OSL Workshop: From Crisis to Critique: Languages of Resistance, Transformation, and Futurity in Mediterranean Crisis-Scapes

4-5 March 2021 | Online

Today, the term crisis is often ‘hijacked’ by far-right, xenophobic, and anti-democratic agendas that shrink the space of political choice and the imagination of alternative futures. In this workshop we ask if there are ways to salvage crisis as a concept that can do the work of its cognate—critique—and participate in the articulation of alternative languages, literary narratives, and other modes of representation in visual, digital and social media, cinema, and art.

OSL Workshop: How Not to Write a Novel

OSL Workshop: How Not to Write a Novel

20 May 2022 | Amsterdam, Eye Filmmuseum
How not to Write a Novel seems to be a joke but it is not. This workshop delivered by the Spanish writer Jesús Carrasco (De Vlucht 2013, De Grond Onder Onze Voeten, 2016, both published in Dutch by Meulenhoff) tries to be a record of his experience in writing his third novel. But why should the writing of a third novel be so difficult? Why not the second? The answer is simple.

OSL/NICA Symposium: Posthuman Futures in Literature and Art

Posthuman Futures in Literature and Art

3-4 June 2021 | University Amsterdam
Within late capitalism, developments in the natural sciences, digital information technologies, and the study of ecological systems have altered the shared understanding of the basic unit of reference for the human. Critical posthumanism (Braidotti, 2016) works as an analytical tool that allows one to expose restrictive structures of dominant subject-formations as well as expressing alternative representations of subjectivity. This posthumanist agenda intersects with New Materialism (van der Tuin, 2012), building a discursive and material production of reality. Knowledge production is understood as situated and embodied visions (Haraway, 1988). Materialist feminism, with the speculative turn (van der Tuin, et al. 2015), develops analytical tools to think beyond the limit of human perception, refusing to make a separation from (non)human subjecthood.

De kunst van het boekomslag

De kunst van het boekomslag

Woensdag 2 december 2020 | 14:00-17:00 | Online Registratie opent op 28 oktober. Ontwerpers, uitgevers en schrijvers stoppen veel tijd in het creëren van aantrekkelijke omslagen. Een geslaagde omslag kan een boek maken of breken, lezers verleiden tot een aankoop of ze juist afstoten. Tegelijkertijd wordt ook op andere manieren aandacht besteed aan omslagen: denk […]

Ravenstein Seminar 2021: Literature, Language and Belonging

Utrecht | 20-22 January 2021 (the seminar will move online if necessary)
Literature distinguishes itself from other art forms through its use of language. Without language, no literature. At the same time, language also binds groups of speakers together through its everyday use as means of communication and the intimate ties that exist between language and culture. Therefore, language is closely related to notions of (national) belonging: it offers an individual membership of a particular cultural and political collective. Writers contribute to shape these social collectives, even though some writers do not find themselves at home there and have consequently asked probing questions about the cultural politics of their writing, their use of language and the community-constituting effects of their writing. In this winter school, we will explore the various ways in which literature, through its use of language, creates, sustains and contests notions of belonging. We take our keywords – ‘literature’, ‘language’ and ‘belonging’ as invitations to think about what the connection between these keywords mean or could mean.

OSL Workshop: Literature and the Social

Literature and the Social

Online PhD workshop | 4 December 2020
Towards the end of the twentieth century, the study of literature became decidedly more sociological. Under the influence of thinkers such as Pierre Bourdieu and disciplines such as gender and postcolonial studies, scholars started paying attention to the context of literary production. This move has sometimes seen literature reduced to a status subordinated to other disciplines – merely the offshoot of other, ‘real’ processes in society and culture. In this seminar, we counter this view and aim to rethink how literature relates to the social, in particular regarding the ways in which literature can make our social world legible and visible in new ways.

OSL Schrijfcursus voor geesteswetenschappers: Framen, schrappen en herschrijven

OSL Schrijfcursus voor geesteswetenschappers

Januari 2021 | Universiteit Utrecht
Valorisatie wordt in de wetenschap steeds belangrijker. En dan gaat het er niet alleen over dat je onderzoek aansluiting vindt bij maatschappelijke thema’s, maar ook dat je aan het brede publiek duidelijk kunt maken waar het over gaat en wat er interessant aan is. In deze korte, intensieve schrijfcursus leer je in verschillende tekstgenres je onderzoek te presenteren.

Active Learning and Perusall: Lecture by Eric Mazur (Harvard) and Pablo Valdivia (OSL)

Online | 22 October 2020
The Covid-19 crisis has been a disruptive force that has accelerated changes and transformations already present in our societies before the start of the pandemic. With regard to education, the digital transformation — with its quick transition from traditional face-to-face teaching to remote and online learning — has impacted how we organize teaching in our institutions, and forced us to re-think the very foundations of our pedagogies.