Public online lecture series: Re-Locating Gender and Diversity Studies: Transnational Perspectives (October 2023-March 2024)

In a transitional age, globalization, digitalization, and new ways of communication have led to a range of new genres, media, and fields of research in contemporary Chinese Studies. At the same time, mainstream political, cultural, and academic discourse continues to resist efforts to decenter its master narratives in favor of minor histories, discourses, and genres. For researchers in the field of Chinese Studies, the literary and visual articulations of underrepresented social groups and communities can serve as productive epistemic positions from where to uncover alternative subjectivities and world views, which can bring about new possibilities of social, political, and cultural formation.

This online lecture series will focus on alternative approaches to genre, media, cultural activism, and research methodologies, thereby probing into the hitherto hidden spaces of knowledge production. Topics shall include non-official agencies, histories, and discourses across the contemporary Sinosphere. Accordingly, the lectures shall not only cover research on literature, but also other media such as visual art, theater, and cinema. Our goals are 1) to bring together established and young scholars from different geographical locations, 2) to think beyond epistemic, geographical, and medial boundaries, and 3) to explore new theoretical and methodological approaches. In this way, the lecture series will shed light on the emergent cultural agencies, aesthetic genres, media, and theories in the field of Chinese Studies and related disciplines.

The lecture series brings together critical perspectives on transcultural gender and diversity studies from different perspectives. It engages with new forms of knowledge production beyond traditional academic tracks and established canons while seeking to capture the asymmetrical transnational connectivities of gender and diversity studies as well as related policies. All lectures in this series are open to the public. We welcome participants from a variety of backgrounds, academic, activist, or otherwise.
This lecture series is part of the project “Creating Spaces: Enhancing Multiversal Knowledge Production in Gender and Diversity Studies” (CreSp), an experimental lab for collaborative exchange.