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.
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).
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?Read more
Thanks to a SSHRC Partnership Engage grant, the PRI has collaborated with the Montreal theatre company Post Humains for the research-creation that led to the elaboration of their play i/O. The play is presented at the Centre du Théâtre d’Aujourd’hui, salle Michelle-Rossignol, from November 16 to December 4, 2021, in Montreal. For an interview with the playwright and director of the company, Dominique Leclerc, see here.
Rick Dolphijn (Utrecht) will give a presentation related to his most recent book on October 7, 2021. The talk takes place 10:00-11:30 (EDT) on Zoom. Please see link below to log on or contact Mitch Goldsmith (mg12vh@brocku.ca).
“The Wounds that Matter”
In my recently published monograph, The Philosophy of Matter; a meditation, one of the key concepts is ‘the wound’. Much inspired by literature and the arts, this talk aims to explore woundedness in different ways; how wounds bring us together? How are we “born to embody” our wounds, as Joë Bousquet would say it? And what is pain teaching us about the non-fascist life?
Dr. Rick Dolphijn is an Associate Professor at Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University, and a Honorary Professor at the University of Hong Kong (2017-2023). He published widely on new materialism, posthumanism and affect theory. His monograph The Philosophy of Matter: a meditation was published with Bloomsbury Academic in August 2021.
Posthumanism: Cinema Philosophy Media: A Roundtable Series
Announcing the Inaugural Event:
‘Running Time’: Atanarjuat 20th Anniversary Roundtable and Celebration
Oct. 06, 2021, 6:00-9:00 pm EST (via Zoom)
Twenty years ago this fall saw the release of Atanarjuat, The Fast Runner: “an exciting action thriller set in ancient Igloolik, the film unfolds as a life-threatening struggle of love, jealousy, murder and revenge between powerful natural and supernatural characters” (IsumaTV). The first-ever feature fiction film in Inuktitut, written, directed, produced, and performed by an Inuit cast and crew, Atanarjuat went on to win six Genie awards, including Best Picture and the Camera d’or for best first feature film at the 2001 Cannes International Film Festival, among many other awards. In 2015 it was voted the best Canadian film of all time.
Well before contemporary debates around identity politics, cultural appropriation, and equity, diversity, and inclusivity, Atanarjuat set the terms of the discussion while laying out a vision for the future of Indigenous peoples in Canada and around the world—a vision of self-determination, however, that has yet to be fulfilled. The past twenty years has seen Atanarjuat’s significance manifest in several different ways: as a story the film continues to resonate all over the world with Indigenous and non-Indigenous audiences alike; as cultural object the film stands as one of the most significant achievements of Indigenous self-representation; as a film Atanarjuat represents a great work of art cinema.
This roundtable brings together key members of the original team behind the film—writer-director Zacharias Kunuk and Lucy Tulugarjuk (Puja)—with an international panel of scholars: Erich Fox Tree (Associate Professor, Religion and Culture, WLU); Jenny Kerber (Associate Professor, English and Film Studies); Pauline Clague (Associate Professor, Manager of Cultural Resilience Hub, Jumbunna Institute for Indigenous Education & Research, University of Technology, Sydney); Simone Bignall (Senior Researcher in the Jumbunna Research Hub for Indigenous Nations and Collaborative Futures, University of Technology, Sydney).
For more information contact: Russell Kilbourn > rkilbourn@wlu.ca
Zoom registration link: https://wilfrid-laurier.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJUrcOqgpz8jGtazM3ZJ4HbhSV11jvpAf3nc
The organizers wish to thank SSHRC, the Posthumanism Research Institute, the WLU Student’s Union, the Faculty of Arts, and the Department of English and Film Studies for supporting this event.
We are proud to announce the publication of the inaugural issue of our journal. You can read it here.
Please join our panel of speakers to discuss posthumanist perspectives on education on Tuesday December 8, 2020, 2:00 to 3:30 pm (EST).
To join the meeting, click on the link on the PDF file (downloadable here) or click here.
We will be hosting a live-streaming of the panel Posthuman Energy/ies on June 1st, 2020, 13:00-17:00 EST.
The panel is hosted by Christine Daigle (Brock) and Mickey Vallee (Athabasca) with paper presentations by Fiona Blaikie (Brock), David Fancy (Brock), Emile Fromet de Rosnay (Victoria), Suzanne McCullagh (Athabasca), Jill Planche (Brock).
Attendees will be able to interact with presenters via chat box. There is no fee for this event.
Details on the afternoon program and login information are pasted below the poster and also available as a PDF document here.
How to join the livestream:
Please click on the link below to take part in the panel:
https://stream.lifesizecloud.com/extension/6198039/4a6bb38b-5ea3-4253-bb84-129a92a85046
You can ask questions via the chat box. The moderator will ask your questions during the question period following each presentation as well as during the general discussion period at the end of the event.
Program:
13:00-13:05 Logistics – Camila Mugan
13:05-13:15 Mickey Vallee “Introduction: Exhausted by boredom: Reinventing the dynamic of being in an age of global uncertainty”
13:15-13:35 Emile Fromet de Rosnay “Posthuman Anarchy/ies”
13:45-14:05 David Fancy “Echealogy, Resonance, Method”
14:15-14:35 Fiona Blaikie “Posthuman energy/ies: a visual-textual trans-disciplinary assemblage”
14:35-14:50 Pause
14:50-15:10 Jill Planche “Minor Theatre’s Dynamic Spaces of Caring Sociability in Neil Coppen’s NewFoundLand”
15:20-15:40 Suzanne McCullagh “Energetic Subject of Posthuman Grace”
15:50-16:00 Christine Daigle “Concluding remarks: Are we energized yet?”
16:00-17:00 General discussion
ABSTRACTS AND BIOS
Emile Fromet de Rosnay “Posthuman Anarchy/ies”
I seek to reconsider potentiality in light of posthuman energy/ies via an “axiological anarchy”. Dissolving Will and action helps us to avoid reproducing humanistic and biopolitical assumptions. I propose 6 anarch(ist)ic axioms: 1. there is no destiny or predetermination (no essence). 2. The open life is infinite and indeterminate. 3. Action is not the expression of Will. 4. “Action” is the emergence into presence of exteriority. 5. That Will is (seen as) the expression of essence is a form of violence on the living. 6. Freedom is allowing multiplicity to emerge without presupposition.
Emile Fromet de Rosnay teaches at the University of Victoria where he is also the director of the UVic interdisciplinary graduate program in Cultural, Social and Political Thought (CSPT). He has a forthcoming experimental book at Punctum Books, Taunting the Useful, that develops a theory of the “virtual useless”.
David Fancy “Echealogy, Resonance, Method”
This paper proposes echealogy to be a recurring disposition in philosophy: an interest in concepts, logics, and relationalities of resonance (synichó), as well as notions reverberative of resonance such as vibration or modulation. Echealogy as resonative thought engages reverberatively with a whole range of energetic and vibratory phenomena, modulatory behaviours, and singularities. Echealogy can play an important role in exploring distributed subjectivities beyond the human. The paper elaborates on Simondon’s notion of resonance to explore the ways in which echealogy and ontology are mutually imbricated.
David Fancy is Professor in the Department of Dramatic Arts, Brock University. He brings his theoretical and philosophical interests in immanentist thought to the intersection of a range of disciplines including philosophy, theatre studies, performance studies, science and technology studies, and critical disability studies.
Fiona Blaikie “Posthuman energy/ies: a visual-textual trans-disciplinary assemblage”
I am drawn to immanent and transcendent energy/ies inherent in posthumanism’s expanding zoe rising, alongside crises of global capitalism and corrupt authoritarianism, and the transformation of anthropocentrism. Rosi Braidotti’s (2019) explores situated conditions of potential and limitation, re/framed in and through material feminisms as re/un/worlding assemblages. Drawing on Christine Daigle and Christina Landry (2013) work on de Beauvoir, and Rosi Braidotti’s empirical transcendental, I present a textual-visual assemblage, through anthropologist Kathleen Stewart’s (2019) worlding, as a way of thinking multi-modally about relationality, contexts, ecologies of being, living and dying, through worlding words, ideas and images.
Fiona Blaikie is a professor and former Dean, Faculty of Education, Brock University. She has won numerous awards for teaching and scholarship, most recently the 2020 USSEA and InSEA Ziegfeld award for art education. Currently, she is editing an interdisciplinary collection for Routledge on gender, sexuality, and visual identity constructs.
Jill Planche “Minor Theatre’s Dynamic Spaces of Caring Sociability in Neil Coppen’s NewFoundLand”
Postapartheid South Africa’s site of ongoing social construction calls for a robust ontological and material practice to understand the “philosophical implication of energies” of self conception – large and small. In its psychological, political and material spaces, Deleuze’s ‘minor’ theatre offers new and generative ways to move beyond identitarian grounding of assumed identities, towards lines and intensities driven by potentiality of self ordering, evoking power dynamics of vibrant bodies and territory moving – enfolding – in construction of subjectivity and mapping of spaces. I explore these concepts through Neil Coppen’s play NewFoundLand; his break from the singular voices of constraining identities to imagine new non-racial, non-gendered, immanent imaginaries.
Jill Planche PhD is an independent scholar whose work engages literature and theatre in the space of postapartheid South Africa. Current interests include ‘minor’ theatre’s role in the contemporary discourse, exploring decolonizing knowledges, feminist geography, social/cultural policy (particularly social justice) and posthumanism.
Suzanne McCullagh “Energetic Subject of Posthuman Grace”
This paper sketches a concept of posthuman grace as a way of thinking through Kathryn Yusoff’s claim that in order to imagine a future without fossil fuels it is necessary to understand their agency and the ways that contemporary geological subjectivity is constituted with them. The concept of grace will be created by amplifying the resonances between Saint Augustine’s notion of grace and Benedict de Spinoza immanent naturalism. Spinoza teaches that becoming active requires understanding a being’s capacity for being affected. Posthuman grace is a conceptual tool for developing an understanding of energetic subjectivity as co-constituted by human collectives and material compositions.
Suzanne McCullagh is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the Centre for Humanities at Athabasca University. She is currently working on a collaborative, interdisciplinary research project titled “Contesting Extinctions” which explores and develops conceptual tools in the Environmental Humanities for conceptualizing and responding to contemporary ecological realities.
HOSTS
Christine Daigle is professor of philosophy and Director of the Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University. Her current research explores the concept of posthuman vulnerability and its ethical potential from a posthumanist material feminist point of view. She also works on environmental posthumanities and issues related to the Anthropocene.
Mickey Vallee holds the Canada Research Chair (Tier II) in Community, Identity and Digital Media at Athabasca University. His research explores how events of uncertainty (such as environmental uncertainty, transitional justice, and currently pandemics) presuppose our obligation to rethink foundational concepts belonging to body, community, and communication.
We will be hosting a round-table of education experts on the theme “Posthumanism and Education” on March 19, 2020, 12:00-13:30, in Cairns 207. All are welcome!
