Between Bridges is excited to host a summer seminar conceived by the scholars Jack Halberstam, Tavia Nyong’o and Damon Young:  

“Our late comrade José Esteban Muñoz once asked the question: what do you wear to the end of the world? This summer, we invite artists, scholars and students to join us in a collective thought experiment, exploring the making, unmaking, and remaking of worlds, and the relation between aesthetic practice and un/worlding. The seminar will be a place of study in which to converse, contemplate, and exchange ideas in a small and intensive group, without the pressures of institutional production, credit or evaluation.

For the past three years, we have gathered each summer with different groups looking to explore topics and practices in queer and trans theory. In these meetings, we hope to create connections across registers of art, theory, intellectual and cultural production. The ongoing project emerges out of a shared interest in the challenges and pleasures of collective thinking and critical theory: in questions of negativity and utopia, Blackness and ontology, desire and its itineraries. This summer at Between Bridges, meeting for five sessions over ten days, we will discuss shared texts, participate in workshops with visiting artists and explore different forms of intellectual production and exchange.” 

This is a money-free seminar; there are no costs involved for seminar participants, other than the necessity of being physically present and accommodated in Berlin for the duration of the seminar.

The seminar is in English language. The seminar is open for everyone to apply. Our venue is wheelchair accessible. The capacity for seminar participants is limited, the applications will be reviewed by Jack Halberstam, Tavia Nyong’o and Damon Young. 

You can download the application document here: Un/Worlding Application Questionaire

Please apply until 28 May 2023 (12 am CET) by sending the application document to summerschool@betweenbridges.net .  

Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University and the author of the books Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, Female Masculinity, In a Queer Time and Place, The Queer Art of Failure, Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and The End of Normal, and, most recently, Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance. Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality, and the built environment. Halberstam also recently published Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire and is currently working on a companion volume titled The Wild Beyond: Art, Architecture, and Anarchy.  

Tavia Nyong’o teaches black and queer studies at Yale University, where he is Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, and Theater & Performance Studies. He is the author of two books, The Amalgamation Waltz: Race, Performance, and the Ruses of Memory and Afro-Fabulations: The Queer Drama of Black Life, along with numerous articles in academic and art venues. He co-edits the book series Sexual Cultures for New York University Press. 

Damon R. Young is Associate Professor of French and Film & Media at the University of California, Berkeley, where he also teaches in the Program in Critical Theory, Women’s Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and the Berkeley Center for New Media. He is the author of Making Sex Public and Other Cinematic Fantasies as well as numerous articles on contemporary art, queer theory, psychoanalysis, film, and digital media. He is currently working on a book project titled Century of the Selfie.