Keywords:
inequalities, creative practice, art, feminism, knowledge production
Abstract:
This panel invites contributions that engage in feminist inspired critique through art agency and/or creative practice research in recognising the construction of knowledge, and the dominant power structures that determine what we know and how we know. Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004) has prompted investigation into the persistence of precarious forms of human existence, which at the current times of crises are thrown into a sharp focus, reinforcing established power structures, hierarchies, and marginalities. Taking Alfred Gell’s work on art and agency, alongside conceptualisations of anthropological liminality from postcolonial, critical and poststructuralist perspectives (Turner, van Gennep), more recently developed by Zygmunt Bauman, this panel responds to pervasive inequalities, and precarity (Kosmala and Imas, 2016), and challenges to livable life particularly in a post-COVID world (Butler, 2022), seeking ways we can contribute to rethinking knowledge, re/building communities, reconstructing social bonds, reshaping relatedness and means of being with each other. We invite submissions that address methodological challenges in undoing inequalities by mobilising creative practice and art as/in research around the issues of feminist inspired knowledge production and co-creation. We call for creative praxis examples that conceptualise and analyse the subject of inequalities and marginalities as well as seek to empower through transformative practice. We call for the papers that demonstrate through creative and material practices - art, design, craft – how to source means and solutions to shape future world based on respect, valuing one another and improved quality of life, conditions of livability and a sense of a shared world. We also invite contributions to ongoing debate on alternative ways of researching constructs of otherness in the context of persisting inequalities and multiple power structures, initiating interdisciplinary inquiry through the critical prism of art and activism, in particular feminist activism. Contributions might, for instance, engage critically or creatively with ideologies of otherness and precarity through shared lived experience, representation, social justice, ethics of collaboration and co-creation.