Marwa Arsanios

WHO IS AFRAID OF IDEOLOGY?

The general frame of my work questions the relationship between culture, cultural production and violence. This has materialized itself mostly in the study of specific material objects such as architectural buildings, books, texts, bodies and the way violence is inscribed either implicitly or explicitly within them. While attempting to differentiate between different kinds of violence; for example, colonial and state inflicted violence from armed struggle, self-defense or a certain use of violence which can potentially be emancipatory.
I will spend the phd period working in close collaboration with the autonomous women’s movement (and other ecofeminist movements) looking at the science called “Jineology”, which is the main intellectual production of the movement and that has radically affected the whole party’s ideology in the last ten years or so, and centered the women’s movement as the core ideologues of the party. How can the relationship between knowledge, language, ideology and territory lead into some form of political praxis that is progressive and radically consequent? And again, posing the question of the relationship between knowledge production and violence, coming from the perspective of a desire for autonomy and self-governance, how can concepts shape social experience?