Knowing Otherwise: Haunting, Conjuring, and Spectral Encounters
The IRW hosts feminist researchers from around the world as Visiting Scholars, enabling them to pursue their own research and writing in a supportive environment while accessing Rutgers’ unique feminist resources. Visiting Scholars participate in the IRW seminar, present public lectures and speak in classes throughout the university.
Smruthi Bala Kannan
"Specters in Public Health and Childhood: Plural discourses of hygiene and adolescent children’s relational experiences in Tamil Nadu, India"
What specters move public health—a field focused on prolonging life against death and disease? How do living children encounter and experience these spectral presences in their everyday built environments and curriculum? My project for 2024-25, titled "Specters in Public Health and Childhood," will explore the role of haunting and absent presences in adolescent hygiene and sanitation discourses in urbanizing Tamil Nadu, India. I will work on a book manuscript and a graphic/illustrated book chapter, building on my dissertation and postdoctoral research to include the conceptual lens of spectrality as absence (Searle 2020) and haunting (Mansfield 2008; Blazan 2021).
Smruthi Bala Kannan is a postdoctoral scholar with a PhD in Childhood Studies from Rutgers-Camden.
Anna Lynn Tom
"Rewriting of/on Women’s Bodies: New Visualities and Feminist Art in India"
My larger project is an attempt to find a reading framework to understand the rise of feminist art in the Indian avant-garde (decolonised, post-modern) as interventional, informed by theories of performative embodiment, affect (Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed) and phenomenological art history (as proposed by Geeta Kapur, Indian Art Historian and Critic). On a theoretical level, it is informed by contemporary theories in Indian art history by Geeta Kapur and Deeptha Achar. In essence, I am trying to analyse how bodily mediated experiences lead to the making of feminist art, and as a receptor/ spectator, how we encounter these bodily mediations and understand the intentions of such feminist aesthetics. My texts would range across genres of painting, photographic mediums, installations and art projects created by women and genderqueer artists of India. The major chapters of the analysis would include a genre-based reading of select artists from India.
Anna Lynn Tom is a Fulbright Nehru Doctoral Fellow and a PhD candidate in Comparative Literature at the English and Foreign Languages University, Hyderabad.
Fernanda Villarroel Lamoza
"Refiguring the Feminine: Reparative Art Practices from The Black Atlantic"
My book manuscript, Refiguring the Feminine: Reparative Art Practices from The Black Atlantic, takes as point of departure how in West African epistemologies, the feminine operates or works through such forms as birds, snakes, and bodies of water. Beyond the representation of women, the feminine most sharply manifest in enactments that reassure social reproduction moving across bodies and their interaction with elements beyond the human—from the act of carrying water to being possessed. The feminine appears thus less as an image than as a force at the core of the performance of political power and, as such, has often been historically manipulated by men. As a position of vulnerability and openness to otherness strategically embraced and explored by contemporary artists on both sides of the Atlantic, the feminine manifest through what I have come to describe as a figuration. Unlike a concrete entity, an image, or a representation, a figuration outlines instead an idea, a project, or a process manifesting and working through what sometimes takes recognizable forms. Refusing a singular identity, the refiguring of the feminine I trace across contemporary art practices thus introduces a radical change in orientation— from existential questions as “who I am,” to the kind of questions we face when we are forced to reconsider where we stand in relation to others, or “where I am.” In doing so, offers as a subjective position from which to trace expressions of freedom that are not bound to practices of domination, ownership, and control.
Fernanda Villarroel Lamoza is a Presidential Visiting Faculty Fellow at Rutgers and Assistant Professor in Africana Studies at Davidson College.