Contact & Registration: e.peeren@uva.nl

Invisibility and inaudibility, and their corollaries, visibility and audibility, have become impactful concepts and metaphors across media and disciplines in recent years. This conference aims to take stock of the role they play in shaping and understanding culture in different contexts and historical periods, including, perhaps most urgently, in our current conditions of political polarization and surveillance capitalism. 

With regard to invisibility we take up both ideas of invisibility as marginalisation or social invisibility (LeBlanc 2009, Král 2014), comprising, for example, lesbian invisibility (Lecomte 2024, 23) or “subaltern invisibility” (Chemmachery 2019), and ideas of invisibility as a site of power or hegemonic invisibility (Guttzeit 2025), comprising, for example, billionaires’ invisibility (Peeren 2024, 86–88) and the power of “decorporation” (Borrego 2024, 37). In this field of tension, a key issue we want to explore is how social, political, cultural, literary, filmic, televisual and online texts can explore the potentials and limitations of an “agency of invisibility” (Peeren 2014).

Inaudibility - as silence - has predominantly been explored as resulting from marginalization. Far from a “passive state of understanding” (Santos), silence can be part of a potent mechanism to create a monopoly of narrative (Le Blanc) that erases cultural, social, and political dissonances. In this regard, inaudibility not only raises the question of how one can make oneself heard, but of how the multiplicity of narratives, of stories, of shared experiences, is muffled by imbalances of power. Silence, the “currency of power” (Achino-Loeb), partakes in the construction of the spectral. Much like being seen requires one to be actually perceived by the other, being heard entails being actively listened to. Inaudibility, however, can also be recuperated as a form of agency: choosing to refrain from speaking, like claiming the right to opacity (Glissant), can be a form of empowerment.

What constellations of the in/visibile and in/audible can be distinguished and what perspectives and social groups do these constellations privilege and ignore? How are in/visibility and in/audibility culturally, socially, politically and economically mobilized? How do in/visibility and in/audibility impact attention and circulate within attention economies? What are the affective dimensions of in/visibility and in/audibility? How do they link to other logics of marginalisation and power dynamics? The conference sets out from the assumption that our understanding of political and social in/visibility and in/audibility needs to be sufficiently complex to answer these questions and related ones.

If you want to receive 1 ECTS for attending this conference through NICA, you will need to:

• Attend the 2-day event.
• Read these texts in preparation:
  • Guttzeit, Gero. “Contemporary Literature and Social Invisibility: Introduction.” ZAA 72.1 (2024): 3-9.
  • Peeren, Esther. “Afterword: Running with the Metaphor of Social Invisibility.” ZAA 72.1 (2024): 81-92.
  • Brinkema, Eugenie. “Critique of Silence.” Differences 22.2-3 (2011): 211-234.
• Write a reflection of max. 500 words answering the question what, for you, were the most salient insights into inaudibility and/or invisibility offered at the conference. The reflection is due by 13 May 2026 and should be submitted in Word-format to e.peeren@uva.nl.

Provisional Program

Thursday 23 April                                 

9:00-09:15      Welcome and Opening by organizers

9:15–10:15      Keynote Kristin Veel, “The Sensing Home: Rethinking In/Visibility and In/Audibility in Infrastructures of Care and Control”         

10:15–10:30   Coffee Break 

10:30–12:00   Parallel Panels 1 + 2

12:00–13:30   Lunch 

13:30–15:00   Parallel Panels 3 + 4

15:00–15:15   Coffee Break 

15:15–16:45   Parallel Panels 5 + 6 + 7        

16:45-18:00    Book launch of Gero Guttzeit’s In/Visible Subjects: Literary Character and Narratives of Invisibility since the Eighteenth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2025), followed by drinks

Friday 24 April                                       

9:00–10:30      Parallel panels 8 + 9 + 10     

10:30–10:45   Coffee Break 

10:45–12:15   Parallel panels 11 + 12 + 13

12:15-13:45    Lunch

13:45-14:45    Keynote Claire Davison, “Lest we remember? War, Sound and Sonic Memory in the BBC’s ‘Scrapbook’ Programmes”             

14:45-15:15    Closing by Organizers