Questions of Silence: On the Emancipatory Limits of Voice – seminarium 10.10.2018 r.
Referat zatytułowany “Questions of Silence: On the Emancipatory Limits of Voice” wygłosi MARTINA FERRARI doktorantka w Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon (USA).
Spotkanie odbędzie się w języku angielskim.
ABSTRACT: This paper begins at a (historical) cross-roads; it straddles the difficult ground in-between the recent public outcry against sexual violence (a protest that, as championed by the #MeToo movement, seeks to break the “culture of silence” surrounding sexual violence) and concerns about the coloniality of voice made visible by the recent decolonial turn within feminist theory (Lugones 2006, 2010; Ruiz 2006; Veronelli 2016). Weary of concepts such as “visibility” or “transparency”—principles that continue to inform the call to “break the silence” by “speaking up” central to Western liberatory movements—in this paper, I return to silence, laying the groundwork for the exploration of what a revised concept of silence could mean for the development of practices of cross-cultural communication that do not play into coloniality.
MARTINA FERRARI is a fifth year PhD student in philosophy at the University of Oregon specializing in 20th century continental philosophy (esp. phenomenology), feminist philosophy, and decolonial thought. She is currently working on her dissertation in which she reexamines the question of silence and contends that, approached from the phenomenological standpoint of concrete lived experiences of what she calls “deep silence,” silence can be more than a simple absence of speech, sense, and being; it can reveal previously unheard-of resources for the renewal of sense. Her dissertation thus offers a novel and philosophically rich contribution to current debates about the coloniality of (Western) voice and decolonial sense-making projects. She earned her Master’s in Philosophy and Social Policy at American University, where she taught philosophy for a year.
