Open Lecture - Tomasz Sikora

The Research Centre for Identities, Politics and Cultures – IPAK.Center has the honour to announce the public lecture of prof. Tomasz Sikora “Living with an Alien; or, (Again) Against Representation”, to be held on 23 August, at 7.30 p.m., at the Faculty of Media and Communications – SINGIDUNUM, Belgrade.

In this lecture prof. Sikora will propose a politics of queer that draws from (theorizations of) art and aesthetics rather than from the liberal-legalistic vocabulary of recognition, representation and rights. Just as an avant-garde artist, by creating modes of signification and relationality that do not fall into a pre-existing framework of legibility, addresses a (virtual) audience that is yet to come (and thus faces a high risk of failure, as the audience may never come to materialize, after all), so – Sikora will argue – queer activism (and queer theory) performs a politics that is “not the terrain of the representation of a people […] but of their creation.” Referring to the ways in which art never ceases to create (ontologically) “queer objects” (with a broad definition of object), Sikora will explore the ways in which queer politics never ceases to create queer practices, subjectivities and socialities beyond the current liberal-humanist epistemological normativities.

The lecture of Jack Halberstam is integral part of the public programme of the Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures and Politics, organized by IPAK.Center, to be held in Belgrade from 18-24 August.

Tomasz Sikora is Assistant Professor at the English Department of the Pedagogical University of Cracow (Poland). In the years 2000-2006 he co-organized, together with Tomasz Basiuk and Dominika Ferens, a series of conferences that introduced queer theory into the Polish academic landscape. Three volumes of essays collected some of the work inspired by the conferences: Odmianyodmienca/A Queer Mixture (2002), Parametrypozadania [Parameters of Desire] (2006), and Out Here: Local and International Perspectives in Queer Studies (2006). The collaboration between Sikora, Basiuk and Ferens found continuation in the creation and management of the online journal of queer studies Inter Alia (published in English and Polish), which has run six issues so far. Sikora also published Virtually Wild: Wilderness, Technology and the Ecology of Mediation (2003) and Bodies Out of Rule: Transversal Readings in Canadian Literature and Film (2014), as well as co-edited a number of volumes on American and Canadian studies, including Embracing Otherness: Canadian Minority Discourses in Transcultural Perspectives (2010) and Towards Critical Multiculturalism: Dialogues Between/Among Canadian Diasporas (2011). His main areas of research and publication include critical and queer theory, interdisciplinary American and Canadian studies, political philosophy, ecocriticism, and gothicism. He is also a part-time blogger, journalist and amateur photographer.

Przemek Branas 2014

 

Tomasz Sikora Open Lecture 2014 - "Living with an Alien; or, (Again) Against Representation"

IPAK

 

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