Mysticism + Consent - Call for Presentations!
Calling to join our session at the Mystical Theology Conference 2025, June 4-6 in Antwerp, Belgium
deadline: February 2nd (Sunday), 2025 - 23.59 CEST
results: latest February 7 (Friday)
applications sent to: aron.birtalan@uniarts.se
email subject: “Mysticism + Consent”
Manthia Diawara: A boat connotes a departure from point A and an arrival at point B – in this context, it is a departure for the Africans who are captured for the first time and pushed onto a boat. What does departure mean to you?
Édouard Glissant: It’s the moment when one consents not to be a single being and attempts to be many beings at the same time. In other words, for me every diaspora is the passage from unity to multiplicity.1
I’m excited to send out this call for presentations for a conference session, preliminarily titled “Mysticism + Consent”. The session will take place at the forthcoming Mystical Theology Network conference, on June 4-6 2025, at the Ruusbroec Institute in Antwerp, Belgium. The general theme for the conference is “Mystical Entanglements: Communities, Networks, and the (Relational) Self in the History and Study of Mysticism”. Click here for a detailed description of the conference at large, and for a list of confirmed keynotes incl. Barbara Newman and Amy Hollywood (gasp!). Read the session’s call below:
Mysticism + Consent
This experimental session explores the many ways mysticism can relate to different practices, methods, understandings and criticisms of consent and the consensual. Questions of boundaries, permeability, allowing, compelling, agreeing, forcing, clarity and obscurity have been central to both mysticism and consent, in academic study and practice. We welcome provocations, proposals, proclamations and critical confessions that collide, intertwine, dance with, amplify, or cancel out the twin theme of this call.
Example presentations could include
- Historical perspectives, focusing on modes of consent in mystical writings and practices.
- The Annunciation, mystical visions, and other scenes from religious texts as case studies for consent or lack thereof.
- Mysticism and modes/models of active consent (eg. techniques in BDSM; The Wheel of Consent, Martin) or their criticism (Limit Consent, Saketopoulou)2
- “Compelling God” (Marguerite Porete, Meister Eckhart) and other non-consensual encounters in mysticism. Abandonment, kenosis and annihilation as CNC (consensual-non-consent).
- “The opacity of the other and in ourselves.”3 How the trans-individual selfhood of mysticism challenges the kind of individual agency, clarity and sovereignty that modes of active consent often require.
- The mystical politics of consent in Simone Weil and others. Mysticism and current political issues of consent (!!)
- Critical clashes and unexpected alliances on questions of consent between the traditional scholarship of mysticism and decolonial, POC, crip or queer voices.
- Positive and negative consent in relation to cataphatic and apophatic mysticism.
- How trust and faith can exist beyond consent and the consensual.
Application
Please send an abstract of no longer than 350 words!
applications sent to: aron.birtalan@uniarts.se
email subject: “Mysticism + Consent”
deadline: February 2nd (Sunday), 2025 - 23.59 CEST
results: latest February 7 (Friday)
The call is open to academics, artists, practitioners and other non-aligned entities. Given the tight deadline, I’m happy to offer feedback on your abstract, as long as it arrives in time for you to still make some updates before the final date.
Each presentation must be no longer than 20 minutes and preferably IRL. We encourage both traditional formats that emphasize scholarly rigour as well as more expanded and experimental formats - long as it doesn’t exceed our time limit. Keep in mind that the presentations will happen in university classrooms with limited technical equipment and setup time. With that said - shoot! I’d love to experiment with you. Personally, I’m dreaming about a screenless session, where we can play with different seating arrangements :,)
Please note that we cannot provide financial support for our presenters. We can, however, give you a letter of acceptance from the conference and/or a letter of collaboration from Stockholm University the Arts, to help you secure funding.
note on the scope of “mysticism”: While lines between mysticism and things like magic, esotericism and the occult can be pretty blurry, right now we are not looking for proposals that would better fit into the latter categories (eg. history of erotic binding magic; kink in contemporary witchcraft, etc). However, we do welcome proposals from various spiritual and religious traditions/heresies, not just Christianity. Please look at past programs and current calls of the Mystical Theology Network to get a sense of the conference’s profile.
Credits
This session is hosted by me, Áron Birtalan. I’m an artist, musician, and student of theology, whose work explores languages of intimacy. My most recent activities include the interactive book and performance The Abyss Between Our Hands, working on the participatory piece Love’s Seven Names for The Church of Sweden, acting as a mentor and residency host for ImpulsTanz symposium 2024, curating the spirituality and performance symposium Gatherings to Disappear, and hosting a series of reading nights for mystical literature. I’m also PhD candidate at Stockholm University of the Arts’ Institute for Dance, where I lecture on topics like play, participation, philosophy of the body, spiritual practices and magic. My artistic PhD, titled ‘Your Bones Hold the Shape of What’s to Come’ is due in 2026.
Further inspiration for the call:
Carson, Anne - Decreation ❈ Diawara, Mathina - Conversation with Édouard Glissant aboard the Queen Mary II ❈ Martin, Betty - The Wheel of Consent ❈ Moten, Fred - Blackness and Nothingness ❈ Newman, Barbara - The Permeable Self ❈ Saketopoulou, Avgi - Sexuality Beyond Consent
Avgi Saketopoulou after Glissant in Sexuality Beyond Consent, 3.