Trans-local Critical Curations and Video Essays

Principle Investigator：Joyce C.H. Liu

I propose an experimental project with trans-local critical curations and video essays. This project follows the mode of action-based and practice-led research. We encourage participating students to look at the margins of the inter-Asian societies, that is, those who have been systematically marginalized, discriminated against, and excluded, as the part-of-not-part (Rancière) that are happening in their local communities. With such a trans-local and interdisciplinary critical orientation, the participants can examine how local political systems and social institutions carry colonial residues and how these systems could turn out to be the arena for regional power struggles and crony capitalism at the expense of local people. We want to examine different forms of social inequality through border politics, such as unequal citizenship, ethnic minorities, aboriginals, sexual/gender minority, migrant laborers, and refugees. These marginalized social groups are formed through long historical processes and are constituted by contemporary neoliberal market competition of global capitalism. We will provide theoretical frameworks for participants to understand how the regime of visibility would lead to the technology of governmentality, border politics, and the colonial matrix of power. We also want to consider various forms of epistemic decolonization and the practice of commoning the city. This project will encourage students to practice the interventions through photo essays, video essays, curatorial essays, documentaries, etc.