Claudia Di Gianfrancesco
Claudia Di Gianfrancesco is a PhD candidate in the Department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck. Her research is primarily concerned with researching performances of gender and masculinities via, art-based methods and participatory theatrical practices from the Theatre of the Oppressed. Her contribution to the conference entails a tentative exploration of questions around epistemology, art, communication, and connectivity via illustrations.
Title: Infiltrating Illustrations, or interruptions in academic writing
The works of decolonial, queer and feminist thinkers and artists have revealed the multiple ways in which illustrations, drawings, and graphic novels offer practical means of queering and decolonising the “universalistic”, white, cisheterosexual, masculinist gaze that permeates much academic research (see the work of Alice Bechdel, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gemma Sou and Liv Strömquist). The emphasis on more “mundane” and allegedly less “intellectual” moments and exchanges offers these authors ways to illustrate and explore the indissoluble interwovenness of political and everyday life. The knowledge and ethics produced by these graphic disclosures and illustrative moments of coming together aid our rethinking in psychosocial theory and praxis of what can be said and how – pointing to an ethics of responsibility, positioning and, in the words of Bracha L. Ettinger, of communi-caring through borderlinking.
At this conference, I would like to explore the space offered by journals and notebooks as a practice of creative evasion from academic constraints. Specifically, I would like to share a series of illustrations documenting my experience of working on the research proposal for my upgrade – also as a way of exploring alternative ways of thinking about one’s research. The hope behind this is to trouble what should be said/done in a conference space, infiltrating non-traditional and non-verbal ways of knowing that may superficially appear as an individual, solipsistic activity, while instead holding the potential for generating what Ettinger calls a metramorphic borderspace, a space where both author/artist/illustrator and viewers can become together, transforming each other through such encounters.
Title: Infiltrating Illustrations, or interruptions in academic writing
Abstract
The works of decolonial, queer and feminist thinkers and artists have revealed the multiple ways in which illustrations, drawings, and graphic novels offer practical means of queering and decolonising the “universalistic”, white, cisheterosexual, masculinist gaze that permeates much academic research (see the work of Alice Bechdel, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui, Gemma Sou and Liv Strömquist). The emphasis on more “mundane” and allegedly less “intellectual” moments and exchanges offers these authors ways to illustrate and explore the indissoluble interwovenness of political and everyday life. The knowledge and ethics produced by these graphic disclosures and illustrative moments of coming together aid our rethinking in psychosocial theory and praxis of what can be said and how – pointing to an ethics of responsibility, positioning and, in the words of Bracha L. Ettinger, of communi-caring through borderlinking.
At this conference, I would like to explore the space offered by journals and notebooks as a practice of creative evasion from academic constraints. Specifically, I would like to share a series of illustrations documenting my experience of working on the research proposal for my upgrade – also as a way of exploring alternative ways of thinking about one’s research. The hope behind this is to trouble what should be said/done in a conference space, infiltrating non-traditional and non-verbal ways of knowing that may superficially appear as an individual, solipsistic activity, while instead holding the potential for generating what Ettinger calls a metramorphic borderspace, a space where both author/artist/illustrator and viewers can become together, transforming each other through such encounters.