15-20 August 2016
Research Center for Cultures, Politics and Identities (IPAK.Center)
Belgrade, Serbia
The Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures, and Politics is
permanent project, originally initiated by the Department for Gender
Studies at the Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities
“Euro-Balkan”, Skopje, Macedonia and the Faculty of Media and
Communications - Singidunum, Belgrade, Serbia. In 2014, the School has
moved to and was taken up organizationally by IPAK Center.
The general aim of the School is to gather young post-graduate students,
scholars and teaching staff from both Eastern and Western Europe and
promote a shared platform for research and trans-disciplinary
theoretical reflection on the complex modes of interweaving sexuality,
culture and politics, and consequently of exchanging and questioning
geopolitically determined discourses in the research of sexualities,
gender studies, and queer theory. Our idea is to provide students,
scholars and teachers with the opportunity to question, decenter and
democratize these areas by way of deferring the notion of theoretical
and geopolitical privilege which is often implied by these research
areas, and thus to introduce new models of rethinking context-specific
phenomena related to sexualities and, vice versa,
to enrich theoretical
paradigms with context specific phenomena and research.
In this way, the School’s long-term goal is to (1) strategically stimulate the particularization and application of key ideas and theories in sexuality research locally, and to (2) universalize and popularize crucial and underprivileged positions
and ideas on the European level, regardless of the East/West divide
which is still central to the development of
queer theory and sexuality
research.
Our endeavor is not to relativize the embeddedness and situatedness
of knowledges about sexualities, but to recognize and disrupt the
existing invisible borders that obstruct the free dissemination of ideas
as they are being determined by various hegemonic forces – political,
educational, economic - in both Eastern and Western contexts of doing
academic and
artistic work related with our desires, bodies, and
sexualities.
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Roberta Orlando will present the Equality project at the Summer School for Sexualities, Cultures, and Politics.
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