Presentation of the Research Program

Screenshot from the online presentation of the Research Program

Thursday June 17, 2021, 19:00-20:30 (EEST)

Presentation of “Antigones: Bodies of resistance in the contemporary world” (ANTISOMATA) and parallel launch of the Centre of Border-Crossing Acts: Critical Theory, Art, Politics that hosts activities of the Research Program.

The presentation was held by the members of the research team:

Elena Tzelepis (Assistant Professor of Philosophy/Principal Investigator), Athena Athanasiou (Professor of Social Anthropology/Dean of Faculty of Social Sciences, Panteion University), Olga Taxidou (Professor of Drama, University of Edinburgh), Marios Chatziprokopiou (Postdoctoral Researcher), Athina Papanagiotou (Postdoctoral Researcher), and Alkisti Efthymiou (Doctoral Candidate).

The event took place in Greek and online (via MS-teams).

The presenters joined from Athens (Greece), Santiago (Chile) and Volos (Greece). The event was attended by approximately 200 persons in the MS-teams platform.

Themes that were discussed included the multiple underpinnings of embodied collective resistance, the hierarchies of mourning, the translocality of trauma, and the intersectionality of narrativation, especially in their resonance with the current global context marked by forced displacement and confinement, biopolitical violence, injustice, unequal conditions of citizenship, and the continuing pandemic crisis. Different “minor”, “exilic”, and “eccentric” Antigones were presented from different geographies of “global South” and “critical East”. Attention was given to the ways the process of translating eccentric Antigones from different geopolitical perspectives and from different languages-sources such as Spanish, Portuguese, or Afrikaans into Greek, become a key border-crossing act of this research project and a method of decentering the western canon.

The Program is held at the Department of History, Archaeology and Social Anthropology at the University of Thessaly with the cooperation of the Department of Social Anthropology at Panteion University for Social and Political Sciences, and with funding by the H.F.R.I.