Dialogue
Thu 20–Fri 21 Apr 2023

Talk “From Independent to Intersectional Publishing”

Ruhr University Bochum (DE)

Participants

Eva Weinmayr

Talk “From Independent to Intersectional Publishing” at symposium Banal Publishing, Practices, Procedures, Episteme of Digital Self-Publishing in Art, Literature and Science, convened by Elisa Linseisen and Dorothea Walzer

This talk explores the social and political agency of publishing by investigating the micro-politics of making and sharing knowledges from an intersectional feminist perspective. Intersectionality means that oppressions (based in racism, sexism, homophobia, classism, ableism etc.) are interconnected and cannot be examined separately from one another. There has been much discussion of the political agency of the book as a medium, yet it is often assumed that the book’s political potential extends primarily, indeed if not exclusively, in terms of its content. The focus of this inquiry, however, is the potentially radical, political and emancipatory ways and processes by which a publication is made (authored, edited, printed, bound), disseminated (circulated, described, cataloged), and read (used).

Slide from presentation: “From Independent to Intersectional Publishing Strategies” at Banal Publishing, Ruhr University Bochum, 2023

Contributor

Eva Weinmayr

Eva Weinmayr works at the interface of art, critical publishing and radical education. Her focus is on decolonial feminist discourses, pedagogies and practices. From 2019 until 2022 she co-led the EU-funded collective research and study programme “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” (with erg, Brussels) and co-initiated kritilab, an open-source platform and laboratory for Critical Diversity Literacy at the intersection of art and education. As part of “Ecologies of Dissemination”(HDK-Valand, 2022–24) with Femke Snelting, she develops decolonial feminist practices to Open Access.

Recent collaborative publication projects include “Noun to Verb”, a PhD thesis concerned with the micro-politics of publishing from an intersectional feminist perspective that was developed and published on a MediaWiki. She collaborates with Lucie Kolb on decolonial, feminist approaches to naming and cataloguing knowledge in institutional libraries in the Global North that led to an exhibition and the online publication “Teaching the Radical Catalog – a Syllabus” (2021–22); Further projects include “The Piracy Project” (2010–15, with Andrea Francke), an international publishing and exhibition project exploring the philosophical, legal and practical implications of book piracy and modes of reproduction.

Currently, she works as Guest Professor for Critical Access at the Institute Experimental Design and Media Cultures, Basel Academy of Art and Design (CH) and is part of the team of the MA “Critical Social Practice in Art Education” at ZHdK Zurich. Since 2024 she is an Honorary Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK).