The PRI has a special collaboration in place with EPTC (Society for Existential and Phenomenological Theory and Culture) through which we hold a special panel each year. This year’s panel will take place in the morning of May 30th and will comprise presentations and interactive activities. See you at York University!
Posthumanist Entanglements – The Beyond of Embodiment
Joint panel EPTC/Posthumanism Research Institute
York University, FC113
9:00-12:30, May 30, 2023
Organizer: Christine Daigle (Brock)
Chair: Trevor Norris (Brock)
Our panel will explore what it means to exist as entangled and embodied humans and nonhumans. Posthumanist theory and methodology seek to dismantle humanist constructs of human exceptionalism along with dualist thinking that separates the human from the nonhuman, nature from culture, and the mind from the body. Grounding their work in this approach, panelists will present their perspective on what these entanglements signify and
how they manifest but also will reflect on what methodologies are best suited to explore and communicate such entanglements. The goal of the panel is to expand our thinking about humanness, human and more-than-human connections, and bodily and material entanglements. To this end, we put to work a posthumanist methodological orientation for knowledge creation which champions postdisciplinarity along with a decolonization of research practices. The panel will be a space for idea generation and idea sharing. It will be launched by presentations by each speaker and unfold through grounding and interactive explorative activities. Attendees are asked to read the “Weird Research Manifesto” prior to attending and ask themselves how to think the new thoughts our world urgently needs.
Fiona Blaikie, “Contemporary Art as Immanent Experiential Praxis”
Posthuman artworlds shape and are shaped by the intuitive archeological ontologies of humans and non-humans, entangled materialities, spaces, limitations, and potentialities. There is a burgeoning tendency in western contemporary art making and exhibition that moves beyond the conventions of white cube gallery spaces, drawing on and expressing a Deleuzian ontology of immanence alongside Elizabeth St. Pierre’s conceptualization of the post qualitative. Focusing on works by Canadian artist Annie MacDonnell, Marina Abramovic, and artist Sophie Calle, contemporary art will be contemplated as immanent experiential praxis, as collaborative, performative, entangled, situated, and affective.
David Fancy, “Divination and Bridging Nature/Culture Divides”
Proceeding gnoseologically rather than epistemologically, the diviner resonates or feels their way through the world in order to bring events and arrangements, seemingly unknowable from the perspective of classical empiricism and its scientistic descendants, into awareness and into the world. The work of divination recalls Deleuze’s affirmation that ‘we must be Egyptologists’ in our reading of signs, an important invitation especially in the context of the Anthropocene where, as a species, we struggle to read, discern and engage with the complex ecologies of which we find ourselves part. The specific figure of the geomancer will be positioned as a key mode of diviner who proceeds via harnessing the complex relationalities between themselves and the earth’s many energetic bodies and forces. The figure of the geomancer will be proposed as a central conceptual persona involved in non-supremacist geophilosophical and geoartistic transindividual activities that can help imagine futures outside and beyond the Anthropocene.
Chris E. Hurst, “Being-with the Lifetimes and Deathtimes of a Shaggy Mane Mushroom”
This presentation will explore temporal entanglements with nonhuman kin, and specifically, the material-affectivity of lifetimes and deathtimes of a shaggy mane mushroom at Silent Lake Provincial Park. The presentation will illuminate some of the many ways in which times are entangled in relations of being-with place and being-with nonhuman kin in nature-based tourism, and what that might mean for conservation futures. The presentation will consider the productive possibilities of affective and sensory-based methodological practices for embodied temporal attunements with more-than-human nature places. The presentation will conclude with a discussion on (re)imagining (re)presentations of times in research and what it might mean to response- ably care for times as multiple, overlapping, and relationally entangled with affects, agencies, and other temporalities in nature-based tourism.
