Redi Koobak
Redi Koobak connects critical discourses of postsocialism and postcolonialism, visual politics of gender, war and nationalism as well as various forms of transnational and local feminisms.
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Books by Redi Koobak
Drawing on postsocialist, postcolonial, queer and feminist visual culture studies, the author argues that Treumund’s art is always already embedded in the local context, as it builds on and problematizes the existing discussions of feminist generations, theorizing, activism and art practices. Combining close readings of Treumund’s artworks with contemporary theoretical debates in feminist studies, encounters with the artist and autobiographical narratives, this thesis asserts: there is no “lag”. More importantly, it is of utmost ethical and political importance to pay closer attention to geopolitical locatedness as an axis of difference that matters in contemporary feminist theorizing.
Papers by Redi Koobak
Drawing on postsocialist, postcolonial, queer and feminist visual culture studies, the author argues that Treumund’s art is always already embedded in the local context, as it builds on and problematizes the existing discussions of feminist generations, theorizing, activism and art practices. Combining close readings of Treumund’s artworks with contemporary theoretical debates in feminist studies, encounters with the artist and autobiographical narratives, this thesis asserts: there is no “lag”. More importantly, it is of utmost ethical and political importance to pay closer attention to geopolitical locatedness as an axis of difference that matters in contemporary feminist theorizing.
as a method of inquiry”, this chapter offers a writing-story about my quest for a PhD research topic as an example of how exploring an unfinished collection of thoughts, inspirations and references in the shape of writing a story about/around them can provide a way to open up creative thought and face the challenges of finding and sticking to a research topic and methodology. Through exposing the specificities of a beginning researcher’s uncertainties, biases and vulnerabilities, my writing-story makes visible how important it is to attend to the rhizomatic character of your points of entry into the “field” you are studying. With the help of six quotations from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) and Through
the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (1871) that structure the writing-story, I show that critical self-reflexivity, i.e. questioning the self at the beginning of (and throughout) the research process, can become a key to unravelling the important questions one needs to keep in mind in order to arrive at and eventually “inhabit” a research topic.
“stuck places” in the research process or wrestling with writer’s block. As these moments of stuckness are often frustrating and likely to slow down the writing process or, in the worst-case scenario, make one give up altogether, I explore strategies to overcome them. I suggest that new potentials can be mobilized when authors confront and consciously attempt to write in (or with) stuck places. Drawing on the work of Patti Lather
(1998, 2007), who describes a “praxis of stuck places” as a strategy of purposefully seeking out and focusing on stuckness and insecurities of meaning as a way to keep moving and managing the uncertainties, I argue that much can be learned from breaks, ruptures and failures in the research process. Using examples from my PhD research, I examine dead
ends, false starts and other stuck places in an attempt to situate the experience of impossibility in writing as “an enabling site for working through aporias” (Lather 2007, 16). In addition, I suggest some exercises and strategies for thinking through and writing in stuck places.
completely new category - we both became ‘non-Swedish’, though in very different ways and to very different effects. In this piece, we anchor our personal experiences in a theoretical discussion of this process and demonstrate how notions of visibility and invisibility (both marked and unmarked) have operated in our narratives in contradictory, ambiguous and unstable ways.