IRW Seminar
2024-2025 IRW Seminar
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.
