The Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies organises the DOING GENDER Lecture Series in cooperation with her partners. These lectures stress the importance of doing gender work combined with an active involvement in the practice of gender theory and research. The concept of DOING GENDER supports a hands-on approach to gender issues in the sense of social and political engagement with the new forms of gender inequalities that are taking shape in the world today. The lecture series wants to give space to the new generations of gender theorists and practitioners and to perspectives that innovate the field and do gender in new ways. Key is the notion of doing gender: what is the state of the art definition of gender? How do contemporary scholars and activists utilise this definition?

On Wednesday December 9, 2026, Professor María del Rosario Acosta López will give a Doing Gender Lecture entitled On Grammars of Listening as Grammars of the Unheard-Of (Inaudito): The Resistance of Testimony.

This lecture is jointly organized by the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies, the UU Memory and Heritage Network, the UU Graduate Gender Programme (GGeP) and the NOG.

Lecture: On Grammars of Listening as Grammars of the Unheard-Of (Inaudito): The Resistance of Testimony
My talk will be devoted to go over the main arguments of my most recent book, Gramáticas de la escucha: hacer audible lo inaudito (published with Herder in the spring of 2026 and forthcoming with Fordham, exp 2028).
As a result of my work with survivors of paramilitary violence in Colombia and police torture in Chicago, in trauma-informed contexts, the book is guided by one question: how to approach the epistemic and aesthetic effects of “traumatic violence” from a philosophical perspective? More specifically, I have asked myself what it would mean to listen to testimonies of these forms of violence without translating them into existing frameworks of meaning that risk reducing, silencing, and erasing their singularity. I describe this as a “radical form of listening,” and the book is fundamentally an investigation into the conditions of possibility for this form of listening from a decolonial perspective.

The book begins by exploring the kind and quality of “hermeneutic damage” we face when violence affects not only the bodies, lives, and worlds it aims to colonize, control, and destroy but also our ability to make sense of its devastating effects. I propose approaching this question through “grammars of listening,” defined as the criteria and rules that determine (and can also destabilize) what becomes legible as audible when colonizing traumatic violence is the grammar that organizes our listening. I ask then what kinds of experiences, forms of narration, and practices of sense—understood broadly—might disrupt, interrupt, question, and subvert those criteria to render the unheard and unheard-of aspects of traumatic violence audible.  This includes making them communicable, memorable, and believable, if and when possible.

Biography
María del Rosario Acosta López is Professor in the Department of Hispanic Studies and a Cooperating Faculty member in the departments of Comparative Literature and Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside.

She teaches and conducts research in aesthetics, critical theory, political philosophy, and decolonial studies, with an emphasis on issues of memory and trauma in the Americas. Her recent publications focus on aesthetics of resistance in Latin American art, decolonial perspectives on memory and history, and epistemic injustice and epistemic violence.

Maria del Rosario Acosta (copyright Rebe López)

She has recently co-edited volumes on transitional justice in Colombia (Planeta 2023) and politics of memory in Colombia (World Humanities Report, 2023), and special issues on Memory and Art in Colombia (H-Art 2025) and Latin America and the Caribbean (Palabra y razón, 2024).
Her most recent book is titled Gramáticas de la escucha: hacer audible lo inaudito (Herder, 2026, and in preparation in English for Fordham).

Doing Gender Lecture by Prof. María del Rosario Acosta López

Wednesday December 9, 2026
Lecture: On Grammars of Listening as Grammars of the Unheard-Of (Inaudito): The Resistance of Testimony
Time: 17:15 – 19:00 hrs.
Location: Utrecht – Janskerkhof 15A, room 0.04
Chair: Ana Miranda Mora and Susanne Knittel
Respondent: tba
Registration: registration is appreciated. Send an email to nog@uu.nl with your name and affiliation.

Background reading (downloads):