Where: Utrecht University

When: 24 – 28 August 2015

Deadline: April 30, 2015.

More information: http://www.graduategenderstudies.nl/files/2015/02/NOISE-2015-flyer.pdf

The summer school emerges from a larger engagement with questions of biopolitics and
necropolitics in an era of neoliberalism and late capitalism. It pays close attention to the
effects this has on bodies and lives. Informed by postcolonial theory, cultural analysis, critical
posthumanism, and feminist/queer studies, we will address the boundaries of subjectivity and
citizenship in a system that actively monitors and excludes certain identities, particularly those
who do not – or cannot – conform to a white, middle-class, gender-normative,
heteronormative, able-bodied, legally employed, state-documented existence. From here, we
move forward toward envisioning feminist/queer futures that rethink categories such as
“human” and “subjectivity” based on the modern onto-epistemological premises, opening up
into new ways of imagining vital politics, resistance strategies, and other-than-human
agencies.
Examining the politics of twenty-first-century life and death, key themes of the summer school
will be surveillance, securitization, planetary co-existence, and co-habitation. In a post-9/11,
postcolonial/neocolonial era, bodily norms – informed by race, gender, and sexuality – are
encoded in tools of surveillance and security, including body scanners, facial recognition
software, and identity documents. In examining these processes, we will critically investigate
how a politics of inclusion requires – and is in fact built on – simultaneous exclusion wherein
some bodies become recognizable subjects while others are constructed as internal enemies
and illegitimate non-subjects. Taking account of these global dynamics, the Summer School
aims at visions of transformation of the matrix of in-/exclusion into feminist/queer cosmopolitical
futures that work towards a new discourse of planetary social justice.
23rd Advanced European Summer School in Women’s Studies from Multicultural and Interdisciplinary Perspectives
Focusing on cultural, legal, scientific, and social practices, this Summer School addresses the
following questions: Which lives are deemed worthy of recognition and inclusion in
contemporary regimes of power, and which lives are considered disposable? Who may live and
who must die? How to envision a different politics of difference(s) that un-works established
(anthropocentric) hierarchies and enriches inter-human and inter-species relationality?

Aims
This advanced training course offers a diverse yet coherent program of study from an
interdisciplinary perspective. The Summer School is meant for PhD and MA students. Separate
seminars for these two groups will be provided in the afternoons.

Formula
• Two lectures in the morning
• Separate PhD and MA-seminars in the afternoon
• Social program
• Students prepare before NOI♀SE by reading and collecting material for assignments
(approximately 40 hours of work). After the school has ended, participants who fulfilled all
requirements (preparation of assignments and reading, active participation, and final essay
of 10-15 pages) receive a NOI♀SE Certificate (5 ECTS).
• All students are expected to participate in the entire program for the duration of five days