Frictions: Europe, America and global Transformations - Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
Creator: Delia, Drivalda; Lange, Frederik; Mathuber, Daniela; Prokopiou, Thalia; Walther, Eva-Maria; Zelenska, Vita
Title: Impressions from the Workshop “Unbuilding binaries: Exploring affective and analytical responses to binary divisions as encountered in the field”
DOI: 10.15457/frictions/0011
Description
The graduate students who formed the organizing team of the workshop “Unbuilding Binaries” discuss the papers’ contributions to critical discussions on the ongoing impact of binary oppositions on scholarship, conceptual frameworks and fieldwork. The presentations in November 2020 considered how researchers not only encounter binary oppositions based on gender and geography, among other factors, but also how they might counter them in constructing analytical frameworks and presenting empirical research. Discussing the importance of the scales employed in research, they find that particular case studies can form the basis for a nuanced, bottom-up challenge to larger-scale binary oppositions. Efforts to unbuild binaries could be particularly effective when coupled with self-reflection on the affective processes that researchers experience in the field, in archives or at their desks. At the same time, the workshop offered insight into the strategic, affirmative potential of binaries as modes of making sense of the world and constructing identities.
Date of publication: 2021-08-18
Subjects: Archives, Migration, binary opposition, fieldwork, gender, geography, graduate conference, theory, unbuilding binaries
Section: Current Debates
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