About the Project
The project evolves around a series of Laboratories of praxis. In these, the praxis of reading will take two different forms. Artists, activists and researchers will be delving into medieval cosmology by reading a series of travelling accounts. We will critically engage with works of learned elite of medieval Europe, describing their encounters with the people and cultures at the borders of their ‘world’ through close reading and co-contextualization with counter-narratives and authoethnographies. Historians and theologians like Mary Louise Pratt, Geraldine Heng and Willie James Jennings have identified that these particular stories were at the core of what created and spread the racialised social imaginary that later became a racialised gaze of white Christian Europeans. Jennings further argues that this inverted, distorted vision of creation reduced theological anthropology to commodified bodies at the same time as it disrupted the relationship to land, place and creatureliness of Christian white westerners.[1]By following this formation in the texts spanning from the period of the 11th to the 16th century, we hope that the participants in the circle will gain deep insights into how questions of race[2] and relationship to creation are intertwined.
The second type of reading material will consist of biographies. The particular biographies that we intend to read focus on stories told by people today living in the Nordics. These will include stories from underrepresented populations in university settings - including but not limited to racialised and Indigenous peoples, sexual and gender minorities, people with disabilities, as well as those living under economically, religiously and politically precarious circumstances.[3] Reading these stories is a reading praxis that will run throughout the study circle with zoom meetings every second month.
In the laboratories, the praxis of listening refers to both the fact that the texts we encounter come from lived experiences of marginalised people in the Nordics as well as historic and diverse worldviews. The praxis of listening will also take the form of listening to each other's experiences of the joint reading. This includes the expertise of Indigenous peoples.
Finally, the praxis of telling stories arises when both artists and researchers are guided into interpreting how the praxis of reading and listening could be transferred into their particular fields of work. All of the medieval travelling accounts carry, for example, descriptions of dancing, cultural customs, food, weather, and animal and landscape descriptions that we hope will inspire further explorations by both artists and researchers. Our aim is that the praxis of telling stories will lead to artistic collaborations arising from the time spent together. The study circle will create joint article publications, an anthology and artistic exhibitions.[4] For the latter, we are collaborating with events like Aboagora and European Night of Research.
[1] Jennings 2010, 58.
[2] Our working definition on racism is: In principle, race theory (…) understands, of course, that race has no singular or stable referent: that race is a structural relationship for the articulation and management of human differences, rather than a substantive content. Heng 2018, 19.
[3] These books will be selected considering the language preferences of the participants. Some suggestions are: Riikka Tanner and Tuula Lind’s Käheä-ääninen tyttö (2009); Sanna Hedman’s Henry Hedman - Kärrynpyörä, taivas ja maa, (2013); Niillas Holmberg Halle Helle (2020); Nura Farah’s Aavikon tyttäret (2014) or Aurinkotyttö (2019); Elin Anna Labba’s Herrarna satte oss hit:om tvångsförflyttningarna i Sverige (2020); Elin Cullhed’s Eufori. En roman om Sylvia Plath (2021).
[4] A special issue publication with the journal Arts is already planned in 2023.