PhiloSOPHIA 2025: Workshops
We are excited to host six workshops:
“Closer to Fine?: Barbie on the borderlands”
Organizer: Claire Katz (Texas A&M University)
Greta Gerwig’s 2023 film Barbie struck a nerve not only in those who have seen the film, but also in those who have not, inspiring both criticism and praise focused on everything from its pink aesthetic to its introduction of existential dread. The film has also become a clarion call, reawakening latent feminist ideals in an older generation of women who have known Barbie as a toy with often contradictory messages of female empowerment, while motivating younger generations to consider where—and who—they might be vis a vis the advances and failures of feminist movements. This workshop, facilitated by several scholars who recently contributed to a volume on the film, will explore the theme of borders and borderlands using the 2023 film, Barbie. The film allows us to see three worlds and the boundaries that separate them: the “actual” world, the Real World (in the film), and Barbieland. The film provides an occasion for us to consider how borders influence or shape identity, especially when identities are conditioned by race, class, gender, and religion.
The aim of this workshop is to engage participants in a discussion about how Barbie–the film–might be used as a supplementary text in a range of philosophy courses including lower division courses like introduction to philosophy to more advanced classes such as feminist theory, concept of a person, or philosophy and film. Themes to be considered include (but are not limited to) the following:
The boundary or division between academic takes on issues of feminism and women’s liberation and the non-academic, public takes on it–especially in the age of MAGA
The divisions between self and other, and the role of main character syndrome, as the driving force in Barbieland
Stereotypical Barbie’s identity crisis and how stepping outside of our comfort zone and listening to marginal voices plays in this resolution
“The Personal and Political/Public and Private Life: Feminist Works in Progress”
Organizer: Jana McAuliffe (University of Arkansas at Little Rock)
In this workshop discussion, we will each draw on larger works in progress to explore the relationship between the public/publics and intimacy, privacy, and embodied experience. We will likely address contemporary political struggles related to race and urban development, libraries and book bans, and trans participation in public life. The goal of this workshop is to advance our collective thinking by exploring how themes, questions, and texts travel among our different works, re-engaging the classic question of how the personal is and is not political.
“Making Feminist Fragments: A Bookmaking and Collage Workshop”
Organizer: Lauren Guilmette (Elon University) & Lynne Huffer (Emory University)
What is a fragment? How can we think its edges? Does a fragment imply a whole? Drawing from our inaugural philoSOPHIA-adjacent workshop in 2022 on Image-Text and Experimental Writing, as well as a 2023 philoSOPHIA workshop on “Making and Doing in Philosophy” and a workshop at the 2024 “Feminist Making, Sensing, and Doing” conference, this year we are excited to cultivate another shared space of feminist philosophical art-making and collaborative creativity. We propose to think about fragments and fragmentation considering this year’s conference theme of Critical Borderlands, reflecting on borders as edges that both separate and connect. What we love about collage, as Jenny Odell puts it: “it’s not something from nothing, but something from something. The ingredients don’t just hang together in a new way; they truly become something else.” This workshop will take up experimental practices to think differently about spatial and temporal borders as well as about the borders of philosophy, how philosophy bumps up against poetry, other forms of making, and especially visual forms of expression. Workshop organizers will provide some supplies (paper, collage materials, scissors, glue, markers, pencils, writing, drawing, poetry, prompts and more), but participants are encouraged to bring their own source materials, such as printed pages, magazines or other clippings for collage-making. Our time together will be playful, so come prepared to experiment! No previous experience with collage is necessary.
“Exploring Collaborative Approaches in Decolonial Feminist Politics”
Organizer: Elisabeth Paquette (University of Buffalo)
Against the framing of a neoliberal institution, this workshop seeks to create a space in which scholars can engage in research that is collaborative. Drawing inspiration from the original format of philoSOPHIA, several scholars will receive feedback on their pre-circulated works in progress to an invited group of people with similar research interests. These scholars have either participated in a previous summer iteration of the Decolonial Feminist Politics Workshop, or work within that area (or those areas) of research.
“‘The question of just how not to do state work at a moment of empire’: Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred”
Organizer: Romy Opperman (The New School)
The question of just how not to do state work at a moment of empire is one of the most crucial questions we must confront in living a transformative politic. (M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing, 249)
Written over a decade and first published in 2006, M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred, maps the reconfiguration of empire and the crossings we need to undertake to refuse it. Almost twenty years later, we are in a dangerous moment of the mutation of the nexus of fascism, empire, and so-called democracy (and the centrality of racialized gender and heterosexuality to this conjuncture). In this workshop, we assemble on the grounds of our vital desire to return to the brilliant, blistering (and under read) gift that is Pedagogies and to take up the challenges it offers. We aim to activate insights and tools from Alexander to cultivate collective self-consciousness, solidarity, and autonomously joyful survival. We gather to reflect on our present as and through palimpsest, and from our locations as transnational Black and decolonial feminist philosophers differently situated in the imperial core. We will reflect with the book on the strategic importance of the academy and ourselves as feminist teachers and intellectuals in a larger battle to manufacture consent for increased militarization/policing, endless war, and corporate control, and consider how this strategy reinforces the logic of slavery and its afterlives. Significantly, Alexander’s attempt to develop an epistemic framework able to map the violence of empire demands sacred political work of rememory, pedagogy, and community with the aim of repairing and shaping accountable interdependence across alienated divisions. Practice is central to all of this. As Alexander shows us, we must begin to learn and practice in community.