Rejecting Closure

Research Workshop, Hildesheim, 03–04 July 2025

With contributions by Ko-Le Chen, Anne Hölck, Omar Kasmani, Wilma Lukatsch, Karolin Meunier, Masoud Morgan, Zuleika Bibi Sheik

Organized by Annika Haas, University of Hildesheim
DFG Research Training Group 2477 “Aesthetic Practice” 

This research workshop is dedicated to writing’s forms and their aesthetic forces that are often overlooked or marginalized in many academic fields. At the same time, the control mechanisms of academic discourse heavily rely on form and formalities and tend to include ways of writing that actively work with form by framing them as ‘experiments.’ This is not just overlooking the specifics of knowledge creation in the arts and literature, it also dismisses that “formal questions are about dynamics—they ask how, where, and why the writing moves“ (Hejinian [1983] 2009). Drawing inspiration from poet Lyn Hejinian’s observation that “form is not a fixture, but an activity,” the proposition of this workshop is to consider the engagement with form and with the wide range of aesthetic and literary practices as a continued re-working of knowledge hierarchies in (academic) discourse and related institutional politics (cf. Ahmed 2012, Harney & Moten 2013, Doyle 2024). 

What are the stakes of doing that work in the current climate of ideological polarization that turns towards the “fiction” of closure and thus towards the “pleasurable effects” of texts that “are directed toward a single reading”? (Hejinian 2009) What are the many ways, in which “the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure” (Hartman 2008) can take form in writing and other media? This question also concerns the ways in which aesthetic practices in research are currently called upon to prove useful for coping with complexity on intellectual and practical levels. In the workshop, we will discuss these questions in view of the epistemic racism, sexism and violence that is part of the crisis of the Westernized system of knowledge production (Grosfoguel 2013). What are the practical, aesthetic and writerly implications in working towards “knowledge cultivation” and “life-affirming research”? (Sheik 2023)

Please register until 30 June.

Program, registration and further information:  
https://www.uni-hildesheim.de/grk-2477/veranstaltungen/research-workshop-rejecting-closure/