The Africa Multiple Cluster Gender and Diversity Office

presents an ICDL Lecture by
Dr. Nirmal Puwar (PhD), Goldsmith’s College, London, UK

Intersectional Complexities, Diversity Optics and Axes of Space

Thursday 1st June 2023; 4 – 6 PM
Zoom (Meeting ID: 683 9613 0569, Passcode: 897688) || Room S 58, RW I, Uni-Bayreuth

Layers of space help us to understand the multiple axes of privilege and power involved in boundary making. This lecture will offer an outline of space invaders, with a view to complicating analysis of intersectionality and marginalities. Diversity as presence and optics continues to generate hard line borders and barriers. Naïve and pure notions of racialized or gendered bodies, don’t enable us to appreciate the complex web of outsiders on the inside. Moving through different conceptions of space and place, this presentation will delve into the processes of both space invaders and space invading. A wide range of examples will be shared, from the worlds of politics, museums and artistic interventions.

Chaired by Dr. Christine Vogt-William
Director of the Gender and Diversity Office
Africa Multiple Cluster of Excellence

Please find attached a chapter from Prof. Puwar’s Space Invaders (2004) as preparatory reading.

Nirmal Puwaris a Reader, she joined the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths in 2003. She is currently a British Academy Innovative Fellow, working on ‘Multicultural Experiments in the Civic Life of a Cathedral’.

She has a longstanding interest in bodies and space, her book Space Invaders: Race, Gender and Bodies Out of Place (2004), generated a conceptual frame work for considering the conditions of inclusion within institutions. She brings together a range of methods including, interviews, collaborative, creative and site-specific interventions. The project Noise of the Past collaboratively re-figured the global war dead and memory with a post-colonial centrepoint.

Puwarco-led the strand on Space Invading in the Global Grace Grant on Gender and Cultural Equalities. At Goldsmiths, she co-founded the Methods Lab to mutate methods and to stretch the walls of the academy. Live Methods, co-edited with Les Back, is one of eighteen collections she has co-edited. She has co-curated several exhibitions in the Kingsway Corridor at Goldsmiths, including Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria: Testimonies of Uprooting, Space and Gaze: Conversations with Jean Mohr and Edward Saidin Palestine, as well as Migrating Dreams and Nightmares.

She is currently writing a collection on a One Mile Walk, whilst processing decompositions and recompositionsof multiple forms of life, which will be published by Punctum Press. The writing process has been a journey of collaborations and creative non-fiction.