This year’s ASCA Theory Seminar takes standpoint theory (Sandra Harding, Patricia Hill Collins, and others) as a starting point to question how our social positions, experiences, values, and institutional locations shape the knowledge we produce as researchers. Rather than treating research as conducted from an “objective” or detached position, we will examine how our relation to objects of study affects what we notice, ask, interpret, and omit. Each session will feature an ASCA member who will select the secondary literature and a text of their own. The sessions will be presented and moderated by a group of seminar participants, not the invited ASCA member. Through the secondary literature and the presentation of the participants (who may include their own research projects), the seminar invites critical reflection on situated knowledge, reflexivity, power, and responsibility in academic research. Nawal Mustafa will be the featured ASCA member on 11 November.

Dr. Nawal Mustafa is Assistant Professor of Black Studies, Critical Race Studies, and Indigenous Studies at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) and a strategic legal advisor at PILP. Her interdisciplinary work bridges law, history, cultural studies, and critical race theory, focusing on colonialism, slavery, migration, and structural inequality. She obtained her PhD from Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, researching the historical regulation of migration and interracialized intimacy in the United Kingdom. Beyond academia, Mustafa has extensive experience in human rights advocacy, feminist activism, and community organizing. Drawing on intersectional and decolonial perspectives, she connects academic research, legal practice, and grassroots movements to challenge systemic injustice

The readings are:

1. Mawani, R. (2012). Law's archive. Annual Review of Law and Social Science, 8(1), 337-365.
2. Hartman, S. (2008). Venus in two acts. Small Axe: A Caribbean journal of criticism, 12(2), 1-14.
3. Mustafa, N. (2025). 12 Regulating Interracialized Intimacies in 1950s–1960s Britain through Deportation and Immigration Policies. Regulating Interracialized Intimacies, 207-2023

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The aim of the ASCA Theory Seminar is twofold: 

First, we propose to explore broad theoretical and methodological paradigms, and discuss influential texts in relation to ASCA PhD projects. Participants of the Theory Seminar will become acquainted with current practices in cultural analysis and learn how to integrate them in their own work.

The second important aim of the Theory Seminar is community building. The seminar aims to bring together PhD candidates from the diverse disciplines within ASCA to learn about each other’s research projects, struggles and joys, and to make new friends. To serve this latter purpose, each session will end in a café with drinks.