ISTP 2026 Conference
“Theorizing in Dark Times – Art, Narrative, Politics”
June 8 – June 12, 2026 | Brooklyn, NY, USA
Conference Agenda
Overview and details of the sessions of this conference. Please select a date or location to show only sessions at that day or location. Please select a single session for detailed view (with abstracts and downloads if available).
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Daily Overview |
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Panel: Gender, Responsibility, and the Politics of Identity Location: North Hall 113* link to join Session Chair: Nurit Novis | |
| Presentation 4 | |
Dancing dialogism (ONLINE) 1: University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland; 2: University of Geneva, Switzerland; 3: Compagnie La Méthode, Switzerland This paper explores the potential of Bakhtinian dialogism explored through the medium of embodied artistic practice. Dialogism conceives subjectivity as polyphonic, constituted by multiple interacting voices. However, the focus of research has primarily been within verbal or textual contexts, with limited exploration in other formats. The NOTUS project (2024–2025) addressed this gap by examining how dialogical processes unfold in movement, creation, and shared reflection. Developed as an art–science–education collaboration between psychologists from the University of Neuchâtel, the contemporary dance company “La Méthode” and a Swiss High-School, the Notus Project unfolded through successive, interdependent phases: the co-creation of a choreographic piece for two dancers inspired by Bakhtin’s ideas of polyphony, bivocality, and dialogical becoming; and a series of participatory workshops with sixteen-year-old high-school students who attended the performance. These workshops, led jointly by the researchers and the artists, combined movement, writing, and collective discussion, allowing students to experience dialogism as a lived and embodied relation rather than a theoretical notion. In this paper, we focus on what occurs when dialogism is approached in and through action. We analyze how the artistic creation generated “dialogical artefacts”, like texts, gestures, and metaphors mediating between scientific and aesthetic logics, and how students, in turn, interpreted and re-enacted dialogical principles in their own bodily and verbal productions. This analysis proposes a reinterpretation of dialogism as a theory of discourse and an embodied epistemology, where meaning, biography and identity emerge through reciprocal movement between bodies, voices and perspectives, at the intersection of scientific and artistic logics. | |

