Vorlesungsverzeichnis

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Veranstaltungen von Prof. Dr. Christoph Brunner

Lehrveranstaltungen

Lost in Translation: Undoing Methods through Art and Activism (Seminar)

Dozent/in: Christoph Brunner, Flavia Pinheiro Meireles

Inhalt: The seminar takes on the challenging question of conducting transdisciplinary research between artistic and activist practices in translocal contexts. It asks about concrete ways of doing such research, while accounting for different perspectives, experiences, languages, cultures, and ways of thinking. Put differently, the seminar asks how to make sense of encounters, materials, and situations that exceed our habits of understanding. With the title “lost in translation” the seminar embraces the challenges of making sense across domains of thought and practice in different territories. In a hands-on manner, the seminar will critically engage the role of methods for enabling but also inhibiting collaborative practice. Combing hybrid and local encounters in Lueneburg and Rio de Janeiro with artists, indigenous intellectuals and scholars in the field of philosophy, media, and culture, the seminar critically asks “how to undo methods?” Methods are usually tools to do research and thus to gain knowledge and insights. They are often derived from specific disciplinary angles and carry the promise of profound and concrete insights into their objects of research. However, the use of methods and their genealogies are not neutral but rest upon highly specified practices and power relations. Most fundamentally, methods are a way of systematizing and structuring the way researchers perceive their environment. From a European and enlightened angle, methods exist for the purpose of gaining knowledge of the “other” and to use that knowledge for concrete purposes such as political decision-making, discursive intervention, preservation, or critique. This seminar wants to undo methods derived from the framework of Western and European understanding of academia. While there has been much internal critique of the idea of methods in Western discourses (see Paul Feyerbabend, John Law, Erin Manning) such critiques of method often remain on a rather abstract and theoretical level. We want to explore ways of undoing methods at the conjuncture of artistic, activist, and indigenous intellectual practices and across different geopolitical territories. We aim to see what happens if we do not refrain from getting lost, and what kinds of techniques and strategies are needed in the face of not understanding—that is, of being lost in translation. The seminar is supported by different digital tools that will be part and parcel of the collaboration between students in Brazil and Lueneburg. Part of the final examination resides in experimenting with documentation strategies as part of the collaborative working process.