Reconsidering Detachment: Building an exploratory network

Staff: Dr Joanna Cook
Funder: ESRC

Dr Joanna Cook has been awarded an ESRC International Training and Networking Opportunities Grant (for an amount of £39,967 FEC), alongside Matei Candea (University of Durham), Tom Yarrow (University of Wales, Bangor), and Catherine Trundle (Victoria University, Wellington). This project aims to create an interdisciplinary exploratory network of scholars invested in critically engaging with the constructive aspects of detachment.

Connection, relationship and engagement have become unavoidable keywords for thinking about ethics and knowledge production across the humanities and social sciences. Going against the grain, the investigators intend to explore the range of contexts within which disconnection and detachment may represent effective modes of action. This project will interrogate practices and ontologies that take detachment seriously, asking how they might broaden our own conceptual tools and methods. Analytically, an attention to detachment and disconnection might open up new heuristic avenues: either as an alternative or counterpoint to the multidisciplinary extension of metaphors of connection and relationality, or as a way of recasting the limits and contours of what counts in various contexts as a relationship.

The investigators have organised a panel at an international conference (AAA, Philadelphia, December 2009), followed by a large interdisciplinary conference (Cambridge, June 2010), and have set up an online collaboratory.

For more information, see http://detachmentcollaboratory.org