Author: Angela Martinez Dy

Dr Angela Martinez Dy is an entrepreneurial community builder invested in liberatory unlearning.

Call for Participants – Of Ghosts and Compost: An Open Mic Grief Tending Ritual

Angela Martinez Dy

‘One day, in Dantewada too the dead will begin to speak. And it will not just be dead humans, it will be the dead land, dead rivers, dead mountains, and dead creatures in dead forests that will insist on a hearing.’ – Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story (2015)

This post is a call for participants for a creative session at the International Critical Management Studies Conference 2025, 18-20 June in Manchester, UK. The conference theme is ‘Regenerative Critical Management Studies’.

Event Description

Who and what has died to enable CMS to live? What haunting ghosts must we compost in order to grow something new? The natural process of regeneration requires that what comes before is, though decay and transformation, turned into fuel and fertilizer. However, in contemporary late digital capitalism, there is a persistent refusal to either slow down, turn around, or sit with that which is decaying or passing away, and acknowledge the impact of this on the present and future. History is often called upon only to undergird future ambitions, not stayed with, nor dwelt upon long enough for us to process and integrate its knowledge and lessons. As such, the important human task of memory-keeping is marginalised, disrupting and denying the relationship between the past and the present, not to mention the future.

Emergent work in hauntological pedagogies (Nathan Tanner, 2022) and on the ‘ghostly’ nature of race (Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2020) explores how systems of power relations can be ghostlike in their ability to shape the present in subtle yet material ways, relying on an ignorance or mischaracterisation of the facts of history to do so. At the same time, the speed at which the  news cycle, global war machine, and climate catastrophe race ahead, plus the sheer volume and seemingly endless nature of the brutal tragedies and losses – human, animal, and planetary – to which we have become witness (Roy, 2015), inhibit our ability to feel our emotions, and especially the multi-faceted grief which, when stuck in our bodyminds, results in systemic illness. A facilitated and collective process of naming, unpacking, feeling and processing can enable consciousness around these issues to be formed, so we can shift our collective energies, and attention.

This proposed in-person session offers conference participants a dedicated space and ritualised container to remember, reflect upon what is haunting us, and grieve that which has been lost, died or passed away in order for such a thing as ‘critical management studies’ to first, exist, and second, be regenerated through the process upon which the conference attendees are collectively embarking. As meaning making beings, humans understand ritual in a felt sense, as a language that speaks without words (Weller, 2015). Therefore, this session will be organised as an ‘open mic grief tending ritual’, loosely based on two traditions: that of the grief tending rituals of the Dagara People of Burkina Faso (Some, 1997), and that of contemporary open mic poetry events and poetry slams. It will incorporate carefully facilitated opening and closing of the circle, rhythmic music and movement, and short and longer sharing segments for participants to contribute their own thoughts and creative products. The agenda for the session will go something like this:

10 min – Drop in and get grounded, with rhythmic music
10 min – Calling in and building a container of support
10 min – Short sharing in large group
5 min – Move the emotions through – energetic music and movement
40 min – Open Mic – 2-3 min time limit (depending on attendee numbers)
5 min – Move the emotions through – energetic music and movement
10 min – Reflective Sharing and close

The session aligns with the theme of Regenerative Critical Management Studies in an anti-racist and decolonial way, by insisting upon the relevance of history, hauntings, the past, and the dead, to our contemporary discussions of academia’s role in late-stage digital capitalism. It asserts that we cannot challenge systemic inequities, persistent neocolonialism and corporate imperialism, nor create new possibilities for a better future, without accounting for and grieving our losses. We will treat haunting, death, loss and grief as the shared and collective experience that is our birthright, resisting the neoliberal individualism of self-care with a model of community care and composting, which is fundamental to building a generative seedbed for a renewed CMS community.

Call for Participants

CMS cannot regenerate without first composting what is now passing away. This creative session calls for participants interested in collectively reflecting and sharing on the below prompts:

  • Who or what should the CMS community remember?
  • What grief do you bring to be composted? OR What do the dead insist must be heard?

To express your interest, please complete this MS form by 31 January 2025 with your name, contact info, relationship to CMS community, why you would like to attend, and your responses to the prompts above. Responses will be seen only by the convenor and will remain confidential.

Please don’t feel obliged to offer extensive detail, but only initial reflections that will allow the convenor to understand your reasons for attending, what you wish to contribute to the space, and what accommodations may be required. Criteria for inclusion will be focused on relevance and engagement with the aims of the session, maximising safety of the space, and increasing diversity of perspectives represented.

The convenor will contact all interested parties to advise whether or not they are invited to participate, and offer further joining instructions.

About the Convenor

Dr Angela Martinez Dy (she/her) is an entrepreneurial community builder invested in liberatory unlearning. As a Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Loughborough University London, her expertise, research interests and communities of practice revolve around digital entrepreneurship, anti-racist intersectional cyberfeminism, and critical realist philosophy. A poet and scholar-activist with a track record of creating impact through community-based initiatives, collaborations, organisational formation and development, Angela is a queer immigrant woman belonging to Filipinx diaspora. She writes at Mangrove Road.

References

Karkazis, K., & Jordan-Young, R. (2020). Sensing Race as a Ghost Variable in Science, Technology, and Medicine. Science Technology and Human Values, 45(5), 763–778. https://doi.org/10.1177/0162243920939306

Nathan Tanner, M. (2022). Hauntological Pedagogies: Confronting the Ghosts of Whiteness and Moving towards Racial and Spiritual Justice. Religions, 13(1). https://doi.org/10.3390/rel13010083

Roy, A. (2015) Capitalism: A Ghost Story. London: Verso.

Some, M. P. (1997). Ritual: Power, Healing and Community. Penguin.

Weller, F. (2015). The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief. North Atlantic Books.

Reflections on IACR 2024 Gender Roundtable: A Critical Moment for CR Gender Studies?

Angela Martinez Dy

As a panel participant of the Gender roundtable that took place at the International Association for Critical Realism (IACR) conference on Friday August 2nd 2024 at the University of Warwick, I understood this event as a critical moment in the trajectory of CR gender and feminism studies. I document the presentations and something of the discussion that followed, and set out my commitment to continued generative dialogue in the face of potentially divisive philosophical differences.

As I have written elsewhere with colleagues, gender studies and feminism finds itself in crisis over a series of debates that to some may seem unresolvable. The casual efficacy and continued relevance of the body and materiality is something that critical realists bring as a challenge to discourse-centric poststructuralist feminism. Our panel brought this topic to the fore from different angles: Steph Grohmann discussing how gender, once considered emergent from sex, seems to have in late stage capitalism become its progenitor, Caroline New reaffirming both the centrality of sexual dimorphism and the fluidity of gender, while noting the challenges of generating meaningful listening and discourse between radical feminists and trans activists, Ngozi Cadmus exploring the potential for distributed corporate agency of Black women in C-Suite executive positions, and Michiel Van Ingen introducing scholarship on social reproduction theory and masculinities to CR debates. For my part, I applied the CR depth ontology and the structure-agency-culture model to intersectional organisational inequality regimes. I was grateful to the audience for introducing additional relevant theory and concepts, as well as suggestions of inclusive practice, to further stretch our thinking.

Importantly, our panel was one of the most racially and gender diverse panels of the conference. This was by design, an intentional choice which was achieved by facilitating the participation of panellists focusing on intersectionality, and including an early career researcher. I agreed with one of the audience members that inclusive panels are achievable with care and effort. As a result of what took place both at our panel and during the AGM earlier in the conference, wherein women early career researchers highlighted the exclusivity of all-male panels and the lack of action since these issues were raised the year prior, I suggest that the IACR organisers have a strong responsibility to improve attendees’ experiences by standardising and exercising inclusive practices. That this was a subject of discussion that emerged in response to our panel happened because there were few other places to raise it. I hope IACR leverages the expertise, positive comments and collaborative energy that was shared in the discussion to form a regular means by which inclusivity can be improved.

Central to the debates in our panel was the issue of gender ontology, and how theorising about contemporary topics of sex and gender such as those regarding trans, intersex and nonbinary issues affects real people, and members of our communities. What I tried to make clear in my contributions to the discussion was that while we are indeed all affected by these concerns, we are affected in different ways and to different degrees.

Positionality matters, and our philosophical undertakings have real world implications. In that spirit, while I acknowledge that we may not agree with each other’s stances on sex and gender, and that we may not be able to bridge our ontological positions, we can commit to building an ethical bridge where we aim to reduce harm and violence that occurs as a result of people’s beliefs and behaviour around gender, and to centre those at most risk, while not ignoring effects on others.