20/11/2023
F22, Academy of Dramatic Art
Frankopanska 22, Zagreb
Relationality, situatedness, and sensibility: institutional paradoxes towards a better tomorrow, a lecture by Una Bauer delved into the relationship between relational ethics, relational epistemology and what the theorist Sara Ahmed calls the nonperformativity of institutions or, more broadly, institutional mechanics; the question of how institutions work.
As Jarrett Zigon articulates in the book How is it between us?: Relational Ethics and Care for the World, contemporary ethics is formulated in the space “between humans”, and relies on the idea that we must abandon the traditional assumptions that there is something ethical in the human being as such. Ethics, according to Zigon, lies “between” and is basically established as a relation. Unlike the analytical-philosophical approach, the sociocultural and phenomenological-hermeneutic traditions are open to the lived experience of our messy world and disordered, extremely complex existence. In this context, there are three key aspects of sociability: relationality, situatedness and sensibility (in the sense of bodily-affective-cognitive openness and receptivity).
Sara Ahmed in her book Complaint! speaks about the system-based inability of institutions to deal with objections, complaints, lawsuits about various discriminatory practices, bullying and harassment in their ranks. What are all the lived contradictions of a higher education institution trying to wrestle with changing its own institutional climate, bearing in mind relationality, situatedness and sensibility?
Una Bauer is a theatre scholar and writer based in Croatia. She holds a PhD from Queen Mary, University of London. She is an assistant professor at the Academy of Dramatic Art (Zagreb), at the Dramaturgy Department. Her first book on theatre and everything else, including tea cozies and bicycles, Priđite bliže: o kazalištu i drugim radostima (Come Closer: on Theatre and other Joys) was published in 2015. Her second book BADco.: Vježbanje nemogućeg (BADco.: Practicing the Impossible), a series of in-depth interviews with BADco. members was published in 2021. Her research interests have recently been focused on affects and emotions, sorrow, mourning and death in the context of performing arts.
This lecture was organised in collaboration with the Academy of Dramatic Art, an associate partner of the Testing Ground project, co-financed by the European Union.