Poetry, Academia, and Feminist Knowledge-Making: A Workshop with Celina Su
As part of AGITATE! Journal’s Feminist Knowledge Production Series, we invited Celina Su—scholar, poet, and member of AGITATE! Editorial Board— to conduct a workshop titled Poetry, Academia, and Feminist Knowledge-Making on March 30, 2023. In the workshop, whose recording we present here, Su discusses poetry as mode of social inquiry and as a vehicle for seeking epistemic justice, especially for stories that do not find expression in academic writing. She invites the participants to explore the connections between poetics and feminist knowledge through poems written from diverse temporal and geographical locations that decenter mainstream and canonical understandings. Unlike other forms of academic writing and research, poetry allows us to express what we feel in our gut and to explore subjectivities of self and another, while also expanding the possibilities of articulating situated knowledges. Poetry can enable us to witness, note, and share complexities from our learning, unencumbered by our disciplines. Su reflects on how poetry has been an integral part of her research with refugees in Thailand and of her grassroots activism around education and urban issues in New York City, and pushes participants to incorporate poetics as part of their own anti-disciplinary agitational practice.
- Mina Loy, “Feminist Manifesto“.
- Oswaldo de Andrade, “Cannibalist Manifesto”.
- Celina Su, Landia, excerpts from “Route 1095,” (pp. 6-18); Marina Romani’s essay on translating “Route 1095”.
- Celina Su, Landia, excerpts from “Notes on the shape of absence,” (pp. 58-61, 64-69).
- Layli Long Soldier Whereas, (pp. 57, 61-63, 79-80, 89-93).
- Sarah Riggs and Celina Su, “letter-poems”.
- Anne Carson, Autobiography of Red, (pp. 9-14, 23-25).
- There Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee, “Calliope/ Epic Poetry,” (pp. 45-58).
- Belladonna Collaborative, “Mapping the tenth circle”.
- Mirene Arsanios, excerpts from Notes on Mother Tongues, (pp. 1-7, 18-19).
- Celina Su, “JFK airport,” excerpt, NYT magazine.
You can watch the first workshop in the AGITATE! Feminist Knowledge Production event series, Feminisms, Translations, Solidarities: A Conversation with the Translators and Editors of ‘The Purple Color Of Kurdish Politics’, here.
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