Workshop: Trans Cosmologies

Bringing together a diverse group of professionals – anthropologists, historians, theologians, philosophers, artists, and activists – for a day-long series of talks and art interventions.

Together, we will think trans cosmologies through specific spatiotemporal contexts, in relation to polities and ideological programmes, cosmological belongings and exiles, crossings and forms of religious syncretism, as well as other dynamics of spiritual practices, political debates, and forms of resistance.

The scope goes beyond ‘habitual religiosities’, to probe new, radical, and alternative ethics, decolonised cosmologies and senses of selfhood, and possible temporalities of repair, whether found in interruptions, reformulations, or resistant continuities.

The workshop provides attendees with an opportunity to explore practical approaches to building more inclusive religious spaces. It also queries the implications of trans cosmologies for our relationships to the environment and the more-than-human condition, the religious afterlives of racial and gender violence, and colonial extraction, as well as the directions of personal trans spiritualities.

This event is organised and funded jointly with lgbtQ+ @cam.

Registration is required.

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Workshop timetable

11:00 | coffee & welcome

• Safet HadžiMuhamedović: “Trans heritage against nationalism”

11:30 | unpacking binaries

• Abeera Khan: “The horseshoe theory of essentialisms: Gender and Islam across the political spectrum”
• Alex Clare-Young: “Water from water: Challenging transmedicalism with body theology”
• Vanja Hamzić: “Jeliya: The art of resistance to the nascent colonial gender binary in eighteenth-century Greater Senegambia”

13:00 | light lunch & coffee

14:00 | solidarities & encounters

• Sabah Choudrey: “What can Islam teach us about solidarity?”
• Mijke van der Drift: “Complicity without identity: Ensouled connections in frictional worlds”
• Omar Kasmani: “Queer companions in suhbet”, book chat

15:30 | art-magic-theatre

• Lucian Summerisle: after the durational act of ritual magic (chat with the artist)
• Raphaël Khouri: “No other cure for sorrow” (lecture/performance)

18:00 | dinner (workshop speakers only)