Knowledge production is an intellectual and political act... but also, of course, an affective one. Although that affective dimension is a key part of the experience of producing knowledge, it is a dimension that is less often explored in formal discussions about knowledge production. In this presentation, I centre the affective life of feminist and queer knowledge production, exploring it through a very particular angle - the deeply affective conversations we have inside our heads with various embodied and disembodied voices. Drawing on ethnographic data, feminist theorising and lived experience, I explore the dynamics of such conversations and problematise the impacts they have on us - as individuals and as epistemic communities. I finish by calling for a different feminist/queer affective politics of knowledge, offering practical suggestions for a more reflexive, nuanced and generative engagement with the - real and imagined - voices inside (and beyond) our heads.
Bio
Maria do Mar is an internationally awarded feminist ethnographer with a background in Sociology and a commitment to interdisciplinary and socially engaged research and teaching, currently working at the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick. Alongside her academic work, she maintains an active involvement in feminist movements at local and international, grassroots and policy levels.
Maria do Mar’s most well-known research project, funded by FCT, is an ethnographic study of how academics discursively and institutionally demarcate the boundaries of ‘proper’ scholarly knowledge. She is particularly interested in examining how scholarship in women's, gender, feminist studies (WGFS) gets positioned vis-à-vis those boundaries. The main publication emerging from this project is the book Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship: an Ethnography of Academia, published by Routledge.
Maria do Mar has also written on feminist methodologies and pedagogies, contemporary transformations in higher education and science policy in Europe, gender equality policy, men’s discourses about masculinity and fatherhood, and issues of language difference and translation in social science research.
COVID-19 rules for on-site participation
In all public interior areas of the University of Vienna the use of FFP2 face masks is mandatory.
Zoom link
https://univienna.zoom.us/j/66805984885?pwd=bUVmV0NKOFJSUEFLN1lYckZPZGJnZz09
Hosts
The Public Lecture is organised by the Department of Philosophy, the GAPS Research Group (Gender, Affects, Politics, State) of the Department of Political Science, the Research Plattform GAIN - Gender: Ambivalent In_Visibilities and the RGF (Gender Research Office) of the University of Vienna. The lecture is organised within the framework of the PhD Workshop: “Embodied (un)certainties: Producing knowledge from the margin. A PhD workshop on affective queerfeminist epistemologies” that will take place on the following day.
