Event Details

The Transcultural Writing, Practice and Research Network is delighted to host this event with Dr Sarah Jackson (Nottingham Trent University). Sarah's creative and critical work explores the intersections of literature and technology in order to address questions of social and environmental justice.

In this seminar, Sarah will examine the politics and poetics of the distress call in Caroline Bergvall’s Drift (2014). Discussing the ethics and aesthetics of ‘answerability’ (Ronell 1989), she will argue that Bergvall resists the wordlessness of the refugee imposed by the legacies of colonialism and instead opens up an affective space in which we find ourselves – in the words of Butler and Athanasiou (2013) – ‘affected, undone, and bound by others’ calls to respond and assume responsibility’. Reading the failures of human speech in the poem as an invitation to listen beyond words, she will demonstrate that Bergvall’s use of distressed – or stretched apart – language not only ‘calls out’ global injustices but also ‘calls for’ new ways of thinking about the relationship between technology, hospitality and voice.

During this event, Sarah will also introduce 'Voice Notes,' an international creative writing and sound arts project that investigates displaced voices, creative networks, transnational communication, and different modes of talking and listening across cultures.