set total for the academic year may be transferred in installments to your research account or to another state budget account designated by your department in support of your research. Your home department will be responsible for administering these funds. We will make these arrangements after the seminar selection process is complete.
How is the award of research funds handled? I’d rather get extra pay than a research award.
The IRW can transfer funds from our state account to a faculty research account or other state budget account in support of faculty seminar fellow research; we are not able to allocate salary or extra pay except in support of graduate student seminar fellows and course releases for faculty fellows.
Interdisciplinary Faculty/Graduate Student Seminar
Since 1997, the IRW has convened a year-long seminar which brings together faculty and advanced graduate students from a broad range of disciplines and from all three Rutgers campuses (New Brunswick, Newark and Camden). The seminar revolves around an annual theme that is also shared by our distinguished lecture series and undergraduate learning community.
In 2013-14 the annual theme is "Decolonizing Gender/Gendering Decolonization." Seminar fellows present works-in-progress, addressing the theme from a range of disciplinary and methodological perspectives. View the current seminar schedule.
The seminar meets every Thursday from 10:30 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. at the IRW Library (second floor, 160 Ryders Lane, Douglass Campus). IRW seminar sessions are open to the public, but guests are urged to
Read a recent article about the IRW Seminar that appeared in the December 2012 Weeks Center Newsletter (London South Bank University).