Letting Something Else Happen: A Collaborative Encounter with the Work of Sharon Rosenberg

In memory of Sharon RosenbergIn July 2012, a two-day symposium was held at the University of Alberta (Edmonton, Alberta Canada), to celebrate and remember the life and work of Canadian feminist and cultural studies scholar, Dr. Sharon Michelle Rosenberg. Sharon was educated at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, University of Toronto and worked in the Sociology department at the University of Alberta from 2002 until her death in 2010. Her intellectual practice dealt questions surrounding trauma, memory and remembrance, and the relationship between the living and the dead. Her scholarly work spanned the fields of cultural studies, queer theory, and feminist theory. Sharon was, from the early days of her dissertation work, interested in finding ways to disrupt the limited and limiting ethos of the university and the structures that shape academic knowledge creation and representation. In a 2010 essay in Future of Memory, edited by Richard Crownshaw, Jane Kilby, and Antony Rowland, she explains: have been struggling to write, to create the space for these thoughts I find arduous to mark onto paper, for publication... (2010 252-253). Near the end of her life Sharon was working poet and writer Betsy Warland, intent to make more space for creative writing in her scholarly work (see Warland 2010 and www.betsywarland.com).When we heard that the symposium was to be held, we both immediately knew that we wanted to participate and join others in remembering Sharon. We were excited by the opportunity to meaningfully engage Sharon's tremendous theoretical contributions; and we were particularly interested in the intentions stated by the symposium's organizers. Sharon's students (Heidi Bickis, Dr. Kate Bride, Dr. Amber Dean, Dr. Kara Granzow, Dr. Rebecca Lock, and Dr. Alissa Overend) and her partner Dr. Judy Davidson, also a professor at the University of Alberta, hoped to foster an event that would embody Sharon's desire to engage in precarious theorizing - in relation to writing and thinking, in relation to teaching and pedagogy, and in relation to living (on).Rather than circulating a call for papers, the organizers produced a call to which explained the focus of the symposium: The relations between people, ideas, affects were what held her animated interest. It is this critical and passionate conversation, interrupted by her death, which we invite you to attend to - in the wake of her absence - careful, thoughtful, generous relationality. Precarious Theorizing program further explained the vision for the weekend: sparked by Sharon's longstanding interest in and love for how 'thought can move in a room, sometimes in unexpected ways' ... We hope that you will be drawn to participate not only in the usual academic-conference mode ... but instead by 'being in process' - by offering your own ideas or even 'halffinished thoughts' to be taken up not just by the presenters but also by the room... Obviously this is an experiment...This article meditates on our experience at the symposium by looking closely at our contribution to the conversation - a performance entitled Letting Something Else Happen.1 We hope to continue to engage with careful, thoughtful, generous, relationality around questions of vulnerability in the academic context. We think through these questions our performance at the conference. We use the experience of our performance to think about the nature of our collaboration, risk-taking, and the possibility of intimacy in academic settings. After describing our performance at Precarious Theorizing, we turn first to a description of Sharon's work and its influence on our project, and then to a description of the work of performance artist Marina Abramovic, whose approaches to performance, precarity, and vulnerability also informs our work. Through Sharon and Abramovic, we return to the broader work of Precarious Theorizing in an attempt to make sense of the value of bringing vulnerability, risk-taking, and collaboration into our practice. …

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