SCI-PRESENTS: CRITICAL NARRATIVES AND FEMINIST/QUEER THEORY
One-Day Conference:
Sci-Presents:
Critical Narratives and Feminist/Queer Theory
The research project "Affectscapes of Care: Gender-Based Violence and Resilience during the Covid-19 Pandemic (Cov-Care)" in collaboration with the Laboratory for Anthropological Research of the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University invites you to a conference that focuses on critical narratives and feminist/queer theory as writing(s) of the present. Cov-Care is funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) as part of the 4th Call for Action “Science and Society”-Emblematic Action- Interventions to address the economic and social effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, and hosted at the Department of Social Anthropology of Panteion University. Its collaborating organization is Diotima – Centre for Gender Rights and Equality.
In our conference, we shall focus on the future produced by the “now” of the (post)-pandemic crisis, in order to analyze epistemological and methodological matters intimately intertwined with the production of knowledge, with narration, and with the imagination. More specifically, we ask: How is the knowledge of the present produced and disseminated into public discourse as a “fact,” through hypotheses, predictions, assumptions, but also through an affective atmosphere of fear, insecurity, suspiciousness, or even conspiratorial thinking? What kind of “epistemic violence” is perpetrated through the narration of multiple crises, and how could we imagine a critical re-interpretation of the present future? Put differently, how is the imagination related to the social and political imaginary of the law, justice, and vindication? Through these questions, this conference consists in an invitation – or, dare we say, a challenge – to think together about the social, cultural, and political, and more specifically the gendered, sexual, classed, and ableist representations of the body in public discourse and how these contribute to the (re)formulation of the present future.
Invitation
to the One-Day Conference:
Sci-Presents:
Critical Narratives and Feminist/Queer Theory
As part of the research project
“Affectscapes of Care: Gender-Based Violence and Resilience during the Covid-19 Pandemic (Cov-Care)” hosted at the Department of Social Anthropology, at Panteion University, with Diotima – Centre for Gender Rights and Equality as collaborating partner, and funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.). The conference is organized in collaboration with the Laboratory for Anthropological Research of the Department of Social Anthropology of Panteion University.
The event shall take place on
Tuesday, June 27
Auditorium Sakis Karagiorgas II
Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences
Program
15:00 Welcome
Athena Athanasiou, Head of the Laboratory for Anthropological Research, Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, and Dean of the School of Social Science at Panteion University
Xenia Chrysochoou, Professor at the Department of Psychology at Panteion University, President of the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.)
Eirini Avramopoulou, Principal Investigator of Cov-Care, Member of the Laboratory for Anthropological Research, and Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University
Part A
Gender-based violence: Public discourse and (critical) storytelling
This panel shall discuss the construction of the “reality” of gender-based violence, when the latter becomes a “fact” (re)produced through the news, reports, and case files. What space becomes available, and how, within public discourse for a critical framing of the experience of violence, or for another (not normative or normalized) storytelling?
16:00 - 17:30
Natasa Kefallinou, Head of Communication, Diotima Centre
Alternative narratives of gender-based violence: A feminist approach.
Cynthia Malakasis, Post-doctoral researcher, Panteion University
The male “right” to dominate: The appropriation of emancipatory concepts in Greek discourses on mandatory joint custody.
Mariniki Alevizopoulou, Journalist
Realities behind the event.
Antonia Legaki, Lawyer
Legal advocacy in the field of gender-based violence
Natasa Tsakona, Ph.D. candidate, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University Beside oneself: Temporalities of violence and collective rage.
Chair and discussant: Eirini Avramopoulou
17:30 - 18:00 Break
Part B
Past presents: Toward a feminist/queer narration
This panel shall discuss how a critical re-interpretation of the present could give rise to horizons of action and resistance in the age of resilience and of continuous and multiple crises. What kinds of archives of knowledge about the body, gender, and desire have haunted us, and what are the anti-archives of critical feminist and queer literature, dramaturgy, and imagination from which we can draw hope?
18:30 - 20:00
Hypatia Vourloumis, Performance theorist, Dutch Art Institute
Changelings: Violence and Survival in the fiction of Octavia Butler
Elena Tzelepis, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Archaeology, and Social Anthropology, University of Thessaly
"What will we do with all other Antigones?" The position of the "other/foreigner" in the democratic city.
Alkisti Efthimiou, Ph.D. Candidate, Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University
"Reading lines of a history that you’ve tried to erase": Queer feminist critique and speculative fiction films in contemporary Brazil
Dimitris Papanikolaou, Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Cultural Studies, University of Oxford
Notes on the biopolitical realism.
Pako Chalkidis, Postdoctoral research fellow, Centre for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (CES-UC)
Sexistórisi or Rethinking cyber-erotica archives in memory of Lauren Berlant.
Chair and discussant: Athena Athanasiou
20:00 - 20:30 General Discussion
Short CVs
Athena Athanasiou is Professor of Social Anthropology and Gender Theory at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Athens, Greece). She is currently serving as Dean of the Faculty of Social Sciences and Director of the Laboratory for Anthropological Research. Among her publications are the books: Agonistic Mourning: Political Dissidence and the Women in Black (Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Dispossession: The Performative in the Political (with Judith Butler, Polity Press, 2013); Crisis as a ‘State of Exception’ (Athens, 2012); Life at the Limit: Essays on Gender, Body and Biopolitics (Athens, 2007); Rewriting Difference: Luce Irigaray and 'the Greeks' (co-ed. with Elena Tzelepis, SUNY Press, 2010); Deconstructing the Empire: Theory and Politics of Postcolonial Studies (Athens, 2016); Feminist Theory and Cultural Critique (Athens, 2006); Biosocialities (Athens, 2011). She is a member of the editorial advisory board of several journals (Critical Times, Feminist Formations, Journal of Greek Media and Culture, and others).
Eirini Avramopoulou is Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology and P.I. of the Cov-Care research, hosted at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences, Athens, Greece [https://covcare.gr/en/]. She has done extensive research in Turkey and Greece while her research interests include anthropology of human rights, social movements and activism; feminist and psychoanalytic approaches to subjectivity, biopolitics and affect; and more recently she focuses on asylums, displacement, memory, trauma and 'caring economies'. She has published three edited volumes and her work has appeared in many book chapters and academic journals. She is a member of the editorial advisory board of the e-journal Feministiqά and board member of the Laboratory of Anthropological Research.
Mariniki Alevizopoulou is an independent journalist based in Athens. She is a founding member of the investigative outfit The Manifold, and co-founder of The Manifold Files. Formerly, she was Reporting and Investigations Editor for Unfollow magazine. In the past, she was a reporter for To Vima newspaper and has worked in documentary production and research.
Pako Chalkidis is a social anthropologist with interdisciplinary research interests in sexuality and gender studies, and in queer and ethnographic epistemology. In 2015, they completed at the Department of Social Anthropology and History of the University of the Aegean their doctoral thesis entitled BDSM practices, sexualities, socialities: anthropological approaches, a meticulous ethnographic study of the emergence of social and sexual networks for BDSM in Greece. They have published in international and Greek academic journals and edited collections, and have coedited with Eirini Avramopoulou a collection of critical sexuality studies essays titled Sexuality's object(ion)s: Critical theories, interdisciplinary readings.
Prof. Xenia Chryssochoou obtained degrees in Psychology from the University of Athens and the University Rene Descartes-Paris V (PhD 1996). She has worked at different Universities in France, Switzerland and the United Kingdom before moving in 2004 at Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences where she is currently Professor of Social and Political Psychology and Director of the Social and Political Psychology lab. Her research interests concern the social psychological aspects of identity construction in liberal societies, issues of migration and multiculturalism, ideologies and political participation. In particular, she is interested on issues of equality and justice in liberal democracies. She has written extensively scientific papers and books and she has directed special issues and collective books on these subjects. She is a member of many international scientific societies She served in the Executive Committee and as Secretary of the European Association of Social Psychology, and as an Adviser for multiculturalism for the Council of Europe (2004-2005). She is currently President of the Scientific Council of the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (HFRI).
Alkisti Efthymiou is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University (Athens, Greece). Closely engaging with works of queer feminist film in Chile, Argentina and Brazil, her thesis focuses on the cultural politics of love and the critical state of intimacy under conditions of neoliberal governmentality. Running in parallel with her doctoral research, her film practice is inspired by queer feminist affectivities and translocal forms of resistance. She has presented her filmic projects and given talks and performative lectures in collaboration with various institutions around the world, including the Onassis Foundation, Greek Film Archive, ZHdK, Künstlerhaus Stuttgart, Vienna Art Academy, Goethe-Institut Athen, the Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, Cineteca Nacional de Chile, and others. Her most recent publications have been included in the Journal for Greek Media and Culture, The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology and Fabrik Zeitung.
Natassa Kefallinou was born in Perama, Piraeus, and studied History at Ioannina. She works as a journalist and communications consultant. Since 2018, she has collaborated with Diotima Centre, a non-profit organization specializing in gender rights and equality, as a communications expert. As head of the communications department of Diotima Centre, she has implemented successful campaigns on public awareness and sensitization, participated in various panels, and given numerous interviews in print and digital media in Greece and abroad. She has also published many articles on gender issues and gender-based violence, in the Greek press.
Antonia Legaki holds a law degree from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and has been practicing law for the past 31 years. Primarily, she battles for the social and political rights of citizens and collectivities. In the last decade, she has focused on cases of gender-based violence, child abuse, and human trafficking. At the same time, her law firm offers legal consulting to labor unions and other agencies on the topic of gender equality.
Cynthia Helen Malakasis is a cultural anthropologist interested in nationalism, ethnicity, race, post-colonial dynamics with an emphasis on intra-European hierarchies, reproductive care, citizenship, and Greece. Her doctoral project, at Florida International University, examined whether and how post-1989, mass immigration to Greece challenged the country’s nationalist norms of collective belonging. From 2016 to 2020, she has conducted ERC-funded, post-doctoral research at the European University Institute on the maternity care of migrants and refugees in Athens. From 2021 to 2023, she conducted post-doctoral research on the institutional handling of gender-based violence in Athens during Covid, as part of the “Cov-Care” project, funded by the Hellenic Foundation for Research and Innovation (H.F.R.I.) and hosted at the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University. In March 2023, she began research, as the P.I. of a four-member team, on the reproductive care of Roma women in the Greek public-health system. Her project is also funded by the H.F.R.I. and hosted at Panteion’s Department of Social Anthropology.
Professor of Modern Greek and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Oxford, Dimitris Papanikolaou is the author of Singing Poets: Literature and popular music in France and Greece (Legenda/Routledge: 2007), “Those People Made Like Me”: Queer Cavafy and the poetics of sexuality (in Greek; Patakis: 2014), There is Something About the Family: Nation, desire and kinship at a time of crisis (in Greek; Patakis: 2018) and Greek Weird Wave: A cinema of biopolitics (Edinburgh University Press: 2021). Founding member of the collective Greek Studies Now and the Journal of Greek Media and Culture, for which he has co-edited special issues on Cavafy Pop (2014), New Queer Greece (2018) and Greece and the South (2022). He has also co-edited volumes on queer memory and politics and the history of Greek cinema. See www.mod-langs.ox.ac.uk/papanikolaou
Natassa Tsakona is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology of Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences. Her dissertation centers round the political aspects of forensic investigation in human rights activism and the affective possibilities of the evidence of violence. As a graduate of the Department of Architectural Engineering she conducted research on the use of gender and cultural difference as a guide for the design of learning environments from an interdisciplinary feminist perspective. As part of the Master’s Program at the Department of Social Anthropology, Panteion University, she studied the affective aspects of security in non-state and state organizations working with survivors of gender-based violence (GBV). As a researcher in the Cov-Care study, she focuses on NGOs and activist groups that deal with GBV as well as homophobic/transphobic violence with an emphasis on the affectscapes of care that are being formed through radicalized claims.
Hypatia Vourloumis is a performance theorist. She is the author of Formless Formation with Sandra Ruiz (Minor Compositions, 2021) and The Alleys (NP, forthcoming). Publications include essays in Theatre Journal, Performance Research, and Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory, ephemera, among others. She is co- editor of the special issue ‘On Institutions’ for Performance Research Journal and is completing a monograph on the politics and performance of Indonesian postcolonial paralanguage. She teaches at the Dutch Art Institute.
