Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (2004) has prompted investigation into the persistence of precarious forms of human existence, which at the times of crises are thrown into a sharp focus, reinforcing established power structures, hierarchies, and marginalities. This panel takes Alfred Gell’s work on art and agency, Susanne Kuchler’s writings on entanglements and imaginings, and Kathleen Stewart’s (2010) work on affect (notably the concepts of ‘worlding’ and ‘bloom spaces’), as our starting point, alongside conceptualisations of anthropological liminality from postcolonial, critical and poststructuralist perspectives (Turner, van Gennep) most recently developed by Zygmunt Bauman.
The panel aims to address the agencies of art, material and visual culture through the interdisciplinary fields of cultural studies, anthropology, design and sociology, as well as art practice and histories. It will examine how cultural and artistic research on the ‘entanglements’ of inequalities, marginalities, and precarious temporalities can help us better understand and value the agencies that may emerge, and critically explore notions of otherness and hybridity.
We invite traditional papers and alternative creative formats, including video, performance, and visual essays, to promote debate on constructs of identity and otherness in the context of persisting inequalities and multiple power structures, initiating interdisciplinary inquiry through the critical prism of art and activism. Contributions might, for instance, engage critically or creatively with ideologies of otherness and precarity through lived experience, representation, social justice, misplacement, or dislocation.
We call for submissions that conceptualise, comment on, and analyse the subject of inequalities and marginalities and examine the multiple ways in which these have been, and can be, challenged or reinforced in the past and the present through interdisciplinary inquiry, creative and material practices - art, design, craft - to seek out solutions to shape future worlds in which we respect and value one another and experience improved quality of life.
