Descent/Dissent: The 11th Annual Wollesen Memorial Graduate Symposium

The Department of Art History and the Graduate Union of Students of Art cordially invite you to Descent/Dissent, the 11th Annual Wollesen Memorial Graduate Symposium. This event is being held on October 18-19, in Room 222 of Innis College.

Descent/Dissent, invites you to discuss the question of genealogy as a matter of inheritance, omission, severance, recovery, adoption, and haunting. How do we interrogate and live alongside returning pasts, Jacques Derrida’s absently present living dead (The Ear of the Other, 1985)? Where does Gerald Vizenor’s concept of Indigenous survivance illustrate the elusive yet unmistakable presence which overtakes absence (Survivance: Narratives of Native Presence, 2008)? In what way do the reclamation projects of communal queer pasts and futures, Gerald Hannon’s uncovered histories, operate beyond the patrilinear (Jackson and Persky, Flaunting It! A Decade of Gay Journalism from The Body Politic, 1982)? How does Stuart Hall’s embodied relational positioning of diaspora as a living archive of difference produce a particular relationship to origin (“Constituting an Archive,” 2001)? How do we parse, categorise, and incise genealogy as Michel Foucault’s “vast accumulation of source material” (Language, Counter-Memory, Practice 1977, 140)?

We are welcoming sixteen guest presenters from a number of Canadian and international institutions, who will be speaking on art historical and related topics concerning film, photography, architecture, curation practice, archaeology, artistic methodologies, and creative process. Our Keynote Speaker, Assistant Professor Gloria Bell, is joining us from McGill University, for a talk entitled "Confidential and Secret": Indigenous Activism in the 1920s.

Further information can be found in our attached program, and through our website. Inquiries can be directed to symposium Co-Chairs Virginia Martos Armenteros and Niharika Russell at gusta.symposium@gmail.com.