Editors - Kristina Hagström-StåhlJyoti MistryJessica Hemmings
This issue of PARSE journal concludes the theme of “Intersectional Engagements in Politics and Art”, first initiated as a research arc within PARSE in 2018. Under this theme, artists, scholars and students, as well as a wider public have gathered to share a critical exploration of the nexus of race, coloniality, gender and sexuality in contemporary art-making, scholarship and artistic research. Focusing on socially engaged practices related to memory, history, embodiment and alterity, the journal issue offers yet another set of considerations that brings together research by practitioners and scholars from a wide range of fields, disciplines and contexts.
The theme began as a way to address and explore interest within arts research about the notion of intersectionality as a mode of creative practice, as well as a form of critical analysis. This interest, arguably following a turn towards the intersectional in feminist artistic practice and pedagogy, came as scholars in the humanities and social sciences were already debating the various appropriations and reifications that had seemingly made intersectionality into “a grand theory of everything”, to use Kimberlé Crenshaw’s words, with the effect of positioning intersectionality as a deeply contested, seemingly overdetermined concept.1