Relationships, Aesthetics, and Whatever Happens Next - A performative presentation by Koby Rogers Hall

As part of our Graduate Fellows Lunchtime Seminars, the Social Justice Centre welcomes a talk by Koby Rogers Hall.

Title: Relationships, Aesthetics, and Whatever Happens Next

A performative presentation by Koby Rogers Hall  - in conversation with Mostafa Henaway.

UPDATE: Watch the recording on youtube.

In recognising conflict as the site of generative possibilities, collaborative creation becomes a dynamic terrain for activist interventions (Choudry, 2015) and creative political possibilities. In this performative talk Koby will speak to some of her experiences with the Immigrant Workers Center in Artistic Co-Facilitation (alongside M. Henaway, 2012-2019), and key praxis that now shape questions at this juncture in her PhD project, on migrant justice, social arts practices, and resurgence theory (Simpson, 2020).

Since the start of this pandemic Koby became a mother, socially distanced from her community organising, lost friends and co-creators in life and in death, and revisited radical pedagogies with an eye for prototyping research-creation as experimentation in the field (Loveless, 2019). But how do we re-engage with community when the aesthetics, and kinesthetics (Simpson, 2020), of ‘post-conflict’ zones (Sotelo Castro, 2021) require an ongoing state of unknowing, be it through pandemics, social justice scholarship, or the painful growth of mothering? (Pauline Gumbs, Martens, and Williams, 2016) Sometimes failure is the only way through to whatever is yet to come.  

If what we are calling ongoing relationships, tactical design, prefigurative possibilities, can meet the depths of our collective care work, traumatic experiences, of grief - how can we show up for conflict, for climate change, for one another? Without slipping back into the comforts of killing each other in isolation and in self-surveillance...I can no longer afford to perform this rhetorical question.

Koby Rogers Hall is PhD Candidate in Humanities, research-creation; artist.activist.writer.educator and Mom.

Mostafa Henaway is PhD Candidate, Geography, Planning and Environment; Social Justice Fellow 2020-21; and long-time community organiser for defending the rights of immigrant workers.

The talk will be hybrid, both in person and on zoom.

Click here to register online on zoom.

To attend in person:
The Acts of Listening Lab - LB-1042-03
J.W. McConnell (LB) Building
1400 De Maisonneuve Blvd. W.  
Montreal, QC, H3G IM8