The annual ASCA workshop will take place this year from May 26-28, where 50+ participants will share their work in relation to the conference theme Re-Imagining Universality in the Pluriverse. This workshop asks if it is possible to establish a new vision of universality through pluriversality. Can diverse epistemologies be recognized and honored while also potentially revealing glimpses of universality that can contribute to a sense of shared space and time necessary to address the needs of the globalized present? Is it possible to address the concerns of the planet without finding a constructive way to talk about human commonalities that do not equate to universalism as oppression? Is it possible to distinguish universality from imperial and hegemonic notions of universalism and, if so, how? This workshop will bring together cultural analysts, theorists, artists, and researchers to investigate if universality can be approached through pluriversality. The aim is to do the urgent work of looking at universality, as opposed to imperial universalism, from new perspectives and find constructive ways to conceptualize a shared but diverse world. The 2025 ASCA workshop will engage with both theoretical and empirical dimensions of universality and pluriversality from an interdisciplinary perspective, investigating their historical, cultural and geopolitical contexts. The workshop is supposed by ASCA and NICA.

ASCA Workshop 2025 is open to the public and no registration is necessary to attend the keynote and panels.

The full program is available here. The abstracts and bios can be found here.

Four keynote speakers will join us:

Keynote 1, Markus Messling (Käte Hamburger Centre CURE / Saarland University)
Tragic Universalism: The Case of Champollion

Respondent: Esther Peeren

May 26, PC Hoofthuis - Spuistraat 134, Room 104, 09:15-10:45

Markus Messling is full professor of Romance literatures and comparative literary and cultural studies at Saarland University, and director of the Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE) funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Previously, he was deputy director of Centre Marc Bloch, the Franco-German Research Centre for Social Sciences and Humanities, and professor of Romance literatures at Humboldt University of Berlin. From 2009 to 2014 he- directed the Emmy Noether Excellence Grant “Philology and Racism in the 19th Century” (German Research Foundation) at the University of Potsdam. Since 2019, he has been principal investigator of the ERC Consolidator Grant “Minor Universality: Narrative World Productions After Western Universalism”. He is an ordinary member of Academia Europaea and has held visiting professorships and fellowships at EHESS Paris, the University of Cambridge, the School of Advanced Study/University of London, and Kobe University in Japan. – Recent Publications (selection): Universality After Universalism: On Francophone Literatures of the Present. Transl. from the German Michael T. Taylor. Foreword Souleymane Bachir Diagne. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2023 (free open access: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111128306); Minor Universality: Rethinking Humanity after Western Universalism. Ed. with Jonas Tinius. Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter, 2023 (free open access: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110798494); Universalism(e) & … Conversations with Arjun Appadurai, Leyla Dakhli, Souleymane Bachir Diagne, Giovanni Levi, Gisèle Sapiro, David Scott, Adania Shibli, Maria Stavrinaki. Berlin, Boston: de Gruyter, 2024 (free open access: https://doi.org/10.1515/9783111373164).

Keynote 2, Ruth Clemens (Leiden University)
Being on the Same Frequency: Ways of Listening to the Incompossible

Respondent: Jeff Diamanti

May 26, PC Hoofthuis - Spuistraat 134, Room 104, 11:00-12:30

Ruth Alison Clemens is a researcher, teacher, and writer based in Utrecht, and she lectures at Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society (LUCAS). Her NWO-funded postdoctoral research project 'Posthuman Music Machines: Literature in the Age of the Pianola' studies culture from the age of the player-piano (1896-1929) to uncover how this novel media technology shaped and was shaped by wider cultural engagements with the affect of automation. Her work has appeared in Comparative Critical Studies, Modernist Cultures, and Feminist Modernist Studies, and she has contributed to the books Deleuze and Guattari and Fascism, More Posthuman Glossary, and Posthuman Pathogenesis, among others. As well as posthumanism, media materialities, and modernism, Ruth's research interests include trans- and multilingualism, critical epistemology, and planetary mineral cultures, and she has led artistic research workshops at the Royal Academy of Art (KABK), the Grey Space in the Middle (The Hague), and Hypha Studios (London).

Keynote 3, Barnita Bagchi (University of Amsterdam)
“A place of truth, discomfort and safety. A home where words and story reside”: Universality in Entangled Literary Worlds

Respondent: Stefan Niklas

May 27, PC Hoofthuis - Spuistraat 134, Room 104, 09:15-10:45

Barnita Bagchi is Chair and Professor of World Literatures in English at the University of Amsterdam. She has published widely on utopia, histories of transnational and women’s education, and women’s writing in western Europe and south Asia. Her articles have appeared in a wide array of journals, such as Utopian Studies, Religion and Society: Advances in Research, Paedagogica Historica, New Cinemas, Open Library of Humanities, Mobilities, and Women’s History Review, and she has published numerous chapters in edited volumes. Her book-length publications include Pliable Pupils and Sufficient Self-Directors: Narratives of Female Education by Five British Women Writers, 1778-1814 (New Delhi: Tulika: 2004), a part-translation with introduction, Sultana’s Dream and Padmarag: Two Feminist Utopias, by Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (New Delhi: Penguin Classics, 2005; renewed Penguin USA edition, 2022), and the edited volumes, The Politics of the (Im)possible: Utopia and Dystopia Reconsidered (SAGE, 2012; republished by Atlantic, 2024), Urban Utopias: Memory, Rights, and Speculation (Jadavpur University Press, open access, 2020).

Keynote 4, Paulo Lemos Horta (NYU Abu Dhabi)
Universal Literature in an Age of Nationalism

Respondent: Barnita Bagchi

May 28, University Library - Singel 425, Doelenzaal, 09:00–10:30

Paulo Lemos Horta is the author of a series of books that center the agency of people overlooked and silenced in literary history, among them Marvelous Authors: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights, Aladdin and The Annotated Arabian Nights (with Yasmine Seale) and Cosmopolitanisms (with Bruce Robbins), for which he also translated Silviano Santiago’s “The Cosmopolitanism of the Poor.” These works have been translated into several languages and received accolades including nonfiction book of the year in the Canadian press and notable book of the year mention in Buzzfeed and the Wall Street Journal. He has written for PMLA, Words Without Borders, The Los Angeles Review of Books and The Times Literary Supplement. His keynote presentation draws from research for his forthcoming book, Rotten Little Worlds: World Literature in an Age of Nationalism. Articles from this new research have appeared in Interventions and the Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Inquiry. A translator of Pessoa and Camões among others, he has a research interest in large language models and translation. He has served on the executive board of Harvard’s Institute for World Literature, for which he has also served as faculty, and the International Comparative Literature Association, where he co-organized a publishing workshop linking authors, translators, editors and publishers. Prior to joining NYUAD, where he is associate professor of creative writing and literature, he founded and designed a world literature program for Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, Canada.

Workshops:

Peloric Flower: Re-Imagining Interspecies-Ecological Pluriversal Futures, Jennifer Crouch (Art-Science Practitioner and Researcher)

May 26, PC Hoofthuis Spuistraat 134, Room 1.05

More than Me: Interactive artistics workshop on embodiment and plurality, Siobhan Wall- Suleyman (Artist, Writer and Curator)

May 27, PC Hoofthuis Spuistraat 134, Room 0.05, 16:45-18:00

Film Screening:

Dreams and Fragments: From Amsterdam to Palestine, Aylin Kuryel (University of Amsterdam), Deniz Buga (Artist), Furat Yücel (Artist)

May 28, University Library, Singel 425, Doelenzaal, 15:30-16:30

Full Program

Abstracts and Bios

For the call for papers, click here.

In a period of increased global division, political polarization, and inequality, while the planet faces the common threat of a worsening ecological emergency, it is important to reconsider and investigate anew the potential for human commonalities. In order to adequately understand and address the alarming rise of far right parties across Europe, the widening appeal of populist leaders, and the surge in anti-immigration sentiment across the world, all while the planet is increasingly under threat by inadequate attention to global warming, it seems crucial to arrive at a universal understanding of concepts like “nation,” “racism,” “colonization,”  or “climate emergency.” However, the premise of universalism has been challenged by decolonial critiques as the edifying project of imperialism that privileges a singular version of reality over others (Braidotti, Escobar, Mignolo, Santos, Walsh), while the concept of the “pluriverse” conceives of a reality where humans are part of a multitude of diverse worlds that are also more-than-human.

Universality is thus often rejected by contemporary critics and theorists who see it as an extension of or another term for universalism that imposes one singular reality constructed on European Enlightenment ideals of reason, democracy and human rights. In fact, much of the history of colonization and imperialism has been justified in the name of such a version of reality which imposed a Eurocentric epistemology on the rest of the world (Mignolo). The imposition of universalism led to the suppression of non-Western ways of knowing, the marginalization of Indigenous cultures, and the establishment of global inequalities that persist today. In contrast, pluriversality challenges this hegemonic production of knowledge and reality by advocating for the coexistence of multiple ways of knowing and being (Esteva), which some scholars also see resonating with posthumanist discourse on decentering anthropocentric and Eurocentric perspectives (Ghosh, Braidotti, Escobar). Emerging from decolonial thought, this approach seeks to dismantle the legacy of universalism by recognizing the validity of diverse epistemologies, particularly those marginalized by colonial histories.

This workshop asks if it is possible to establish a new vision of universality through pluriversality. Can diverse epistemologies be recognized and honored while also potentially revealing glimpses of universality that can contribute to a sense of shared space and time necessary to address the needs of the globalized present? In his introduction to the recently published Literature and the Work of Universality, “The Fire This Time: Working with Universality” Stefan Helgesson asks, “how can we even know that there is something seriously wrong with our contemporary moment unless there is a world - a reality - that humans at some level can share?” (5). In other words, is it possible to address the concerns of the planet without finding a constructive way to talk about human commonalities that do not equate to universalism as oppression? Is it possible to distinguish universality from imperial and hegemonic notions of universalism and, if so, how? This workshop will bring together cultural analysts, theorists, artists, and researchers to investigate if universality can be approached through pluriversality. The aim is to do the urgent work of looking at universality, as opposed to imperial universalism, from new perspectives and find constructive ways to conceptualize a shared but diverse world.

The 2025 ASCA workshop will engage with both theoretical and empirical dimensions of universality and pluriversality from an interdisciplinary perspective, investigating their historical, cultural and geopolitical contexts through themes that include. Submissions might include:

Cultural and artistic expressions that stage the tension between the particular and the universal: How can art, fiction and media contribute to an understanding of pluriversal worlds in their shared universals? (we encourage including case studies or close readings)

The ways that certain theoretical approaches that radically oppose any sense of universality could potentially prevent much-needed solidarity and social renewal (or the inverse, promote much-needed solidarity)

Epistemic injustice and knowledge hierarchies: How have Western knowledge systems, representing all that is universal, been privileged over non-Western knowledges, while also denying/ignoring all acts against what is universal, such as violation of human rights, climate crisis and genocidal acts in colonized territories? What role have academic institutions played in sustaining these epistemic hierarchies, and how can we act, as scholars, to unveil and dismantle such hierarchies while rethinking the concept of universality in its pluralistic dimension?

Decolonial theory and practice: How do decolonial thought and pluriversality challenge universalism in their theoretical and practical frameworks? And how can they reach a level of universality, this time, through the very particular and singular of the decolonial experience? In other words, can decolonial and pluriversal perspectives genuinely integrate into academic institutions on a global level, through a fundamental rethinking of educational programmes, research methodologies and recruitment and collaboration practices?

Reimagining universality through posthumanist discourses: How does posthumanism challenge traditional notions of universality that are centered on the (Western) human subject as the measure of the universe? In what ways can posthumanist discourse intersect with decolonial and pluriversal perspectives to reshape universality in global discourses about nation, colonialism, racism, gender? And how does the decentering of the human affect the articulation of shared universals, particularly in areas like environmental justice, advanced technologies and global decision-making?

ASCA Workshop 2025 is a three-day in-person event taking place in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Please note that we cannot accommodate virtual presentations.

We welcome individual applications in the form of academic and artistic research. Please submit a 300-word abstract and a 100-word bio. Presentations should be up to 15 minutes in length. If you are considering a different presentation format, please get in touch with us and we will do our best to accommodate your request.

Events such as workshops, roundtables or seminars are also welcome. Please submit a proposal that includes a title, a short description (300 words) and a list of participants.

Applications should be submitted by March 15, 2025 to ascaworkshop2025@gmail.com. We will notify the applicants about the selection by April 11, 2025.