Jaap Kooijman

The 9/11 Effect: Art and Cultural Politics in Post-9/11 Europe
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis / Institute for Culture and History
Coordinators: Marieke de Goede and Jaap Kooijman

The 9/11 Effect is a multidisciplinary research project at the Faculty of Humanities of the University of Amsterdam, focusing on the cultural politics of representation and visualization of 9/11 and the “war on terror,” particularly in art and popular culture. Significant new security practices and modes of governing are emerging in the name of the fight against terror in Europe. A thorough understanding of these modes of governing has to include an analysis of the diversity of ways in which visual culture and cultural representation play a role in their constitution. The politics of fighting the war on terror intimately depend upon a landscape of cultural production. Like the spectacle of 9/11, the political and military responses carried out in the name of the war on terror may be conceptualized as a symbolic targeting.

What’s Queer Here?
Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis
Coordinators: Murat Aydemir and Jaap Kooijman

The What’s Queer Here? research project will continue, critique, and extend the legacies of what has become known as “queer theory,” critically appropriate these for our ongoing research projects, as well as propose and try out new priorities, affiliations, objects, and concerns for the field. Those may include a renewed focus on sexuality in relation to class and labor, to the state and civil society, to activist practices and alternatives, to postcolonial migration, tourism, and globalization, to the biopolitical discipline of the (re)production of “healthy” bodies and minds, and to the liberal politics of identity that enshrines, some have argued, a new “homonormativity” in the West. Our goals are to facilitate exchange and debate between scholars working with queer theory (comfortably or uncomfortably), both within and beyond the Netherlands; to organize the 2008 edition of ASCA’s yearly Soiree meetings; and to reflect intently on what’s queer here, now, in the Netherlands, in Amsterdam.