An open ended publishing made after a series of workshops on exploring alternative methods of autotheory and presented at the 2019 Parse conference HUMAN.

For the 2019 PARSE Biennial Conference: HUMAN, we proposed a participatory workshop resulting in an open ended publishing which will be presented during the conference. We are an inquiry group in the context of the MFA at Valand, exploring the formation of the other. This led to discussions about how social groups form and how power structures within society form the way we look at ourselves and others. We began looking at the work of Paul Preciado and specifically the utilisation of Autotheory. The term Autotheory is applied to the method of analysing personal experience within political contexts and how the self is constructed through available epistemologies of our current socio-political climates. The 2019 conference theme offers a platform to discuss Autotheory both in relation to Biopolitics as well as ‘the contested universality of the human across the divisions’. We want participants to realise the use of Autotheory as a method of practice, to record and to see its capabilities in text and non-text-based disciplines when discussing self in relation to the governance of the category of the human.

​

It was an opportunity to introduce Autotheory, it’s problematics and potentialities. With this knowledge, the workshop engaged with texts such as Donna Harraway’s Situated Knowledgesand Maggie Nelson’s Argonauts to name a few. Participants were then invited to use Autotheory as a tool to explore their personal histories, using it in an expanded and explorative form.