Rose Marie Beck: "Towards non-representational concept-making"

Research Colloquium "Reversing the Gaze"

In her contribution Rose Marie Beck experiments with a non-representational stance towards concept-making. Following Gandorfer & Ayub (2021) she asks “Who or what has ever encountered—that is, sensed and made sense of—a concept, or even a word, that was not an entanglement of matter, history, forces, political and legal structures, chemical reactions, and physical intra-actions?” Most likely the short answer would be “nobody”, since in our everyday academic practice we do indeed take into account such entanglements. However, they are not well conceptualized as a mode of concept-making that – we think – necessarily comprises of acts of onto-epistemological exclusions. Does a non-representational mode help us in grappling with this gap between representational concepting and our academic practice?

The colloquium “Reversing the Gaze” is an interdisciplinary forum to reflect on methodological, conceptual and theoretical issues related to knowledge production in Area Studies and comparative social sciences. In this semester, the colloquium will discuss the changes socio-scientific analytical concepts undergo to be able to render phenomena intelligible in different settings. The standard assumption according to which concepts, when properly used, are independent of context has come under massive critique, especially within the context of postcolonial and decolonial critiques. But does this mean that concepts are hopelessly tied to context and are bearers of normative assumptions? What happens with analytical concepts when they travel from one historical or regional context to another? What is gained – and what is lost? And (why) should we make concepts crossing borders at all?

The colloquium takes place online via Zoom. If you are interested in participating, please register via the registration form.

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