Conversations editorial

Popular artistic experiences are part of people's everyday lives, from those occupying the centers of the political to those who have been relegated to its margins. Because of its contextuality and situatedness, popular art speaks to a vast range of subjects and objects, helping people navigate their daily lives, resist forms of oppression, and find inspiration in contexts that seem devoid of hope. Above all, popular art calls attention to the multiple ways of inhabiting the world. This summons nuanced perspectives on the structures of power but also, and more importantly, on the forms of resistance that accompany those structures – contesting, subverting, and dislocating them.

Considering the entanglements between art, knowledge, and power, this special Conversations Section on “Popular Art and Epistemic Justice/Violence” invited international feminist scholars to reflect on the political and ethical possibilities that could be opened up by popular artistic expressions. How does popular art relate to different manifestations of international gendered violence and what can be its potential to counter these forms of violence? Can popular artistic expressions intervene in the field of knowledge- and policy-making and disrupt its premises of subjectivity and objectivity? What ways of resisting and re-existing are possible through art, and how are they important for building situated knowledge about the world?

By inquiring into these questions, this special section provides varied accounts of the ways in which popular art defies forms of epistemic violence that are structured into society and helps build more just epistemic orders. The pieces gathered here address these issues through different interpretations of art, presenting varied entry points to understand the connections between gender, violence, politics, and knowledge. As such, they provide fresh and stimulating visions of international politics, which invite us to think through different possibilities of resisting power and crafting new worlds.

Alister Wedderburn offers an inspiring feminist reading of a tapestry woven by rural South African women that teaches us much about art's potential to recreate life in the face of devastating violence. While speaking to more traditional accounts of art – such as Picasso's Guernica – the Keiskamma Guernica defies our understanding of where politics lies, confusing the lines that separate public and private, rational and emotional. By mobilizing affective politics, the tapestry is able to build a powerful critique of South African gendered violence and resist the gendered politics of health that has brought much loss and suffering to this particular community.

J. D. Schnepf conveys a powerful reflection on the “artivism” of the Transborder Immigrant Tool (TBT), a phone application designed to guide migrants crossing the US–Mexico border through a combination of GPS technology and poetry. Her reading of this digital art explores the agential networks created between humans, technology, poetry, and environment. In doing so, the TBT points to alternative ways of dealing with the relations between locality and globality that defy the narrow boundaries of the nation state and national security, presenting instead a biopolitics that sustains migrant life.

Reflecting on the provocative visual works of two artists, Njideka Akunyili Crosby and Wangechi Mutu, Elspeth van Veeren debates art's capacity to disrupt the gendered, raced, and sexed structures of power and open new ethical, political, and epistemological possibilities. Van Veeren's emphasis on the artists’ use of a queer epistemology of collage allows her to explore artistic practices that emphasize multiplicity, layerings, and wanderings that confound clear-cut boundaries and easy assumptions of meaning and intentionality.

Finally, Quỳnh N. Phạm engages in an exciting conversation with Linh Tường Đỗ on art, epistemic violence, and refusal in Việt Nam. By navigating issues of art, knowledge, gender, and postcoloniality, their conversation reshapes the terms in which resistance is thought about – terms that are variously co-opted by the traditional discourses of the globalized west. In so doing, they provide us a glimpse into different ways of being in the world through art.

The Conversations Section is an innovative intervention by IFJP which aims to offer space and opportunity to make strong theoretical and practical contributions to feminist debates that do not necessarily take standard academic forms. It may include interviews with prominent or early-career scholars, practitioners, and activists; narratives and short stories; photo essays, artistic pieces, and poetry; film readings; conference reports; and other “non-traditional” modes of scholarly writing.

Interested authors should submit their articles via ScholarOne: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rfjp. Please also upload a biographical note and five keywords. Make sure to edit it thoroughly for language and clarity, format it to correspond to the Taylor & Francis guidelines, and identify it as a submission for the Conversations Section.

For further information, please refer to the journal’s FAQ page at: https://www.ifjpglobal.org/submit-to-us/#anchor_conversations_shortcut.

Enquiries should be directed to both Conversations Editors.