Over the duration of my PhD, I organised two conferences and a symposium.
2024:
Breaking Silos: Building Solidarities in Gender Research, LSE.
As critical scholars and feminist researchers working on issues of gender and sexuality across the universities in London, we have often struggled to organize concerted, collective responses to the many interlocking crises we–and ever more disproportionately, the world–face: rising inequalities, ecological collapse, global desensitization to genocide, racism and xenophobia, forced displacement, right-wing nationalist upsurges, and “antigender” backlash. As scholars, we often produce knowledge that is disciplinarily and institutionally confined, which limits our connections to one another as well as our contributions to broader, sustainable social transformation. The BREAKING SILOS Conference, celebrated as part of LSE Gender’s 30th Anniversary, proposes to create a space of solidarity and collaborative, localized, interdisciplinary knowledge-production that reaches beyond disciplinary and academic boundaries, and creates opportunities for collective learning and collaboration, as we address these mounting challenges.
2023:
Methodologies for Imagining an Alternative Politics of (Human) Rights, LSE.
This symposium explores the possibility of alternative ontologies and epistemologies to (human) rights. It asks how we can best study rights cultures—addressing the methodological, epistemological, ethical, and conceptual approaches to marginal and excluded voices and practices of rightsmaking and claiming. In doing so, it seeks to both draw attention to alternative vocabularies of vernacular human rights and emancipatory politics and to reflect upon how we as scholars and activists can develop new practices of knowledge production about these vocabularies and struggles for social justice.
2022:
Death World(ing)s Conference, LSE.
What might it mean to dwell in death and grief as an everyday experience, and how can this allow us to contest normative notions of the dead, living and undead? What material practices emerge in states of death and mourning and how do people experience grief through esoteric and occultive practices, including witchcraft, dreams, memories, ghostly hauntings, and the otherworldly? What kinds of archival practices emerge to memorialise the dead and dying? How can archival practices of memorialisation allow us to think about which deaths are archived and which deaths vanish? How does death and its presences, then, allow us to elude, exceed, re-envision the world, and imagine alternative ways of being and living in the world? How can grief and mourning be revolutionary? We want to come together to think about what it could mean to begin our analyses from affective states, feelings and emotions that we inhabit and that inhabit us, especially from that which is considered ‘negative’, uncomfortable and ‘unproductive.’ We understand the production of death and the politics and ethics of mourning as historicised, situated and intersectionally gendered. We insist on the multiplicities of narratives and material experiences of death, mourning and grief as refracted through gender, sexuality, class, caste, ablebodiedness, and species. Recognising that the world is subjected to death differentially, we propose this conference as a collective space of care and solidarity for us to explore these questions. We want to sit with/in death and mourning without trying to resolve it, move beyond it, or reproduce demands of resilience.