Creative feminisms: Material–Affective Approaches to Knowledge Making

Creative Feminisms: Material–Affective Approaches to Knowledge Making is a PhD course (3 ects) that explores creativity as a feminist mode of knowing and world making. Anchored in longstanding feminist traditions of attention to diversity, belonging and everyday life and drawing on feminist new materialist, posthuman and affect scholarship the course approaches creativity as relational, situated and always already at work in mundane practices, vernacular traditions and communal care.
Through participatory lectures and workshops the course explores how somatic, material and affective methods and making can open up otherwise, more hopeful and transformative, ways of engaging our social and ecological worlds.

What to expect
The course is organized in conjunction to ‘Remixing folk feminisms’ cultural programme that brings together international scholars, artists and creative makers to explore what happens when everyday vernacular creativity meets contemporary feminisms.

The course consists of participatory lectures, collective gatherings and creative making sessions (16h), including bog somatics, crown making, storying, handicrafts, remixing of feminist figures and icons, and collective reflection. These practices function as methodological interventions, enabling participants to experiment with material–affective research approaches, reflect on their ethical and political possibilities, and develop care full, non extractive research praxis suited to contemporary social and ecological questions.

Upon completing the course, participants have learned to

• consider multiple forms of creativity as feminist knowledge making (artistic, crafting, storying, somatic)
• understand how materiality and affectivity shape creative knowledge making
• reflect on the methodological, ethical and political possibilities of creative material-affective approaches

The course consists of in-person lectures and creative workshops (16 h) and individual work including readings and assignments (65 h), amounting to 3 credits in total.

To complete the course, participants are expected to familiarize with pre-readings and readings related to lectures/workshops, complete pre-assignment, and to participate kick-off gathering and lecture; the selected lectures/workshops during the ‘Remixing Folk Feminisms’ week (1.9.-6.9.2026) and re-gathering session after the week.