Orientations
Felt Notes
ID: No visit to Tkaronto is complete without making time for the Glad Day Bookshop, the world’s oldest queer bookstore (1970–present), carrying titles only by queer and trans+ authors. This past summer, when I was in the city and on territories at large whilst on a fellowship, the reality of the bookshop closing was very much real—and the fact that it is safe from eviction for now (thanks to a successful community fundraising campaign) is also a pause, as Tianna Henry states, “about having some time to consult with the community and see what their needs are and what we can best do to facilitate those (needs).” Image courtesy of Kush Patel.
“. . . we do not acquire our orientations just because we find things here or there. The concept of ‘orientations’ allows us to expose how life gets directed in some ways rather than others, through the very requirement that we follow what is already given to us. For life to count as a good life, then it must return the debt of its life by taking on the direction promised as a social good, which means imagining one’s futurity in terms of reaching certain points along a life course. A queer life might be one that fails to make such gestures of return.”
— Sara Ahmed [1]
It’s the beginning of a new academic year, marking also the start of the new Contemporary Art Practice Master of Arts (MA CAP) program at Srishti Manipal. As the program’s current head, I have been working collaboratively with a team of faculty members over the past year—Aastha Chauhan, Anil Kumar, Mamta Sagar, Padmini Nagaraja, and Shai Heredia—to envision and bring into the curriculum a more expansive vocabulary of contemporary art involving practices of fine art (including public art); text and performance; digital humanities; and moving image art. In the course of two years, students will locate themselves in these fields and methods through a set of studio-, seminar-, and project-based engagements; “acquire orientations” to key debates in art history, media and cultural studies, translation and literary studies, critical technology studies, and gender and sexuality studies; and make individual claims to theory-practice relationships at the intersections of art, technology, and society.
The Just Futures Co-lab will be a core site in this program, interrelating MA CAP research and teaching with the project spaces of queer and trans+ futurities and futures with “the peripheries.” The Co-lab will also function as a queering hub, facilitating a set of non-normative orientations to our responsibilities and presences as a faculty collective. This month, as with previous course-development sessions, for example, the lab hosted the first MA CAP faculty colloquium where my colleagues and I presented our respective draft syllabi; offered peer-feedback in writing; and outlined a set of next moves concerning wider arts and culture collaborations in the city. Additionally, as the convenor of this colloquium and SMI’s MA practice at large, it was important for me to model how we may come to realize teaching as a scholarly project, and more specifically, as a liberatory project where we structure the discourse-building, critical making, and arts-focused elements of each of the outlined offerings around a shared promise of a research-creation and social justice-oriented MA pursuit.
Since the colloquium, I have welcomed not only the inaugural cohort of MA CAP students, but also one of the newest doctoral candidates to this space, orienting us all to a set of discussions about what the lab life has been like in the past and how they might see their future involvements in this context. That the Co-lab ongoingly and with intention builds common cause with queer and trans+ individuals is, perhaps, the most incredible responsibility that I continue to outline for myself and my scholarship—and it was with this responsibility, that I also introduced my integrated talk and workshop on critical citational practices at the recently concluded PhD orientation.
Following Ahmed, as I orient myself to the new MA, I write this letter as a way of also inviting myself, my students, and my faculty colleagues to take on inquiries that “queer” the world, that deliberately fail to fall in line with prescribed institutional lines, and that move “freely” rather than “easily” through spaces of art and cultural production in society [2]. Onward.
Notes
[1] Sara Ahmed, Queer phenomenology: Orientations, objects, others (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 21.
[2] Ahmed, Queer phenomenology, 136.
Opportunities
+ Jobs: Archival Project Associate–QAMRA Archival Project, NLSIU, Bengaluru (Deadline: August 26, 2024)
+ Call for Applications: Gender Bender 2024, Sandbox Collective and Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, Bangalore, https://www.goethe.de/ins/in/en/kul/ang/aus/gen.html (Deadline: August 31, 2024)
+ Jobs: A Digital Accessibility Job Board (for folx working on assistive technologies) (Global).
+ Call for Submissions: Little Puss Press (original manuscripts of fiction and non-fiction, including works-in-progress. The Press is also considering reprint proposals of literary/historical works of significance by transgender authors (Deadline: Ongoing)
About
Felt Notes are monthly dispatches about the work of the Just Futures Co-lab, and the co-labouring worlds of research and teaching in art, design, and the digital humanities that it scaffolds, furthers, and amplifies. The letter writing translates the ever so negotiated nature of this space at Srishti Manipal Institute and the discourse and scholarship on equity and justice I produce with students and wider academic and non-academic community members through critical pedagogy; archival and database constructions; interactive digital storytelling; and inquiries into queer-feminist media technologies and infrastructures.
I hope reading this letter and its upcoming segments are a meaningful experience for you. If you aren’t subscribed yet, you may do so here. If you are already subscribed, I would love for you to share the link with friends and trusted networks as we make sense of our relationships to technology as well as our relationships to each other via technology. If you would like to write or co-write a letter in the future or share any announcements, please feel free to get in touch with me, and whilst you’re here, please also check out the Felt Notes Archive.
Kush Patel