About
Monica van der Haagen-Wulff (*1965), Doctorate of Creative Arts (DCA), is an Associate Lecturer at the Chair for Education and Cultural Sociology in the Department of Education and Social Sciences at the Faculty of Humanities, University of Cologne. Her teaching and research interests include: Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Gender and Queer Studies, Migration, Intersectionality, Postcolonial/Decolonial Feminist Theories and Methodologies, Globalisation, Global Cities, Affect Theories, Performance Studies, Theories of Embodiement, Fictocritical Writing, Critical Heritage and Historical Memory Studies.
Monica has an intercultural dance and performance background, and her main research focus is on how practice and theory can be merged to create new knowledges, and in so doing decentre Eurocentric knowledge constructions. She is interested in questions of critical heritage, exploring, in particular, the possibilities of embodied ways of understanding, remembering and in the process decolonising history. Part of this process involves critically reflecting on her own long-term cultural immersion in learning traditional Cirebonese mask dance and other Indonesian traditional and contemporary dance forms, as a white woman, couched within the contact zone of colonial inspired global inequality. She locates this inquiry within contemporary debates around decolonisation and repatriation and asks questions about cultural appropriation and the possibilities and limits of ethical forms of cultural exchange in relation to embodied knowledges such as dance and identity.
Monica has published in international academic journals such as The International Journal of Diverse Identities, Portal Journal of Multidisciplinary International Studies, and Routledge Journal Postcolonial Studies but she also considers Performance as part of her theoretical output, and has performed in Australia and internationally. Her performances include the Performance Laboratory and Symposium in October 2017: ‘Body Hegemonies 2017 – an experimental Transfer’, ‘The Tangled Garden’, a collaboration between Sidetrack Performance Group from Sydney and Komunitas CCL from Bandung, Indonesia; ‘Troppo Obscura: A Peepshow of Historical Perversity’, a multimedia, intercultural Installation performed as part of the Sydney Carnivale Multicultural Arts Festival, and ‘Girt by Sea’, a marathon outdoor Indonesian-Australian performance installation at Manly Cove Beach.
Mission statement
In my research, teaching and performance I seek to find innovative ways of interweaving embodied, affective and aesthetic methods with critical theory in order to find new ways to critically reflect on and make visible (my own) / humanities involvement and implication in global history. It involves an examination of the historical entanglement of slavery, colonialism, and global capitalist expansion together with the hegemonic knowledges, structural inequalities, and ecological damage that this historical trajectory has produced. By applying a transdiciplinary theory/practice approach to this examination of history, and the new knowledges it produces, I hope to find less violent, more equitable, ethical, and ecologically sustainable ways of imagining a future that can adequately deal with the current global complexity. My vision, and that which I work towards in all areas of my life, is the emergence of a global intelligence for social justice and ecological sustainability. A global ‘intelligence’ that includes the manifold and rich range of modernity’s historically devalued and excluded local knowledges, indigenous, women’s and non-human, not in exclusion of established knowledge but in dialogue with and expansion thereof. This pluriversal stance (Haltung), based on a democratic, participatory, cross-border approach, will depend on new and equitable ways of making digital technologies available and accessible across the globe through formal and informal education, research, and creative endeavours. To live this vision will take commitment, humility, critical self-reflection, and the ability to persevere through the tension of alterity and potential conflict and facing up to the vulnerability of the unknown. Lastly, and this is my greatest hope, is that we as humanity begin to see ourselves in the other, and the other in ourselves, including the non-human down to its smallest elements, and realise there are no grand singular solutions, only us.