Organized and Hosted by the Institute for Research on Women, Rutgers, New Brunswick
Thursday, March 6, 2025
Keynote speaker: Deirdre de la Cruz University of Michigan
Program
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. Knowing Otherwise explores how haunting, conjuring, and spectral encounters challenge us to think beyond conventional limits. We should be prepared to be surprised, affected, changed, and hailed by that which lingers and haunts.
9.45 - 10 Introduction
10 – 11:15 Panel 1
“Transit Memories as Haunting: Andean Indigenous Women and Activism Beyond Borders”
Evelyn Autry (Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers), Elva Navarro and Mavila Paucar (PEX Semillas de Libertad)
11:15 - 11.30 Break
11.30 - 12:45 Keynote
“The Dictator’s Two Bodies: The Politics of the Paranormal in the Twentieth-Century Philippines”
Deirdre de la Cruz (Southeast Asian Studies & History, University of Michigan)
12.45 - 1.45 Lunch
1.45 – 3 Panel 2
“Materializing Absence: Art, Photography, and Spirits”
Zeynep Gursel (Anthropology, Rutgers) Dana Luciano (English & Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, Rutgers), and Hilit Surowitz-Israel (Religion, Rutgers)
3 – 3:15 Break
3:15 - 4:30 Panel 3
“Conjure: The Feminine as Oceanic Force”
Fernanda Villarroel Lamoza (Davidson College & Presidential Visiting Scholar & IRW, Rutgers), Christina Knight (Art History & Global Racial Justice, Rutgers), Carlos Decena (Latino and Caribbean Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, & Institute for the Study of Global Racial Justice, Rutgers)
4.30 Reception & Performance
"OTHERWISE: Queer Scholarship into Song -- and More!"
Kay Turn Her and the Pages
Led by Kay Turner (Douglass '71)
For more information, email
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC