Upcoming and Current Events – open to join
- Online Writing Sessions – Situatedness in Body: Writing as an Embodied Practise of Truth – October 2026 – January 2027 [open for joining]
- Winter Symposium Situatedness in Body: Writing as an Embodied Practise of Truth, February 2027 – TBA
Newsletter!
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About the Study Circle
This circle addresses the abyss between theory and practise. We noticed a broadly shared and ongoing phenomenon: certain women in academia reclaiming their own way to know and write about what they know and what they want to know (for example Aaniyah Martin, Sarah
Manguso). By opening the question of what it means to write, we return to that which many feel is lost in current academia: the visceral obsession with the search for meaning and life.
Our curiosity is not only directed to those who take into account their own experience when doing research and theory, as for example Hannah Arendt when theorizing about the refugee problem. We are specifically interested in:
- choices related to the form writing can take in different contexts;
- breaking structures in order to allow us to return to what remains presently unsaid;
- writing as a methodology “to help give a name to the nameless so it can be thought.”
(Audre Lorde)
There is a need for truthfulness. There is a need for a return to beginnings that is revolutionary. There is a need to ask what language limits without succumbing to silence. There is a need for meaning creation beyond knowledge production. There is a need for unproductivity. There is a need for a community of practitioners of listeners that aim for writing. There is a need to do more than responding and being against.
Situated writing acknowledges that writing takes place in a specific context. It is academic writing that dares to be poetic, honest, and raw. It takes into account the marks enabling and limiting how a person can become part of the world and share it with others. Drawing on, but not
limiting ourselves to traditions of autofiction, escrevivência (Conceição Evaristo) and autotheory, we aim for a creative academic blending; questioning the rigidness of boundaries related to form in academia, art and society, in order to return to the real questions concerning life and death.
Our aim is to stay with these questions, the resulting ambiguity, and to allow us to voice the difficulty of not having definite answers. Our aim is to practise carriance (Bracha Ettinger) – to create a space in which to carry and be carried by others to (re-)fin(d/e) hope.
In our circle we embrace the importance of inviting otherness, while being aware of the danger of performativity. Being the homo sacer (Giorgio Agamben), the one that exists outside of academia, art and structured society, and thereby creating a space to return to what it means to be human. The method of escrevivência and autofiction will be explored from different angles. What does it mean to be situated, to be a body in a specific time and space, relating to political reality and polarisation while not succumbing to the burnout society (Byung-Chal Han) it creates.
Our circle intends to continue the strong tradition of feminist encounters within NSU, acknowledging the continuous need to host emerging scholars, writers and artists.
Points of departure:
Mona Livholts, Situated Writing as Theory and Method
Karolina Enquist Källgren, Maria Zambrano’s Ontology of Exile: Expressive Subjectivity
Fanny Söderbäck, Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray
Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism
STRUCTURE AND PLAN OF ACTIVITIES
Symposia
WS27: Situatedness in Body: Writing as an Embodied Practise of Truth
Collaboration with Laukku (Latvia) (confirmed)
SS27: Situatedness in Life: Writing life / life writing
WS28: Situatedness between Tongues: Exilic Writing as a Sacred Becoming
Collaboration with University of the Arts Helsinki and Abo Akademi University (Finland)
SS28: Situatedness in Time: Addressing Death in Writing
WS29: Situatedness in the Abyss: Living between Theory and Praxis
Collaboration with Hordaland Kunstcenter (Norway)
SS29: Situatedness in Ambiguity: Not-knowing as a Method of Meaning Creation
Core Group
Besides the two coordinators who will do the practical work, there will be a core group of long-standing collaborators who will be involved in creating the content and structure of each symposium: Ilona Blumgrund, Elina Saloranta, Carol Stampone, and Inta Balode.
Coordinators
