Too Wide and With/in: Multivocality as a Route Beyond Dualistic Frameworks.

Workshop Description:

In today’s highly sorted culture, the allure of interactive spaces of exposure and mutual influence seems to be shrinking. This is not only the effect of longstanding positivistic-colonial-capitalist frameworks of separation, sameness, and predictability, but a derivative of the rising phenomena Brené Brown describes as “ideological bunkers.” That today’s culture is organizing itself around polarization—distancing ourselves from those who disagree with us, or bonding with others solely through what Brown calls “common enemy intimacy.”

Together in sameness; together in hatred. Us versus them. Why, then, is multivocality still a claim worth pursuing in a culture whose dominant powers are set against it?

Too Wide and With/in designs opportunities to step outside that pattern and explore multivocality—the practice of making space for many voices, perspectives, and ways of knowing. Multivocality is set against the simplistic —and often self-referential— contributions of a binary reading. It is part of a complex metabolic system that favours noticing, integration, resonance, and diluted identity.

The workshop invites participants to directed role play exercises and collective discussion. Selections of texts will be read in-session to help sustaining the debate on the significance of multivocality as a reparative deep-listening strategy in a culture that does not seem to listen.

Participants are asked to prepare written reflections (around 150 words) in advance, responding to the following questions:

• How (not) to talk to tyrants?
• My fascistic sibling does not listen. But can I — can I listen through what their deafness is built upon?  

 No other preparation required.

List of reading material (available at the venue):

The Weak — Brandon LaBelle.

The Work (worksheet) — Byron Katie.

The Unpayable Debt (sel.) — Denise Ferreira da Silva.

The flexibility of Ideas (sel.); Exercise of Flexibility — Gregory Bateson.

Illuminist Radicalism (sel.); Illustrated Illiteracy — Marina Garcés.

The Tyrant — Michel Serres.

Wednesday 19 November 13:00-16:00

All welcome but registration required. To confirm a place please email rose.brander@gu.se