Subverting Spaces: Politics of Embodiment and Solidarity in a Condition of Digital Ubiquity

The project questions contemporary politics of embodiment within a strained relationship between space and subjectivity. Understanding this relationship to have been altered through the ubiquity of digital media, it follows the hypothesis that a failure to understand these altered spaces leads to limitations of progressive political subjectivities. Subsequently, this results in a repression of spaces for bodily existence, especially those existences already within social periphery: the marginalized, the minor. Understanding space not as geography, but as a location for human experience to take on material form, the project reviews existing philosophical concepts of space and location in relation to their potential in proliferating politics of minor embodiment and transnational solidarity. It does so with regards to reconceptualizing the widely disdained Global South. Focusing on gender as a largely contested category of social inequality, the framework will serve for an analysis of existing practices of minor embodiment within globalized political spaces. The political examples chosen have specificities regarding their location, their feminist perspectives on embodied spaces, and their engagement with or reflection of digital phenomena like the Internet, which – at least theoretically – enforces narratives of borderless freedom and infinite spatiality. Transferring knowledges from political fields to academia, the project intends to open a dialog between the two, so as to find new spaces and possibilities for minor embodiments and global solidarity beyond identity politics.

Sara Morais holds M.A. degree in the program "Culture, Arts, and Media“ at the Leuphana University Lüneburg. In 2013 she began exploring digital cultures through a research semester at the Center for Internet and Society in Bangalore, India. Upon her return she continued her work in the broad frame of digital politics and knowledge production through the multi-stakeholder project "Making Change“ at the Center for Digital Cultures, Lüneburg. From the engagement with practices intersecting into academia and politics, her research inserts feminist theory into a condition informed by the digital to review spaces of embodied and situated articulation within what is commonly referred to as the "Global South". Focusing on "the minor“ as a mode of knowledge production and political practice, her doctoral research will engage with embodied digital practices in India, Brazil and Germany.

2018

Member of the editorial collective at kritisch-lesen.de

2017

Translation: Beyes, Timon, Jörg Metelmann, Claus Pias (eds.): Nach Der Revolution. Ein Brevier digitalerKulturen, Duisburger Dialoge. Berlin: Tempus Corporate, 2017. (from English to German for followingcontributors: Paula Bialski, Mercedes Bunz, Aleksandra Przegalinska, J. Jesse Ramirez, Nishant Shah)

Translation: Leeker, Martina, Immanuel Schipper, Timon Beyes (eds.): Performing the Digital.Performativity and Performance Studies in Digital Cultures, Bielefeld: transcript, 2017. (from German toEnglish for the contribution by Martina Leeker: Performing the Digital. Positions of Critique in DigitalCultures)

Translation: Kuster, Brigitta: Venture Sciences in Actu! – A visit at the EAB Research Projects Conference(EAB-RPC) 2016, in: Spheres. Journal for Digital Cultures, issue 4: Media and Migration, June 2017. {from German to English) Link to Article 

Editorial Team: Caygill, Howard, Martina Leeker, Tobias Schulze (eds.) Interventions in Digital Cultures.Technology, the Political, Methods. Lüneburg: meson press, 2017