About this Episode

What does it mean to do research “in character”? In this concluding episode of Chapter 5, we explore how different internal personas—like the academic, the runner, the cynic, or the dreamer—might shape the kind of knowledge we produce. Extending the well-known concept of research positionality beyond the social agent, this video asks: what if the diversity of self within a single human being could enrich academic inquiry, just like diversity across a community does?

Through a critical reflection on authorship, epistemology and performance practice, this video proposes that acknowledging and even inviting inner character diversity could improve the rigour and scope of research.

About this Series

Scripting for Agency: An Artistic Enquiry into Selfhood, Character and Agency in the Age of AI is a video lecture series based on Dr Katarina Ranković’s practice-based PhD in Fine Art at Goldsmiths, University of London. Combining philosophy, performance, creative writing, and AI theory, the series explores how our understanding of the self shapes our personal lives, our politics, and our relationship to intelligent technologies.

Links

Series Playlist: https://bit.ly/sfa-series

PhD thesis (PDF format): https://bit.ly/sfa-pdf

Thesis artworks: https://bit.ly/sfa-art

References

- Althusser, Louis. Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001.

- Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

- Crawford, Kate, and Trevor Paglen. “Excavating AI: The Politics of Images in Machine Learning Training Sets.” September 19, 2019. https://excavating.ai.

- de Lange, Catherine. “Know Yourself.” New Scientist, May 21, 2022, 42–45.

- Graeber, David, and David Wengrow. The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity. London: Allen Lane, 2021.

- Gross, Rachel E. Vagina Obscura: An Anatomical Voyage. New York: W. W. Norton, 2022.

- Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (1988): 575–99.

- Ranković, Miloš and Slavica. “Art in the Time of Contractions.” MIDIRS Midwifery Digest 24, no. 4 (December 2014): 536–38.

- Warner, Marina. Phantasmagoria: Spirit Visions, Metaphors, and Media into the Twenty-First Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.