Thinking from positionality: feeling, skepticism, experience and the work of theory

In Familiar Stranger, Jamaican cultural theorist Stuart Hall chronicles how his feelings and experiences of being out of place as a colonial subject in England, because of both race and cultural difference, became a drive to conceptualize the field of cultural studies. Like Hall, many other decolonial, anti-racist, feminist and queer scholars, writers and artists across cultures have found theoretical grounding in following feeling, wonder, skepticism, objection, and experiential knowledge when thinking within western academic settings like ours.

This workshop will look at examples of such generative intimate resources, as places where to theorize from and generate new knowledge, with the aim of finding ways to encourage students to employ these personal sources as sites to think from or to relate to theories and ideas they are learning in the classroom. Furthermore, we will consider how including materials like images, interviews, songs, memes, poetry and video can help mobilize learning from intimate and humorous extra-theoretical sources. Our final intent is to generate deep engagement between lived experience and non-academic knowledge and the historical, cultural and theoretical material taught in the classroom.

Audience: Concordia community and external