Articles by author: cdaigle

  • Special PRI panel at Congress

    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.

    Categories: event, news

  • Posthumanism and Pedagogy/ies Panel Discussion

    Join us on March 24, 2023, 12:00-14:00 (ET) for this live-streamed panel discussion chaired by Fiona Blaikie, Associate Director of the PRI. Link to the livestream here. For more information email Christine Daigle or Veronique Rousseau.

    Panel description

    Moving beyond the idea that humans are central, this panel presentation will offer contemplation of posthuman pedagogy/ies as entangled, interconnected, and shaped by places, temporalities, situated im/materialities, cultures, and animating entities that impact teaching, learning and scholarship.

    Speakers

    Bretton Varga “Material (Re)shapings within Unspeakable/Uninterrupted Territories of Violence”

    Abstract: If history has taught us anything, it is that anti-Black violence is deeply embedded within the material, social, and political landscape of the United States. This presentation unfolds within the (latest) occurrence of anti-Black violence in the United States: the unspeakable and senseless murder of Tyre Nichols. Using a posthuman lens, Bretton Varga brings into focus the non-human actors that continue to play a role in the (un/re)foldings of countless deathworlds and the way which they (re)animate a far-reaching arc of act(ion)s: trauma, racism, death, joy, love, and hope. Bridging (critical) social and material analysis, he (re)positions non-human entities as entry points into discourses of/around unspeakable acts of violence while also suggesting how materialism can also foster educational conversations that are rooted in desire and hope.

    Bio: Bretton A. Varga, Ph.D., is an assistant professor of History-Social Science at California State University, Chico. His research works with(in) critical posthuman theories of race, materiality, and temporality to explore how visual methods and aesthetics can be used to unveil historically marginalized perspectives and layers (upon layers) of history that haunt the world around us. His work can be found across a range of disciplines including arts-based research, environmental studies, curriculum studies, social studies, and post-qualitative inquiry.

    Kay Sidebottom “[Birdsong]: Pedagogies of Yearning, Surrender, and Learning from More-Than-Human Teachers”

    Abstract: Educating for and about a world that is not only “for us” but one that elevates animals, plants, and the wider eco-systems on which we rely is a vital shift in times of ecological destruction. For Wallin, this is a pedagogy that teaches using “the filthy lesson of symbiosis” (Wallin, in Carstens 2018). However, at present much education focused around environmental issues continues to reinforce nature/culture binaries; the environment is at the service of humans, and neo-liberal ideals of sustainability are pervasive.  Our current predicament calls for a curriculum that encourages notions of kinship with non-human others; accepts complexity; and reframes our attachment to a shared world. In this presentation I offer a diffractive re-telling of a research project, in which participants (both human and non-) came together to explore what happens when we de-centre humans as educators. Ceasing to privilege ourselves as the ultimate instructors and holders of knowledge through artistic provocations and fabulations, we aim to inspire others to begin similar processes of noticing, de-centering and surrender in order to enact posthuman ideas in their own pedagogical practice.

    Bio: Dr Kay Sidebottom is a Lecturer in Education, and Programme Director for a new MSc Education at the University of Stirling. Her current research explores how teachers can work with posthuman ideas to facilitate meaningful and disruptive education spaces for our complex times. With a background in community and adult education, her pedagogical specialisms include critical, radical and anarchist education, arts-based practice, and community philosophy.

    Katie Strom and Shakhnoza Kayumova “Toward Pluriversal Praxis in Science Education”

    Abstract: Despite multifaceted reform efforts in science education, inequities continue to persist among youth from non-dominant communities (Calabrese Barton & Tan, 2019). These inequities are perpetuated in part by the rational humanist perspectives that underlie scientific knowledge and practices in schools, which impose western, colonial epistemology and ontology (i.e., ways of knowing and being) as universal and correct, while rendering marginalized youth’s linguistic, cultural, and everyday resources as inferior or illegitimate. In this presentation, we map key features of western colonial thinking-being to dominant science knowledge and practice, showing how these logics continuously construct youth from non-dominant groups in deficit terms. We then explore what it might mean to construct a pluriversal praxis in science education by embracing an ontoepistemological shift based on relationality, interdependence, embodiment, ethics, and care toward youth, diverse communities, and more-than-human collectives.

    Bios:

    Dr. Kayumova is an Associate Professor in the Department of STEM Education and Teacher Development at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, a Research Scientist at the Kaput Center for STEM Education Research and Innovation, and the founder of the STEAM Language, Learning, and Identity Research lab. Dr. Kayumova’s research closely examines the ways in which STEM education could be a context for empowerment and positive science identity development of linguistically and ethnically/racially diverse learners, and thereby increasing the representation of people of color in STEM fields.

    Kathryn (Katie) Strom is an Associate Professor of Educational Leadership at California State University, East Bay, Director of CSUEB’s Center for Research on Equity and Collaborative Engagement (CRECE), and co-founder of the Posthuman Research Nexus (a global organization that supports and connects scholars engaging in posthuman and other complexity perspectives). Dr. Strom’s research combines multiple critical and complex/neomaterialist theories to study teacher learning and practice (particularly in support of minoritized youth), as well as to advocate more broadly for more relational, difference-affirmative ways of thinking-being-doing in education and academia.

    Categories: event, news

  • Upcoming talk on “Posthumanism for Sustainability”

    Don’t miss this talk by Dr. Çağdaş Dedeoğlu on March 2nd, 2023. You can attend in person in PLZ 600F at Brock University or join the livestream here: https://stream.lifesizecloud.com/extension/12627650/edf0a4e1-a920-44e8-8744-5dacc2c88b7c

    PDF file with active links

     

    Categories: event

  • Interconnections vol. 1 no. 2 is now published!

    We are proud to announce that issue 2 of Interconnections. Journal of Posthumanism/Interconnexions. Revue de posthumanisme is now published. You can access the issue here.

     

    Categories: news

  • DESMONTE – A performance and talk by Pedro Oliveira

    This performance for pre-recorded voice and live electronics explores vocal timbre at the limits of the (juridical and symbolic) body. It offers a study on the so-called “automated dialect recognition” software in use by the German migration authorities since 2017 on cases of undocumented asylum seekers. It explores the fabricated connection between voice and citizenship, it explores the failures of machine listening to partake in the “overrepresentation of Man” (to follow Sylvia Wynter), while at the same time understands the spaces delimited by such failure to be generative of different pathways in which it might be possible for the voice to refuse to announce the body and thus rethink (or unthink) the figuration of the “human.” The piece is entirely constructed with and through the voice of Brazilian death metal singer Fernanda Lira, originally commissioned by Festival Novas Frequências 2021 and the INITIAL funding program of the Berlin Senate for Culture and Europe and the Akademie der Künste Berlin.

    The performance will be followed by a discussion with the artist hosted by Dr. Christine Daigle (PRI) exploring the affordances of the piece in the ongoing conversation on posthumanisms and coloniality.

    Pedro Oliveira is a researcher, sound artist, and educator working in decolonial and sonic thinking (https://oliveira.work/). He has previously worked as a Postdoctoral fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies; a lecturer in Musicology and Media Studies at the Humboldt-University Berlin; as well as a teaching and research associate in Media and Cultural Studies at the Heinrich-Heine Universität Düsseldorf. Artistic residencies include the Max-Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, and IASPIS/EMS, both in Stockholm. He is a founding member of the research platform Decolonising Design; he holds a PhD from the Universität der Künste Berlin, and an MA from the Hochschule für Künste Bremen.

    Oliveira’s work inquires the coloniality of listening and its implications on racialized violence and the policing of bodies in urban and border spaces. He is currently researching the historical, aesthetic, and material articulations of so-called “dialect recognition technologies” and their deployment in the asylum system of Germany; this project has so far been partially funded by the Goethe-Institut BrusselsSenatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa BerlinDeutschlandfunk Kultur in collaboration with the CTM FestivalKonstnärsnämnden Sweden, ZKM Karlsruhe in partnership with Akademie Solitude, and the Max-Planck Gesellschaft.

    Categories: event

  • Rescheduled round-table: “More Than Human. Posthumanism, Human-Technological Relations, and Bioethics

    This round-table will now take place on May 4th, 2022, 16:00 (EST). Please see the poster for how to join the meeting.

     

  • Round-table: More than Human: Posthumanism, Human-Technological Relations, Bioethics

    The ‘Posthumanism: Cinema Philosophy Media’ Roundtable Series presents:

    MORE THAN HUMAN: Posthumanism, Human-Technological Relations, and Bioethics

    March 29, 2022 @ 7:00 P.M.

    Zoom Meeting: https://wilfrid-laurier.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJEsduqtpzsoGdBH4VOdDieN4ykgVKgw4GKK

    Biohacking, biomedical advancements, bioengineering, and transhumanist hopes, aspirations and fixations – How do technological advancements extend what it means to be human?

    This roundtable discussion seeks to break down the barriers between different perspectives upon and methods of analysis of transhumanism, biohacking, and bioethics. From film studies, to a cultural studies lens on biohacking as a subculture, to the latest mind-body interface technologies, how we take up our relationships to and with technological advancements is central to how we understand what it means to be (or not to be) human.

    Join an engaging roundtable with:

    • Jeremy Hunsinger, Associate Professor, Department of Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University
    • Andrea Austin, Associate Professor, Department of English and Film Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University
    • William Brown, Assistant Professor, Department of Theatre and Film, University of British Columbia
    • Alex Pearlman, Communications Director, Science and Technology Reporter, Research Affiliate at MIT Media LabConcentric by Ginkgo

    For more information contact: Russell Kilbourn rkilbourn@wlu.ca or Julia Empey empe3530@mylaurier.ca

    Categories: event, news

  • Talk by Dr. Myra Hird on Waste

    Dr. Myra Hird (Queen’s University) will be giving a talk on “Waste: a Tale of Two Problems” on March 21st, 2022, 11:00-12:00 ET. This talk is jointly hosted by the Environmental Sustainability Research Centre, the Sustainability, Science and Society program (SSAS) and the Posthumanism Research Institute (PRI) and will be live-streamed here.

    Categories: event, news

  • Decentering the Nature-Culture Divide in Diplomacy

    The North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative (NACDI) invites you to attend our virtual panel, Decentering the Nature-Culture Divide in Diplomacy, which carries forward the issues and debates that foregrounded our 2021 summit, Players: We Are All Practitioners. Hosted by NACDI in partnership with the Posthumanism Research Institute, our virtual event will be held on 16 February 2022 at 2:00 – 3:30 pm (ET), 1:00-2:30 pm (CT), and 11 am-12:30 am (PT).

    **Click here to register to attend this free event!*

    Building on the North American Cultural Diplomacy Initiative’s work to address the question of culture’s role in diplomacy, this event focuses on statist diplomacy as a Eurocentric practice to advance a discussion of diplomacy that is refracted by applying posthumanist and post-anthropocentrist lenses. Taking as a starting point forms of diplomacy on the North American continent that were, and continue to be practiced by Indigenous Peoples, the panel also brings into play Islamic perspectives and posthumanist discourses.

    This panel suggests that to properly examine “cultural diplomacy,” the centrality of a nation-state-based understanding of “culture” that excludes other ways of knowing and stands in opposition to “nature” must be problematized. Viewing diplomatic practice and orientation through the lens of what Glen Coulthard (2014) terms “grounded normativity”, this session challenges the ways in which Cartesian dualism of nature and culture provide a limited understanding of being in and relating to the world. Re-orientating our relationship to time and place, grounded normativity centers histories, practices, and ways of relating to one another which contest the state-centric and settler-colonial orders and broadens the scope of diplomacy to include non-human players.

    Categories: event, news

  • Roundtable on Posthumanism, Cinema, Memory

    We are happy to co-host this round-table event with a special guest presentation by Dr. Anna Amza Reading. The event takes place on Monday February 28, 2022, 11:00-14:00 EDT.

    What does it mean to approach memory from a critical posthumanist perspective?

    Please join us for a roundtable discussion on the intersection of cinema, posthumanism, and memory studies. The topic of memory affords unique opportunities for posthumanist inquiry, including (but not limited to): object-oriented memory; environmental memory; animal memory; Indigenous memory; feminist memory; radical alterity and memory; post-anthropomorphic memory; post-apocalyptic memory; multidirectional memory. Rosi Braidotti revalues memory as one of the “main criteria for posthuman theory,” a positive life-affirming force of imagination. Cary Wolfe maintains that, in a certain sense, memory has always been posthuman: in its cultural and institutional forms it has historically relied on prosthetic supports, technologies like writing, for the recording and storage of information or knowledge. Of these technical supports, writing is the “fundamental historically identifiable form” of the “exteriorization of memory.” This is the de-ontologization characteristic of modern memory whose roots, of course, are considerably older than modernity—a modern memory now supported by digital audiovisual media. In thinking about memory and its relation to cinema, posthumanist theory tends to privilege science fiction film, whether dystopian or otherwise. Yet, close attention to audiovisual style also allows for a critical interrogation of such questions as whether or not a given film text actually represents a given posthumanist concept, properly speaking, or whether the film ultimately perpetuates some form of anthropocentric or neo-humanist understanding of the relations between the human as currently understood and what comes after or falls outside or beyond. It remains to be seen to what degree posthuman memory names a modality of human experience that is as much about the present or future, marshalling these temporalities in the service of a memory that transcends a mere relation to the past—a ‘making present of the past’ (Richard Terdiman)—with the potential to operate at a global scale far beyond discrete social groupings. The ultimate question, perhaps, is whether such a posthuman memory will still wear a human face.

    Our four panelists will share their varied approaches to memory studies, posthumanism, and cinema in a discussion that hopes to further illuminate how audiovisual media as “prosthetic support” expresses and engages with memory in a posthumanist context. This will be an online event supported by Zoom to be held Monday February 28, 11:00am-2:00pm ET..

    Please see the poster for Zoom webinar registration information. Also available here.