Conviviality and Contamination

Introduction

The Conviviality and Contamination project is a partnership with PARSE Journal, towards a special issue due for publication in Spring 2023. Conviviality and Contamination aims to explore the concept of conviviality (Gilroy, 2004), through the literary tradition of contamination (Kwame Anthony Appiah, 2006). Drawing from a series of collaborative workshops in September and October 2022 in Malmö and Berlin respectively, participants will develop various forms of creative, academic and literary practices. The workshops provide the participants with an opportunity to engage in forms of transversal writing and literary contamination and relies on a connection to South Africa.  Through experimental, interdisciplinary and international collaboration the geo-political and socio-cultural connection to South Africa may (or not) surface in the resulting work but the intention is to advance diverse and multi-layered work that explores key themes not only through content but through process and form. The project emerges from a number of previous successful collaborations and networks, including the edited volume Conviviality at the Crossroads (2020) and the collaborative research group on Precarity and Conviviality (2019), part of the South Africa Sweden University Forum (SASUF). The Conviviality and Contamination project is funded by the Swedish Research Council (Vetenskapsrådet) and led by Oscar Hemer, Professor of Journalistic and Literary Creation at Malmö University. https://mau.se/en/research/projects/conviviality-and-contamination/