“Hearing the Inarticulate: Ethics and Epistemology in the Archives” A Summer Seminar and Writing Retreat at the Prindle Institute for Ethics, DePauw University

“Hearing the Inarticulate: Ethics and Epistemology in the Archives”
A Summer Seminar and Writing Retreat at the Prindle Institute for Ethics, DePauw University
June 20-29, 2016

The study of people who, as Lawrence Levine once put it, “have been rendered historically inarticulate” involves challenges of research and interpretation both methodological and ethical. How do we derive meaning from obscure, incomplete, and fragmentary evidence of ordinary people’s intellectual history? How can we responsibly give voice to people, often very unlike ourselves, who were or are silenced? How do we know if we are restoring the voices of marginalized people on their own terms or reinventing them for our own ends?

In June 2016, DePauw University’s Prindle Institute for Ethics will host a seminar and writing retreat devoted to such questions, bringing together scholars in a variety of disciplines and using a variety of frameworks—which might include (but are not limited to) childhood, class, disability, gender, immigration, incarceration, literacy, and race—who see their work contributing to the larger project of hearing the inarticulate.

Participants will spend ten days in residence at DePauw, dividing their time between workshops devoted to each other’s works in progress and—taking advantage of the Prindle Institute’s spacious and secluded setting—long blocks of uninterrupted writing. Those selected to participate will receive travel, lodging, and most of their meals, as well as a $500 stipend to cover incidental expenses. For more information and application instructions, visit http://www.prindlepost.org/summer-seminar-and-writing-retreat/