Gat-her-ing at the dinner table : an arts-based invitation to organize differently in academia

Academic meetings often feel intimidating and can exclude people. How might we organize them differently to encourage connections? Welcome to our reimagining of Judy Chicago’s famous feminist art installation The Dinner Table, where you will encounter South African flowers, butterflies, bumblebees, and many other human and more-than-human materialities. At our Dinner Table we invited everyone to honour the legacy of feminist scholars who inspired them by employing the arts-based method of crafting, playfully attuning voices, senses, and bodies. In this space humans and nonhuman participants like flowers and butterflies formed vibrant connections with absent–present ‘guests' to join in a different kind of conversation at an academic conference. We call this feminist figurative practice of relationality and connections-in-action (agencement) Gat-her-ing. Gat-her-ing is our invitation to reimagine academia across differences and to explore alternative ways of organizing.