Sensible Ruptures
Towards Embodied and Relational Ways of Knowing
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7146/kkf.v36i2.138090Keywords:
racialisation, queer theory, affect, embodiment, archives, epistolaryAbstract
This paper explores queer and racialized experiences in Danish academia through what we call ‘sensible ruptures’: affective, embodied and sensory ways of knowing. Taking seriously these modes of knowledge, the article outlines the creation of an online, audio-visual archive. Weaving together text, audio and images to unfold our concept of sensible ruptures, we demonstrate how the audio-visual can meaningfully contribute to capturing the affective and material fabric of racialized and queer experiences with/in Danish higher education. Sensible ruptures underscore the importance of under-standing the complex processes of racialization in an institutional and national context saturated by ambiguity and exceptionalism. We contend that thinking not only against, but beyond, disembodied colonial logics offers a different mode of knowledge creation, reconfi guring the self as permeable: constituted through and with our histories and surroundings. We centre friendship as a vital part of this process, harnessing queer epistolary to perform our pursuit of, and argument for, knowledge as always and inevitably relational.
References
Agostinho, D., Dirckinck-Holmfeld, K. and Grova Søilen, K.L. 2019. Archives that matter. Nordisk Tidsskrift for Informationsvidenskab og Kulturformidling. 8(2), 1-18.
Ahmed, S. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Alexander, E. 1994. Can you be Black and Look at This?: Reading the Rodney King Video(s). Public Culture. 7(1), 77-94.
Allen, J.S. 2021. There’s a Disco Ball Between Us: A Theory of Black Gay Life. Durham: Duke University Press.
Andreassen, R., and Vitus, K. 2016. Affectivity and race: Studies from Nordic contexts. London: Routledge.
Bacchetta, P., El-Tayeb, F., Haritaworn, J., Hernandez, J., Smythe, S.A., Thompson, V.E., and Willoughby-Herard, T. 2018. Queer of color space-making in and beyond the academic industrial complex. Critical Ethnic Studies. 4(1), 44-63.
Banerjea, N., Dasgupta, R., and Grant J.M. eds. 2018. Friendship as social justice activism: Critical solidarities in a global perspective. London: Seagull Books.
Bhambra, G.K., Gebrial, D., and Nişancıoğlu, K. 2018. Decolonising the University. Pluto Press.
Brown, A.M. 2017. Emergent strategy: Shaping change, changing worlds. Chico, CA: AK Press.
Calafell, B.M. and Moreman, S.T. 2009. Envisioning an academic readership: Latina/O performativities per the form of publication. Text and Performance Quarterly. 29(2), 123-130.
Campt, T. 2021. A Black gaze: Artists changing how we see. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Chen, M.Y. 2012. Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and queer affect. Durham: Duke University Press.
Collins, P. H. 1989. The social construction of Black feminist thought. Signs. 14(4), 745-773.
Cvetkovich, A. 2003. An archive of feelings: trauma, sexuality, and lesbian public cultures. Durham: Duke University Press.
Danbolt, M. and Myong, L. 2019. Racial Turns and Returns: Recalibrations of Racial Exceptionalism in Danish Public Debates on Racism. In: Hervik, P. ed. Racialization, Racism, and Anti-Racism in the Nordic Countries. Approaches to Social Inequality and Difference. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 39-61.
DasGupta, D., Rosenberg, R., Catungal, J. P., and Gieseking, J.J. 2021. Pedagogies of Queer and Trans Repair: Letters from Queer Geographic Classrooms. ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies. 20(5), 491-508.
de Sousa Santos, B. 2018. Decolonising the university: The challenge of deep cognitive justice. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Diaspora of Critical Nomads and Marronage. 2020. Vi Vil Mere End At Overleve – Opgør Med En Antisort Verden. Copenhagen: Eks-Skolens Trykkeri.
Diaz, N. 2020. Postcolonial Love Poem Natalie Diaz. [Online]. [Retrieved 31. March 2023]. Available at: https://rb.gy/7g2w8
Dillard, C.B. 2000. The substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen: Examining an endarkened feminist epistemology in educational research and leadership. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education. 13(6), 661-681.
Fanon, F. 1967. Black Skin, White Masks. New York: Grove Press.
Forensic Architecture. 2022. Witnesses Exhibit. Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
Gagnon, O.M. 2021. Tender archives and the closeness of Cheryl Sim’s The Thomas Wang Project. Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory. 31(1), 1-25.
Goankar, A. 2022. Feeling Sick of Home? A Cultural Study of Postmigrant Homesickness in Contemporary Denmark. PhD dissertation. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen.
Guschke, B. 2023. The Persistence of Sexism and Racism at Universities: Exploring the Imperceptibility and Unspeakability of Workplace Harassment and Discrimination in Academia. Frederiksberg: Copenhagen Business School [Phd]. PhD Series No. 06.
Halberstam, J. 2005. In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives. New York: NYU press.
Harris, J.C. and Nicolazzo, Z. 2020. Navigating the academic borderlands as multiracial and trans* faculty members. Critical Studies in Education. 61(2), 229-244.
Harrison, F.V. 1991. Decolonizing Anthropology: Moving Further toward an Anthropology for Liberation. Arlington, VA: American Anthropological Association.
Hartman, S. 2006. Lose Your Mother A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
hooks, b. 1994. Teaching to Transgress Education as the Practice of Freedom. New York, London: Routledge.
Hunter, E.L. 2021. Diasporiske perspektiver på racialiseringens kolonialitet i Danmark: Diasporiske perspektiver på racialiseringens kolonialitet i Danmark. Periskop–Forum for kunsthistorisk debat. 25, 88-111.
Ivinson, G., and Renold, E. 2021. What More Do Bodies Know? Moving with the Gendered Affects of Place. Body & Society. 27(1), 85-112.
Jackson, Z.I. 2020. Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World. New York: NYU Press.
Keeling, K. 2020. Looking after the future on queer and decolonial temporalities. [Online]. [Retrieved 31 March 2023]. Available at: https://rb.gy/jdssm
Khawaja, I. 2023. Minoritetsstress: Begrebet, dets anvendelighed og potentiale. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning. 34(2), 91-107.
Khawaja, I. 2022. Memory Work as Engaged Critical Pedagogy: Creating Collaborative Spaces for Reflections on Racialisation, Privilege and Whiteness. Nordic Journal of Social Research. 13(1), 94-107.
Lagermann, L.C. 2013. Racialized subjects in a colour blind school. International Journal on School Disaffection.10(1), 73-89.
Lee, J.K-J. 2023. Model Minority Life, Interrupted. In: Chen, M., Kafer A., Kim, E. and Minich, J. eds. Crip Genealogies. London: Duke University Press, 257-275.
Lorde, A. 1984. Sister outsider: Essays and speeches. Trumansburg: Crossing Press.
Marronage. 2021. This Silence is like an Invisible Wall that Needs to be Shattered and Broken. An Interview with Jupiter Child. Periskop – Forum for Kunsthistorisk Debat. 25, 78–87.
Midtvåge Diallo, O-K. 2019. At the margins of institutional whiteness: black women in Danish academia. In: Emejulu, A. and Sobande, F. eds. To exist is to resist: Black feminism in Europe. London: Pluto Press. 219-227.
Midtvåge Diallo, O-K., Kelekay, J., Abdullahi M., and Sawyer, L. 2023. Writing Letters as Counter-Archiving: An Afro-Nordic Feminist Care Practice. Merridians. 22(1): 180-203.
Mignolo, W.D., and Walsh, C. E. 2018. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press.
Muñoz, J.E. 2009. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press.
Myong, L. and Bissenbakker, M. 2014. Forstyrret kærlighed: Affektiv assimilation som nyt ideal for transnational adoption. Social Kritik: Tidsskrift for Social Analyse and Debat. 26(137), 56-67.
Navarro, T., Williams, B., and Ahmad, A. 2013. Sitting at the kitchen table: Fieldnotes from women of color in anthropology: Introduction: Gender, race, and anthropological practice. Cultural Anthropology. 28(3): 443-463.
Nyamnjoh, F. 2020. Decolonising the Academy: A Case for the Convivial Scholarship. Namibia: Basler Afrika Bibliographien.
Odumosu, T. 2019. What Lies Unspoken: A Remedy for Colonial Silence(s) in Denmark. Third Text. 33(4-5), 615-629.
Puwar, N. 2004. Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies out of place. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
Puwar, N. 2021. Carrying as Method: Listening to Bodies as Archives. Body & Society. 27(1), 3-26.
Ramayya, N. 2019. States of the body produced by love. London: Ignota.
Sealy, M. 2019. Decolonising the Camera: Photography in Racial Time. London: Lawrence & Wishart.
Sharpe, C. 2016. In the wake: On blackness and being. Durham: Duke University Press.
Simpson, A. 2007. On Ethnographic Refusal: Indigeneity, ‘Voice’ and Colonial Citizenship. Junctures. 9, 67- 80.
Singh, J. 2018. No archive will restore you. Santa Barbara, CA: Punctum.
Skadegård, M.C. 2017. With Friends Like These, Who Needs Enemies?: Structural Discrimination and Good Intentions in Danish Everyday Contexts. Nordic Journal of Migration Research. 7(4), 214–223.
The River and Fire Collective, 2021. The Fires Within Us and The Rivers We Form. Teaching Anthropology. 10(4), 92-109.
Thorsen, T.S.S. 2019. Minoritetsbeskatning - et værktøj til at forstå opretholdelse af strukturelle uligheder i dansk akademia. Kvinder, Køn & Forskning. 28(1-2), 31-43.
Thorsen, T.S.S. and Skadegård, M.C. 2019. Monstrous (M)others: From Paranoid to Reparative Readings of Othering Through Ascriptions of Monstrosity. Nordlit. 42, 207-230.
Tinsley, O.M. 2008. Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage. A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies.14(2-3), 191-215.
Vertelyté, M., and Staunæs, D. 2021. From tolerance work to pedagogies of unease: affective investments in Danish antiracist education. Nordic Journal of Studies in Educational Policy. 7(3), 126-135.
Vuong, O. and Orange, T. 2020. City Arts Lectures. [Online]. [Retrieved 31 March 2023). Available from: https://rb.gy/ziogg
Weheliye, A.G. 2014. Habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wekker, G. 2016. White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race. Durham: Duke University Press.
Wilderson III, F. B. 2020. Afropessimism. New York: Liveright Publishing.
Wilson, S. 2008. Research Is Ceremony: Indigenous Research Methods. Winnipeg: Fernwood.
Wynter, S., and McKittrick, K. 2015. Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations. In: McKittrick, K. ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Practice. Durham: Duke University Press, 9-89.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2023 Gabriella Muasya, Maya Acharya
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.
Publications in Women, Gender and Research are licensed under Creative Commons License: CC Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0
