Practicing Theory: Imagining, Resisting, Remembering

Although theory and practice are often considered to be mutually exclusive, this conference proposes to investigate how these two ways of thinking and/or doing overlap and how they influence and construct each other. The aim is to explore the productive intersections that arise when the boundaries between theory and practice are considered as porous and the gap that supposedly lies between them is reinvented as a constructive space of opportunity.

So what does it mean to actually theorize; to be engaged in the act of theory?  As practitioners of cultural knowledge, it is clear that we are also actively theorizing certain modes of praxis when we are writing, speaking, thinking, experimenting and playing with our objects of analysis, whatever they happen to be (art, literature, film, theatre, politics, history, even theory itself).  However, if theorizing praxis implies the distanced application of a theory to a practice (such distance can be found in the etymology of the term ‘theory,’ from the Greek, theoria - ‘to view’,) is this not the opposite of what we mean when we say, ‘to practice theory’?

In other words, can we locate a border between ‘practicing’ and ‘theorizing’ theory?  Are we not already engaged in theoretical acts of performativity when we are committed to working across, within, and between cultures, disciplines, histories, artworks, and theories themselves?  In other words, perhaps it is the very encounter between theory and practice in our own work (whether explicit or implicit) that we (as theorists, artists, and activists,) should be engaged with more closely, both theoretically and practically.

Since the conference revolves around the interrogation of the boundaries between the conceptual objects of theory and practice, we emphatically encourage submissions from the widest range of disciplines. These ‘disciplines’ can range from and/or cross the academic and artistic to the political. The conference and workshops will be structured along three main concepts in which to think or work through the practicing of theory and the theorizing of practice. Submissions can address any of the three themes mentioned below and/or their interrelation in the context of the many possible intersections between theory and practice.

These issues will be discussed in panels grouped around the three themes:

▪                Imagining

▪                Resisting

▪                Remembering

The 2011 ASCA International Workshop: Practicing Theory will take place on March 2-4, 2011 at the University of Amsterdam. The deadline for proposals is September 15, 2010. For more information about the workshop and how to submit a proposal, please click the Call for Papers link.

Organizing Committee

Adam Chambers, Aylin Kuryel, Niall Martin, Hanneke Stuit and Irina Souch.

Contact

Dr. Eloe Kingma (Managing Director)
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis  

Room 113, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam The Netherlands

Tel.: +31 20 525 3874
Fax: +31 20 525 4773
E-mail: asca-fgw@uva.nl