Experimental Feminisms: Correspondence, Fabulation, Reenactment

Nida Doctoral School 2025
Experimental Feminisms: Correspondence, Fabulation, Reenactment

25–29 August, Nida, Lithuania
Arrival: 24 August, Departure: 30 or 31 August

The Nida Doctoral School in 2025 invites researcher participants to engage with and apply research methods developed through intersectional feminist thinking. These methods aim to activate ways of articulating absences and re-evaluating traces within established histories and theories. The School seeks to foster discussion and idea-sharing around imaginative methods and examine what is at stake in bringing past and present voices into relation.

Building on the methods that animated discourse around experiment, form, and sexual difference in feminist work of the 1960s and 1970s, the School aims to engage these approaches in contemporary contexts. Through seminars, workshops and discussions, the school carousels three imaginative methodologies – correspondence, fabulation and reenactment –  which artist-researchers can orient towards their own interests and inquiries.

Correspondence is an active form of research, situated in an address that seeks response, marked by its direct, intimate appeal. To co-respond suggests a meeting – a point of confluence – that may be based on likeness and commonality, as much as on difference. This method employs letter writing, the epistolary address, and the notion of historical affinities.

Fabulation focuses on approaches to fiction, expanding previous conceptions of literary genre to include radical modes of narration, speculation, revision, fable, lying and hoaxing, as alternative modes of critical and creative engagement that re-imagine our own and others’ lives, bodies and worlds and possibilities.

Reenactment extends discussions of performativity and cross-historical affective relations. As a feminist strategy for arts research, it tests the potential of reenactment as a mode where then and now punctuate each other or a return with revolutionary potential, it experiments with tools of embodiment, ventriloquism and mimesis, amongst others.

Over the five-days, participants will share and develop their ongoing research through peer- driven exchanges, reading groups, task-based practical workshops, group discussion, and individual tutoring sessions. Meals will be shared and time is allocated for informal meetings and activities.