The Feminist Lecture Program is excited to announce a brand new collaboration with the Vagina Museum! The same amazing online weekly feminist content you expect from us, now hosted by the world’s only bricks and mortar Vagina Museum!
CLASS DESCRIPTION
When we think about the academic institution, where is the witch? Equally, when we think about the witch, where is the academic institution? And why is it that although cultural representations of witches “coming into” their witching frequently imagine this initiation happening in the classroom, scholarly study of witches rarely acknowledges a relationship between the academic institution and becoming witch?
Written collaboratively, this piece takes the form of a series of spells and rituals to counteract the knowledge industrial complex and how it has positioned the witch. In service to these interventions, we’ll be building an altar, made from the following ‘objects’: feminist academics who write witch stories; feminist academics who leave academia to ‘become’ witches; feminist writers – such as Sylvia Townsend Warner (Lolly Willowes) and Mary Stewart (Thornyhold) – who are fascinated with witches; academics whose work on witchcraft has been discredited for being feminist; and feminist practitioners engaging witchcraft in protest against the structures and conditions of twenty-first century academia. Part of this work will be to reclaim academic witches who have been excluded from the academy’s account of itself and, sometimes, excluded in subtle ways from the academy itself. As part of this work, we are also interested in our own makings and unmakings as academic witches, in a longer genealogy. Building an altar works, here as an invocation whose articulation can, we believe, support the manifestation of new forms of protest, resistance, and re-imagining.
This session moves between a performance and a lecture, questioning the framework of a traditional lecture in order to explore the witch in academia.
ABOUT OUR LECTURER
Dr Ruth Charnock is a writer, storyworker, creative mentor, tarot reader, and lapsed academic. She is the author and editor of Joni Mitchell: New Critical Readings [Bloomsbury, 2019] and writes about sex, music, witching, tarot, nature, bodies, motherhood, feelings and literature. Her latest piece ‘3 tarot cards for the new mother’ for the collection Blood and Cord: Writers on Early Parenthood will be out with the Emma Press in early 2023.
Dr Karen Schaller is a multi-modal and interdisciplinary feminist researcher specialising in theories of affect, feeling, emotion and embodiment. Her work tracks economies of feeling in 20th and 21st century literary and critical cultures, materialises the biopolitics of academia and distributions of vitality across domestic and institutional scenes, and performs tactics of feminist resistance.
Instagram: @ruthcharnock and @karenschaller
Website: www.ruthcharnock.com
UPCOMING SESSIONS WITH THE FEMINIST LECTURE PROGRAM
Monday 4th March
Dr. Noam Yadin Evron
The Vulva's Pilgrimage: Myth and Meaning in Medieval Vulva Badges
Monday 11th March
Ruth Charnock and Karen Schaller
Witching the Institution: Academia and Feminist Witchcraft
Monday 18th March
Lucy Cade
Female Creatives and Spirit Photography in the 19th Century
Monday 25th March
Dr. Sheree Mack
The Women of the Black British Art Movement
Monday 1st April
Nina-Sophia Miralles
Vogue Magazine: Invention, Erasure, Perversity & Power
Monday 8th April
Camilla Baier, Lauren Clarke and Rachel Pronger
The Animation of Mary Blair: A Feminist's Guide to Disney
Monday 15th April
Lauren Peters
Fashion Before Plus-Size: Bodies, Bias, and the Birth of an Industry
Monday 22nd April
Ama Josephine Budge Johnstone
Intimate Ecologies: a Black feminist erotics for interspecies un/worlding
Monday 29th April
Joanna Ebenstein
The Anatomical Venus
Monday 6th May
Amina Nugumanova and Elmira Ismukhamedova
Women in Central Asian art: Preservation of Collective Heritage and Decolonisation
Stay tuned in to be the first to hear about our Summer term!
RECORDING
A recording of the lecture will be sent out by The Feminist Lecture Program after the event finishes, within 2 hours of the end of the class. This email will also contain any resources/reading list the lecturer shares.
Please add hello@feministlectureprogram.com to your email contacts to ensure you receive the recording as expected.
Please note that the recording will expire 7 days after sending.
PAY WHAT YOU CAN
Everyone is welcome to join this Pay-What-You-Can class. We suggest a donation of £20, however, we understand that may not be possible for everybody. Please be honest and pay what you can afford so that we can continue to offer our sessions on a donation basis.
MORE FLP…
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And that's it!
We're really looking forward to you joining us.