Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies (LIAS)

By Dr. Lydia Ouma Radoli, LIAS Fellow

As a media and communications researcher, I have been triggered to researching society using methods that provide an interpretation to wider audiences beyond the scientific community. I studied in Germany and had lived in Frankfurt hen Cottbus, and many times commuted to Berlin for work, but I had never been to Hamburg and Lüneburg.

My journey to Lüneburg and Leuphana begun when I landed on 6^th April 2023 at Hamburg’s Helmut Schmidt Airport, with two loads of suitcases and my 9-year-old son in tow. It was a courageous journey to balance an exciting research stint, taking care of a pre-teen in a new context, new school, new language, and lots of questions. The questions started at the France De Gaulle Airport, where we made our transit, are we in Germany mommy? and as he counted the number of German machines (Porsches, BMW and Volks Wagen’s), which is your favorite German car? as our taxi cruised about 76 KM from the Airport to Wilschenbrucher Weg 46. This would be our home for one year.

Jesse’s enthusiasm did not dampen spirits but added a ton to a delightful expectation of what awaited in Lüneburg and Leuphana. Lüneburg did not disappoint, from its beautiful alte stadt (old city), the salt history with it sälze museum (salt museum), the analogy of the sinking city, the centuries churches (alten kirches). But its people, they smile and nod as they tag their dogs for evening spazieren (evening walks). A much welcome mood booster!

Soon we settle in, my son had his school schedule and sports, and I had LIAS: the colloquiums, the coffee talks, seminars, lectures, and academic discourses.  As a former journalist, social researcher, and media lecturer, the project at Leuphana Institute of Advanced Studies in Culture and Society (LIAS-CAS) provided a possibility to increase visibility in the publication and dissemination of research work on trauma journalism. The project followed earlier research work at the Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus, where I had been a Visiting Scholar.

The research at LIAS addressed the Visual Witnessing Trauma Phenomenon among Journalists in East Africa. During the fellowship period, I enjoyed various enriching discourses and events organized by LIAS. I also had self-initiatives in partnership with the Conference of African PhDs in Germany (CAPiG).

Central to the research fellowship stay was my quest to explore the ethical questions on the extent to which horrific visuals convey a story. The quest had earlier emerged during a doctoral seminar at Daystar University, School of Communication on Visual Witnessing in the Media. The purpose was to critically review the role journalists play in recording traumatic events and the existing ethical dimensions. However, I was intrigued by the questions generated, what if the camera is turned on journalists to allow them to share their experiences?

Could they even allow themselves to be vulnerable? After all, journalists were people with humanistic emotions not extensions of machines. Beyond the ethical requirements of safeguarding the audience, and selecting images that are palatable to broadcast, I questioned how journalists deal with the extremity of raw images through the production process. What was the impact of multiple exposures that occurred during capturing, selecting, editing, rendering, and reviewing? Could this process of over-exposure exacerbate the trauma? Or was the experience of constant reporting the epitome of trauma?

While the seminar was aimed to provoke critical thinking on different dimensions of media studies, I started a literature search on the topic of trauma journalism and was confronted with the scarcity of authorship in the context of East Africa. Once I began talking to journalists, first, informally, as a situation analysis, then through in-depth interviews in the data collection process, I realized within research precincts, the outcome would be another academic work and less immersion in the lived experiences of journalists. Particularly those capturing images through photography, and videos – the visual rhetors. I was cognizant that by covering stories for non-visual media like print and radio, journalists bear witness, talk to victims of atrocities, and are also exposed to trauma, just as their counterparts in visual production.

In this project, I conceptualized all journalists covering traumatic events as visual rhetors – as Frosh (2019) describes those who witness and produce visual frames of the dark side.  Working on a project that would depict narratives that humanize journalists’ experiences using an analytical approach that connects psychology to trauma journalism was viable. The main purpose of the project was showcasing alternative narrative practices and forms from empirical data gathered through in-depth interviews with journalists, psycho-social experts, and symptomatology measurements for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD).

The project straddled academic writing formats and journalistic experiences constructed in the form of themed narratives that address the key objectives of the study that looked at: Exploring the relationship between visual witnessing and trauma phenomenon among Journalists in East Africa; Establishing the prevalence of the trauma phenomenon from violent stories journalists cover from East Africa; Proposing support mechanisms for East African Journalists covering trauma events;  determining if exposure to visuals or the experience of journalists leads to trauma. In the beginning, I hoped that the outcomes of the project would provide a glimpse into the personal experiences of journalists acting as portraits of many other visual rhetors covering traumatic events in East Africa, and whose stories may never be heard.

Stories from East African Journalists

To complete the study, I went through a series of ethical clearances in Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda and met journalists with numerous stories that were deeply hidden in the memories. The journalists seemed not to be bothered, they maintained that witnessing horrific moments was part of the job and they have not given thought to the effects. It was a vicious cyclic, reportage from one story to the next, addiction for intense motions in the production processing, capturing the images, editing, reviewing, and rendering. Some narrated they never paused a moment to think of the horror in the images. But when the conversations and deep questions on trauma begun, they paused and had flashbacks, some had out of body experiences, I saw manifestation of lived trauma during the interview’s sessions, some cried, some remembered moments that was deeply etched in memory.

Even as I went through the narrative process, I was keen not to re-traumatize and we paused, made jokes, laughed, over tea and mandazi’s or samosa (sweet, deep-fried dough and Indian/Swahili pastries) we finally picked up the threads of the narratives and wove them together until the story was complete. I also talked to psychosocial experts whose inputs were relevant in finding ground to dissect aspects of trauma that were out of my media and communication preserve. The methodological process recognized the vitality of storytelling and individual experiences in comprehending complex social phenomena.

 Traumatic stories are risky and less attractive to journalists, so a few visual rhetors were engaged in this genre, of reporting further making their stories vital. The visual rhetors had covered trauma events for close to or over a decade. Some of the stories were intense and involved terror, crime, and violence and generated a lot of national and global interest.

The analysis followed systematic steps for narrative analysis: a) identification of visual rhetors; b) data collection and recording; c) transcription of data; d) theming of the data to address research questions; e) interpretation of meanings; f) analysis and presentation of findings; g) making conclusions (Marsh and White 2016). The analyzed themes produced constructs of stories and meanings that ascribe experiences of trauma among journalists.

Conferencing and Learning New Experiences

Linked to this project, I managed to present work at 5 international conferences, the idea was creating visibility for the project and engaging with different perspectives. This was possible with the financial support from LIAS. The first engagement was virtually at the International Communication Association annual conference’s regional hub hosted at Daystar University. The second was the 33^rd International Conference of the Research Association of Interdisciplinary Studies (RAIS) Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities, held virtually and at Princeton University Erdman Centre between 3-4^th August. In this conference I spoke virtually on the topic: Courting Trauma: An Unspoken Mental Health Crisis Among Journalists in East Africa.

The ‘courting trauma’ imagery describes the connection between journalism and trauma following the accumulation of emotional disturbances after repeated exposure to horrific visuals. I argued that work-related trauma is prevalent in high-stress professions such as law enforcement, the military, and in journalism. The near symbiotic relationship between trauma and exposure to violent visuals forces journalists to reproduce horrific images to either find coping mechanisms or succumb to trauma.

Between 25^th and 27^th Augusts I presented a second paper on African Epistemology – a Panacea for Mental Health Among Journalists Reporting Trauma in East Africa – at the Social Science Congress Paris- France. It was imperative to start a conversation suggesting a search for alternative strategies with the African theroy of knowledge to address trauma crisis among journalists in east Africa. African theory of knowledge or epistemology includes the African understanding of the nature of knowledge, the methods used to acquire knowledge, the standards used to judge the veracity of knowledge, the motivation behind the pursuit of knowledge, and the significance of knowledge to human existence (Asante and Mazama, 2005). I argue that African knowledge has a strong metaphysical and spiritual bent and is profoundly anchored in African tradition that can be incorporated in trauma mitigations within East African newsrooms.

On September 6^th to 8^th 2023, I travelled with my son to Madrid-Spain for the Communication and Media Studies Conference at Complutense University. I spoke on the larger notion of Suppressed Narratives through lens of the Life Cycle of Visual Rhetors in East Africa. Here I invoked silences that exist within newsroom structures and among journalist in East Africa on trauma. It was an exciting experience as a mother and a researcher to see the possibilities of balancing parenting through bonding, travelling and academic exchange. We met another parent from the USA travelling with her 3-year-old daughter. The children had time to play after the sessions, as parents connected through intellectual parle.

The last event was the 34^th International Speaker RAIS Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities held on 16^th 17th November 2023, at the American University in Washington DC, USA, where I chaired sessions and presented a paper on the topic: Visuals of Trauma in Journalism and the Mixing of Methods – Symptomatology of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Trauma Narratives.

Research and Praxis to Post-Study Actions

The project provided a lens into the life of visual rhetors during and after capturing violent conflicts and suggests mitigation to cope with trauma effects. One of the points of practice of the project was the LIAS Intervention in Visuals and Trauma in Journalism media workshop that was held during the LIAS opening Days in June 2023.

The Media Workshop brought together Journalists from Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, and Germany, Editors, Media Council Representatives from East Africa, LIAS Fellows, and media scholars to interrogate in both analytical and practical ways the theoretical and conceptual dilemmas in trauma visual. It also witnessed a display of narratives of field experiences of journalists covering trauma events.

The post-study component will engage media practitioners in commencing conversations on the trauma phenomenon in newsrooms. These discussions will adopt formats for broadcast (Television, Radio) and digital (podcasts, blogs) to share content from conversations with journalists, psycho-social/health experts, media editors, media councils, and decision-makers.

The outcomes of the study will also be disseminated in in-country workshops that will be organized in collaboration with Makerere University College of Languages, Literature and Communication, Department of Journalism in Uganda.

In Kenya, with Daystar School of Communication – Department of Media Film Studies and in Rwanda with the Institute Catholique de Kabgayi, as part of Unity and Reconciliation. Out of the engagement with journalists, networks that bring together journalists covering traumatic events have been formed in Uganda and Rwanda. In Kenya, an existing network of Crime Journalism Reporters was included as participants in the study and brought to speed issues on Trauma Journalism. One action out of this project is to connect the network of journalists to mental health practitioners for continuous and sustainable psycho-social support.

The overall outcome of this project is to inform policy and practice within developing countries through the interpretations of existing trauma phenomena among journalists.  Other key deliverables are a book focused on Suppressed Narratives: The Life Cycle of Visual Rhetors employing experimental writing between narratology (story telling through vignettes) and academic writing. The second work would then look at Visuals of Trauma in Journalism using an analytical lense between Symptomatology Measurements of PTSD and Trauma Narratives.

At the end of this project, I hope to continue researching and publishing aspects of trauma in Journalism and engage in conversation sessions using legacy and social media that will provide information and research contexts on the topic of trauma journalism. I see a path that leads to academic growth, and starting an initiative that connects media research to practical issues through the Diaspora Radio platform, a project I launched some five years ago. A hearty appreciation to the unwavering support from the LIAS team.

• Lydia Oumo Radoli: “Visuals of Trauma in Journalism and the Mixing of Methods – Symptomatology of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and Trauma Narratives. Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (RAIS), Nov. 16-17, 2023. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.10397855
• Lydia Oumo Radoli: Courting Trauma: An Unspoken Mental Health Crisis Among Journalists in East Africa. Research Association for Interdisciplinary Studies (RAIS), Aug. 3-4, 2023. DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.8310051

By Pedro Oliveira, LIAS Artist Fellow

What forms of knowledge production are possible that would invite a reflection beyond the holding together of established „truths“? How to move the writing of theory away from its stabilizing ethos and invite ambiguity, hyper-locality, and poetics, albeit without losing grip to that which makes knowledge accessible? What forms of writing might be possible, that could productively stretch the boundaries between artistic and academic knowledge, and hopefully complicate them further? With these questions in mind I invited Senior LIAS Fellow Prof. Rosalind C. Morris and Public LIAS Fellow Katja Petrowskaja for a conversation circle under the umbrella format of „LIAS:Unfinished“ on October 5th, 2023. Joining the three of us were Senior LIAS Fellow Prof. Radha d’Souza, LIAS Fellows Wilson Sherwin and Daniel Nemenyi, as well as LIAS Fellow Support Thomas Krutak. The conversation took place for a couple of hours under a white autumn sunlight, in an intimate and at times very vulnerable setting at the large, empty room of the Leuphana Kunstraum. What follows is not an exegesis or a review of that event, but a months-long, post-event personal reflection of the ways in which the conversations filled that empty space of the Kunstraum on the one hand, and moved my body elsewhere on the other.

While seemingly (and paradoxically) cryptic and self-evident at first glance, these questions came originally from a place of deep reflection and uncertainty within my own research: I consider my work as occupying a rather porous terrain of the in-between, where many of the connections I am interested in unravelling often find themselves at a crossroads between the desire for academic accuracy and the (political) need for poetic and artistic articulation. Because my work deals with a topic that requires – particularly in the past few years but stretching way further than that – a certain degree of urgency, it also understands the necessity of momentarily disentangling history from temporality so as to deepen the inquiry, and in so doing to avoid the seduction of simple and simplistic answers. I mean namely the topic of borders and asylum, and the ways in which it intersects with technological development and in particular voice-based, „artificial intelligence“ systems.^[i] So allow me a brief detour for the sake of establishing „the grounds from which I speak“ (cf. Anzaldúa 2015).

With my work, I am investigating the deployment of state-of-the-art, machine learning proprietary software in the asylum seeking processes of Germany, and more specifically the use of a so-called „automated dialect recognition“ (Dialekterkennung, sometimes also referred to as Sprachbiometrie). I am not interested, however, in providing solely knowledge which would verify or falsify the need – political or otherwise – for the development and implementation of this software. I am more concerned with understanding the reasons why Germany is at the forefront of this move, and the ways in which it reflects a larger timeline stretching at least a hundred years back in the country’s own history, and the ways in which it projects itself in the present – as seen in current affairs with Palestine – and the future. These connections, however, are often not correlational, or in any way linear; I find myself in a terrain that is full of knots, a four-dimensional cat’s cradle (cf. Haraway 1994), that refuses to resolve itself and yet remains available to the touch (it is, therefore, „fassbar“). To complicate matters even further, I am at odds with the ways in which my own positionality sits rather uncomfortably alongside this research. I am indeed a border subject, and know quite well the struggles, pitfalls, and anxieties of being placed at the will of the other to be recognized in full personhood here; yet, my border-crossing has always been partially voluntary, partially economic, partially ambitious.

Of course the answer to the question „where to write from“ would always imply that, like I stated above, I can only write from where I speak. Despite the attempt by „canonical“ (i.e. traditionally European) academic knowledge to imply the position (or even the existence) of a „neutral observer,“ I put myself into the work whether it is explicitly acknowledged or not. The work might not be „about me“ but it emerges „with me.“ It becomes thus a matter of situating oneself within that „self(less)ness“ that is inherent to the writing or the work; which parts to emphasize, which threads to pull, and how to weave the story with the theory of the self towards the larger questions that any research demands and sets itself to address. In a way, it is a writing that would play around with what feminist theorist Gloria Anzaldúa would call an autohistoria-teoría,^[ii] although not exactly in the guise of a personal story but a story that can only emerge in a way that is particular and tangential to my own.With that in mind, academic writing becomes a methodological orientation; it becomes then, as Katja Petrowskaja said during our event, a „form of ethics.“ It sets the conditions of a certain encounter, one that is bound to a deep commitment not to validate truth by giving it fixed references and contexts, but rather a commitment to „speak truthfully“, remarked by Prof. Rosalind Morris, while attending to the possibility of holding contradiction and ambiguity closer. Staging manifold contestations of „what is true“ is seen as a way to produce „what is not yet said“ (Voegelin 2023, ix) , that is, exactly from the (possibility of) friction. In line with Anzaldúa, by writing myself into the work I am also writing about the struggles that are similar to many migrants like me. The epistemic and institutional violences have the same point of origin, but they arrive (and impact) ourselves differently. Yet I cannot write outside of my experience and bringing that experience to the forefront sets the position from which to write; it „taints“ my writing in a way that can be seen as productive, and in many ways, truthful.

Martinican theorist, psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon remarks in the introduction to „Black Skin, White Masks“ (1952[2008]) that there exists a moment where „methods devour themselves.“ This act of devouring happens exactly because of the complexity (or unsolvability) of specific questions, for example, in my case: to which effect does the inquiry I am doing into this so-called „dialect recognition software“ can enact meaningful change? Posing this question during the event allowed me to better understand its components: what exactly is implied by „meaningful“? What kinds of „change“ are possible with academic work? And what kinds of „change“ am I particularly interested in?^[iii] These were, of course, discussed with the participants and when posed with these questions back to me, one thing became clear: I was (and still am), matter of fact, manifesting a larger concern with the limitations of specific methods to even come up with answers to the questions at hand. In a way, it seems, the question I asked also devoured itself just by my posing of it in such terms.

Thus the issue is not so much the enactment of a method per se, implied in the above question, but rather the idea that there might be an enactment of a change to begin with; a purely scientific or artistic inquiry cannot contain the breadth of this question alone. At stake here is not the refusal of one method in favour of another, not even of a merging of different methods as a heuristics for research. It demands another form of ethics that would enable or create the conditions for any enactment to be imaginable or possible to begin with. However, such ethics would also be concerned with the limits of this enactment: what can be changed, from whence, and for whom. This is why we stay with Fanon, particularly with what he says immediately after the above quote: „I want to start from there.“ I propose we start not from, but with Fanon from the moment after the devouring has taken place; where it makes evident that which must be left behind.

To articulate from these tensions that arise between form and content, and to move away from the hungry desire of methods to devour themselves (we can also say, if we choose to follow indigenous sound scholar Dylan Robinson (2020), that this hunger results in a version of what is „knowledge“ as the scientific method would name and want it), means to write from beyond the concern with the economy of academic publications. It means to recognize the stiffness of certain scientific and academic languages as a genre, and with it its own fashions and traps. Such writing has currency because it does provide the grounds for specific kinds of truth to be established, and requires at the same time a writing proficiency concerned with the factual, the objective, the descriptive. It allows for its quick circulation, its steady and slick flow within the structures of academic writing through peer review, funding applications, ethics committees, scientific journals, conferences and symposia.

This is not a diss on the value of scientific writing and critical theory. On the contrary, it is a nudge on the ways in which these forms of critical theory partake on a specific kind of economy of publishing and performance review that can significantly hinder the realm of possibilities for scholarship to flourish, to do and to be otherwise.^[iv] Which is to say critical theory often relies on a monophonic, steady tone so as to establish what is at same time an asset and a pitfall for its mode of knowledge production: it exercises evidence- (and truth-)making because it does not allow for ambiguity, contingency – let alone poetics. Everything that might need to be said is said through the words of others, and the academic writer performs a gesture of revealing that which would otherwise remain concealed by the failures of history so far or, at the very least, until the moment of that gesture. That this gesture remains tied to a specific genre – which we can also call a style, a modus, or a script – is the question at stake.

I am trying to think of creating or enabling a space in which scientific work can be poetic, and where poetics can be allowed the same degree of theoretic precision as scientific work without conflating one into the other, or granting either a similar affect. In fact, one of the ideas that motivated my thinking for this event was Sylvia Wynter’s proposition for a „science of the word.“^[v] After our conversations, I am willing to stay with Wynter (apropos Aimé Césaire) on this matter,^[vi] but I am not so sure whether the thinking of poetics needs to occupy a similar space as that of „science.“^[vii] Rather, what I am proposing is creating or enabling of a space in which we come close to the subject without losing the commitment to an ethics of speaking truthfully; in so doing, we avoid that „the burden of evidence falls on muted writing.“ (Voegelin 2023, ix) The concern is thus one of establishing a relationship between writer and reader, a relationship that is not bound by a linearity in the transmission of information but provokes (or elicits) encounters.

Indeed, the question of readership did emerge at some point during that afternoon. Who to write for might be the first question an academic writer might ask herself; when it comes to hybrid work such as the one I do, the readership question gets even more fuzzy and knotted. There are layers of meaning, subjectivity, poetics, and information that need to be conveyed, and they need to be conveyed simultaneously. However, these can be purposefully and generatively played with. One can write dialogically, that is, bringing the poetic and the academic into dialogue by emphasizing how and where they differ. One can also write so as to emphasize the frictions that arise when attempting to bring this together, something perhaps akin to a meta-writing, or the writing of writing itself. This friction becomes the space of a writing that refuses to resolve, and in that refusal the reader might be drawn into the work, or be called upon to do the work with the writer.

Here is where the boundary work, and the idea of writing from and with the border, becomes relevant as its own form of critical theorizing, a critical theory in flux or, as Karen Barad would put it, a „living and breathing [reconfiguring] of the world.“ (2012, 207). A writing that already starts from the boundaries between the scientific and the poetic, with the desire not to resolve or to re-draw them but to dwell on that fuzzy and knotted space emphasizes the relationship between writer and reader as that of an always re-negotiable (and therefore contingent) encounter. With every encounter, the transmission mutates, takes a different path and arrives at similar but not exactly equal destinations; the text becomes a tracing that is more than the sum of its parts, a rehearsal for walking different paths. Both writer and reader might feel lost, but it is through the text that they meet, and the conditions of this meeting remain contingent to what lies outside the text. The text becomes a vehicle for the reader to ask herself „how could I not know this?“^[viii] Indeed, it seems the writer and the reader might feel lost; yet they are never alone.

In thinking together with Gloria Anzaldúa, how can a work of scientific and poetic intention be re-organized so as to dwell on while at the same time draw closer something other than a hybrid, something more profound, and in many ways knotted differently than what a simplistic (or narrow-focused) view would imply? Or in other words, what is the poetic function of a text that conveys, advances, articulates knowledge while being simultaneously committed to this articulation of knowledge, but done so in ways which consider subjectivity as the locus of enunciation? What other modalities of „text“ (as in the material, thick and discursive production of both question and thought, all at once) are possible that would productively uproot and dismantle these hard boundaries – while at the same time avoiding redrawing these boundaries anew?

That afternoon, I entered the room with Anzaldúa; and after our conversation I am happy to leave still with her – albeit differently. Anzaldúa’s understanding of artworks as inherently „alive“ – containing both the artist and the object’s soul at once – re-negotiates (one can even say re-organizes) the idea of agency when it comes to artistic and poetic subjectivity. This inspires me to hold text and artwork (in the case of my work) together in similar grounds; to see one as the continuation and activation of one another, in a process in which the result is always more than the sum of its parts because they constantly activate one another. Activating the artwork for Anzaldúa means something different than what the term has implied more recently in contemporary art discourse: for her there is a profound acknowledgment of the work’s spirit and, perhaps more importantly, its function as a node within social, cultural, and political life. Such a view beyond the „thisness“ of an object or a text in the end enacts the border work Anzaldúa was writing about; an active engagement with the undoing of boundaries not between artist and artwork, but art and life, poetics and knowledge, self and world. That text and object can activate one another in this sense means that they produce different things when taken separately or together, but they all tell versions of the same story – or perhaps they enter the story from different standpoints. For her practice there are no sides of this endeavor, the only space is the one that contains none and both at the same time.

Similarly, the ways in which our discussions circled around the room served almost as an otherwise encounter with the familiar, and the opening for the possibility of the new. To hear other, fairly more experienced thinkers’ struggles, pitfalls, and – why not – traps that emerge with the exercise of writing truthfully and ethically pointed towards directions, but – thankfully – refused to resolve them as a method. What remained was the desire (and the support for), as Prof. Morris remarked, „contorted methodologies“. When it comes to my work with the „dialect recognition software“ it means that there are many ways to tell the same story. As Katja Petrowskaja remarked about her own writing process, it is a matter of „how close to the subject [one] can come.“ The story here is not about the ways in which this software works, or the people that are excluded through it, but rather how such a coalescing of technology, politics, notions of selfhood and world come into being within the borders of this nation-state. The text I am interested in is a text in which tensions between form and content become vectors. It is about its annotated margins; mine and others’, as it is the case with the documents and forms I work with. It is about strikethrough words and blackened out data, not about what they conceal but taken as they are. It is about foreclosures and revealings of knowledge, but also of what knowledge ultimately is or can be. The space and language each of these aspects demand, however, takes different forms in order to be properly weighted, conveyed, and criticized. More than that, some of these aspects demand radical refusal, reinvention, or arresting. They demand methodologies that effect the work of activation in so many different ways – critical, poetic, descriptive, denunciative, speculative, historical – so that the subject becomes exhausted before the reader does. It brings matters to a halt, even if momentarily, because of the constant work that is put into it in all fronts, by all parts involved.

It seems to me that at the end of the day Donna Haraway and Gloria Anzaldúa may dance and cook together, so that the cat’s cradle becomes pliable dough (2015, 90), and the text rehearses a multiplicity of forms that refuse to limit (or even define) themselves. That is to say: to claim that I left our „Unfinished“ colloquium with answers would be a pretentious move. For one, it was never the intention; secondly, I do not believe that answers to these questions can be meaningfully achieved, not even as an appendix to the event or to this brief text. Rather, they need time to ferment, as the slow process within which new things emerge in contact with whatever is in the air. These are exercises worth practicing, rehearsing – and in so doing, erring – as the articulation of subjective and poetic thought itself, a scientific endeavor of the most dexterity and precision that only the profound realms of language- and method-bending can allow for.

References

Anzaldúa, Gloria. Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza. Fourth Edition. San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 2012.

———. Light in the Dark/Luz En Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. Edited by Analouise Louise Keating. Durham, North Carolina: Duke Univ Pr, 2015.

Barad, Karen. “On Touching—the Inhuman That Therefore I Am.” Differences 23, no. 3 (December 1, 2012): 206–23. https://doi.org/10.1215/10407391-1892943.

Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. Translated by Richard Philcox. Revised edition. New York : Berkeley, Calif.: Grove Press, 2008.

McKittrick, Katherine, ed. Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis. Duke University Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.1215/9780822375852.

Robinson, Dylan. Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

Voegelin, Salomé. Uncurating Sound: Knowledge with Voice and Hands. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

Wynter, Sylvia. “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation–An Argument.” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 257–337. https://doi.org/10.1353/ncr.2004.0015.

Notes

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^[i] Since 2017 I have been producing academic and artistic work on this subject. A comprehensive outlook on my work can be found at https://oliveira.work

^[ii] according to Gloria Anzaldúa, personal stories and histories can be „augmented“ in dialogue with theory. By mixing personal narrative, fiction, and essayistic writing, Anzaldúa uses the term „autohistoria-teoría,“ to define a „personal essay that theorizes“ (2015, 238n14)

^[iii] These questions were raised (in different wordings) by LIAS Fellows Wilson Sherwin and Prof. Radha d’Souza.

^[iv] This is a reflection brought up during the conversation by LIAS Fellow Daniel Nemenyi.

^[v] A „science of the word“ would be, according to Wynter, a study of „the neurophysiological circuits/mechanisms of the brain that […] lead to the specific order of consciousness or modes of mind in whose terms we then come to experience ourselves as this or that genre/mode of being human“ (2003, 328–9), that is, a science that attends to the way we describe what it is to be and feel like being in this world, rather than treating the uses of these words as purely (or merely) factual.

^[vi] I had suggested that in preparation to our encounter we read Césaire’s text „Poetry and Knowledge“ which inspired Wynter to dwell so adamantly on the proposition of a „science of the word.“ The text, however, reads rather naive on its propositions – perhaps even a bit outdated. I agree with Prof. Morris’ remark that Wynter’s reading of it is a very generous one.

^[vii] this concern with how knowledge gets formed, established, and validated is something that Denise Ferreira da Silva will also write about (2015); similarly, Katherine McKittrick will suggest (and prefer) the word „scientia“ rather than „science“ for it (ibid.).

^[viii] This is a remark made by Prof. Morris when recalling her reading of Katja Petrowskaja’s 2015 book „Vielleicht Esther.“

Das Leuphana Institute für Advanced Studies (LIAS) der Leuphana Universität Lüneburg ist ein Forschungsinstitut, das der Profilierung und Internationalisierung der universitären Forschungsschwerpunkte dient. Getragen von einem internationalen Fellowprogramm begegnet es auf wissenschaftliche Weise den Herausforderungen einer globalisierten Gegenwart. Angesiedelt in dem von Daniel Libeskind entworfenen Zentralgebäude der Universität, zeichnet sich das LIAS durch interdisziplinäre Zusammenarbeit, universitäre Einbindung und Co-Creation aus. In diesem Blog berichten Fellows und Mitarbeitende von Themen, die sie beschäftigen – ihre Foschung, die wissenschaftliche Arbeit, das Leben und Arbeiten am LIAS oder aber spezifische Themen beim Aufbau und der Arbeit an einem Institute for Advanced Studies.

Das LIAS in Culture and Society fördert diagnostische und kritische Grundlagenforschung im Bereich der Kultur- und Sozialwissenschaften. Basierend auf dem Lüneburger Profil der Zusammenführung von geistes- und gesellschaftswissenschaftlichen Perspektiven überschreitet das LIAS in Culture and Society programmatisch akademische Disziplinen. Als Arbeit an gesellschaftlicher Potentialisierung sollen am LIAS in Culture and Society Möglichkeiten erarbeitet werden, Zukunft zu gestalten sowie Denk- und Handlungsoptionen zu erweitern. Es verwirklicht daher auch das erklärte Ziel der Universität Leuphana, sich der Verantwortung für gesellschaftliche Herausforderungen zu stellen. Das LIAS in Culture and Society wird gefördert aus Mitteln des SPRUNG, die durch die VolkswagenStiftung vergeben werden.