Bunche Hall
Room 6275
For the Sixth Trans-pacific Workshop, we will take up the theme of “ayausa” (危うさ – danger, precarity, risk) as our focal point of discussion. In a time of political, economic, academic and environmental uncertainty, we understand “ayausa” to refer not only to the danger inherent in a narrow moment of natural disaster or other crisis, but to a condition of complex temporality. “Ayausa” encompasses both risk as a condition of possibility for resistance and precarity as a relationship with a volatile and unknowable future. Broadly framed, we anticipate that “ayausa” will serve as a category of analysis through which different social relations, identities, subjectivities, social movements, moments of natural or manmade disaster, everyday experiences and apparatuses of the state can be examined. Previously, our workshop engaged with the theme of “kizu” (wound) as a moment of rupture in both individual and collective experience. By adding “ayausa” to our conceptual register, we intend that it will challenge workshop participants to rethink our understanding of the temporality (and continuity) of such moments of peril or vulnerability; question the ways in which discourses of harm, disaster, and victimhood are co-opted by the state as justification for surveillance and control or commodified into displays of multiculturalism; and consider the ways in which “ayausa” might also be a productive category for generating new modes of existence through the disruption of everyday life.

Download file: Program-5f-htu.pdf