News and events

  • Livestream Talk by Evelien Geerts – September 22, 2023

    Wednesday, September 06, 2023 | By

    Dr. Evelien Geerts (Birmingham/Linköping) will speak on “Haunting Spectro(micro)politics: The Powers of Alt-right Memes and Critical Posthumanisms”, September 22, 2023, 15:00-16:30 (ET) 

    Given form by memetic vignettes and visuals, memetic theory, and critical posthumanist philosophies, this talk will explore the world of far-right (post-)pandemic politics by zooming in on the Belgian alt-right youth movement Schild & Vrienden [Shield & Friends] and the haunting spectro(micro)politics of Shield & Friends’ alt-right memes.After contextualizing the Flemish nationalist tenets of Shield & Friends’ memetic (meta-)politics against the backdrop of these (post-)pandemic more-than-human crisis times, a critical posthumanist argument is constructed in favor of taking the spectro(micro)political scene-setting of – and by – memes seriously. Doing so reveals how memes are always part artefact, part agential phenomena with microfascist and counter-microfascist potential. Such a critical posthumanist take on memetic theory that conceptualizes memes-as-(counter-)microfascisms also helps us better understand the macropolitical grasp of Shield and Friends and the global alt-right on today’s neoliberal digitalized societies of control, consequently broadening the reach of contemporary critical theory and activism.

    Link to the livestream: https://stream.lifesizecloud.com/extension/12627650/edf0a4e1-a920-44e8-8744-5dacc2c88b7c

    Biography: Evelien Geerts (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Cruz) (e.m.l.geerts@bham.ac.uk) is an interdisciplinary philosopher, a Research Fellow (University of Birmingham, UK), and an affiliated researcher at the Posthumanities Hub and the Eco- and Bioart Lab (Linköping University, Sweden). Her work focuses on questions of identity, difference, and violence, critical posthumanist, new materialist, and Deleuzoguattarian approaches, and theorizing in (post-)Anthropocenic crisis times. She previously has published in Philosophy Today, Women’s Studies International Forum, and CounterText, and recently co-edited special issues on “The Somatechnics of Violence” (Somatechnics: Journal of Bodies – Technologies – Power, forthcoming in 2024) and “Dis/Abling Gender” (Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies, 2022)—publications that can be found at www.eveliengeerts.com.

    Categories: event

  • Posthumanist Entanglements – A Summer Camp (June 25-29, 2024)

    Tuesday, August 15, 2023 | By

    Call for Participants (PDF version here):

    The Posthumanism Research Institute at Brock University is organizing a summer camp (June 25-29, 2024) to investigate and problematize human and nonhuman entanglements and embodiments. Our approach rests on the conviction that the time of the humanist human—as exceptional, separate from and superior to other beings—is over: humans have caused enough havoc already! There is a need to conceive ourselves as post-human, as com-post, as radically entangled and embodied, as relational through and through. The goal is to work collaboratively and postdisciplinarily drawing on a set of conventional and non-conventional methods, including research-creation methods, to think through and generate knowledge about the relational ontology that defines being. The workshop & summer school will capture a moment of coalescence in the shifting and fluctuating structures and relations in which all beings exist.

    The five-days program will comprise presentations and interactive sessions led by 7 key interlocutors/facilitators (confirmed: Jaim* del Val, Ada Jaarsma, Fiona Blaikie, Christine Daigle, David Fancy; Karen Houle, Marie-Andrée Robitaille). Selected readings will be assigned in preparation for the summer camp. The list will be made available by the beginning of May.

    We are inviting you to participate in this intensive collaborative knowledge generation event. As a participant, you will engage in preparatory readings before we meet and then take part in all activities including interactive knowledge creation sessions led by key interlocutors/facilitators such as: micro think tanks, research-creation sessions (creative writing, art making, and performance), grounding exercises (walking the Brock Labyrinth, immersion in Pond Inlet), and connection to nature exercises (guided forest-bathing on the escarpment trail). Three of these activities will be led by Indigenous Knowledge Keepers (TBC). As a participant, you will also offer a “provocation” to the group. Provocations are 10 minutes presentations which may take any form and explore one of the themes of the workshop. We expect that the work you engage in throughout the week will lead you to produce/create, at least in draft form and perhaps in collaboration with another participant, a piece reflecting the knowledge generated through your participation. The summer camp organizers will create a digital archive of activities and participants will be invited to contribute material for it (text, photos, and/or videos). Themes that will be explored include:

    • Human and nonhuman porous entanglements (animal, plant, rocks, organic/nonorganic life)
    • Hyperobjects (weather and climate; the Anthropocene)
    • The meaning of diseases, death, and extinction (growth VS decay, death, viruses)
    • Prosthetic VS symbiotic life (enhancement/impoverishment/enrichment)
    • Place (local, glocal, planetarity)
    • Porosity and care: an “how to” for post-human lives

    In addition to the activities described above, we will also hold 2 public-facing community wide artistic performances.

    Please submit a 500 words letter of intent detailing your interest in participating, which themes resonate with you and your work, and what provocation you would be interested in offering. Please also submit a current CV. Send these materials to pri@brocku.ca by February 28, 2024.

    Registration fees will apply (TBD). Accommodation will be available on campus at a reduced rate. Coffee breaks and vegan snacks will be available, but meals will be the responsibility of each participant.

    Categories: event, news

  • CFP – Special Issue of Interconnections on the “Fungal Turn” // Appel à contributions – Numéro hors série de Interconnexions sur le “Tournant Fongique”

    Friday, August 11, 2023 | By

    CFP for a Special Issue Interconnections: journal of posthumanism

    Appel à contributions pour le numéro hors-série de Interconnexions : revue de posthumanisme

    Guest Editors:  Dr. Allison Mackey and Dr. Elif Sendur

    CFP: Fungal Turn- French version to follow (le français suit) (PDF version here) 

    A growing body of contemporary fiction and film, along with more political and practical networks, such as zines, conferences, and writing collectives, engage with fungal discourses to think about the porous and permeable limits of bodies, to reconsider our relationship with space, time, death and decay, and to imagine novel ways of perceiving, living, and resisting power. What is perhaps most attractive to this novel spatial concurrence of politics, ontologies, and knowledge lies in the fungi’s liminal position as neither animal nor vegetal but intimately connected to both biologically and evolutionarily. This bifurcated and ambivalent perspective modeled by fungal entanglements suggests unsettling and symbiotic relationships where an objectified environment subsumed by a masterful Anthropos is abandoned for the sake of an intra-active becoming (as Karen Barad suggests). Indeed, mycelial networks propose relational fruiting bodies, and more importantly, they show the possibility of a resilient relationality that refutes simple linear causal agencies.

    Interest in fungal networks is not new[1] yet whether we encounter them in HBO’s recent video game adaptation of The Last of Us, in the zines of Spore Liberation Front, or in the fungal faces of Xiaojing Yan, we notice mycelial ontologies’ demand to be more visible in their dismantling of our current approaches towards being in the world and becoming with it. Hence, we perceive a more urgent and imminent investment in fungi and mycelium via their ontological and political potential. We call this new appeal a fungal turn. This new interest is not limited to literature, film, and aesthetic objects: for example, The Radical Mycology convergence has been organized every year since 2011, where participants celebrate mushrooms and mycelium in their political, ethical, and intersecting contexts. Similarly, Mushroom Writing School is a type of writing collective that emphasizes mycelial creative writing networks.

    When Anna Tsing traced the multilayered material relations of matsutake mushrooms, she declared the end of the hegemony of the Christian Western man’s perspective and asserted that “the time has come for new ways of telling true stories beyond civilizational first principles. Without Man and Nature, all creatures come back to life, and men and women can express themselves without the structures of parochially imagined rationality” (vii). Yet, one major challenge to engaging with the liminal and multilayered perspectives that fungal networks offer is imagining the radical ontologies that they provide outside of rational frameworks. As Merlin Sheldrake asks in Entangled Life: “Is it possible for humans, with our animal brains and bodies and language, to learn to understand such different organisms? How might we find ourselves changed in the process?” (29) What would it mean to actually pay attention to the fungal—not just mushrooms themselves as visible, fruiting bodies, but also complex, interspecies mycorrhizal networks—beyond the figurative, as a material model that can potentially challenge humanist frameworks? For example, Eugenia Bone notes paying attention to the fungal teaches us that “everything that lives is plural.” (283). In this sense, as radically ecological entities, fungi embody the fundamental reality of ecological interconnectedness, collaboration, and interspecies entanglement. Serpil Oppermann’s notion of “compost poiesis” reconciles a “continuous decomposition and recomposition” that “veers us away from anthropocentricity by transforming sites of decay into vibrant sites of fecund imagination” (136-137).

    This CFP proposes to think of fungal spaces and bodies as sites of real connections between art and sciences, as sites of plurality and resilience in literature, film, art, and media. Beyond taking the fungi as a metaphor, how can we also attend to the working of these fungal worlds, in their refusal to disappear and ability to thrive under dire circumstances–regenerating life from death and decay––in their potential to undo our taken for granted anthropocentric ontologies and epistemologies?

    We invite papers on topics including, but not limited to, the following:

    • Fungal spatiality, environments
    • Concepts of fungal contamination, resistance, and resilience
    • Queer spatiality, queer and weird becoming in speculative literature and media
    • Excesses of space and body/porosity/merging/co-constitution/ contamination/concorporation
    • Fungal approaches to the Anthropocene, Capitalocene, etc.
    • Fungal representation in bio-art, visual media, and literature
    • Ecocritical resistances and resilience in literature and media through fungi
    • Neoliberal appropriations of fungal and posthumanist discourses surrounding multiplicity and their critique
    • Material approaches to fungal and mycelial networks
    • Economies of fungi/ fungal economies and critique in and around its real relations of productions/ distribution and exchange
    • Onto-epistemic decompositions and recompositions via fungi
    • Creative works on fungi, fungal networks and entanglements including original artworks, performative pieces, poems, and other arts.

    Please send 600- 900 words chapter proposals along with a working title, bibliography, and your short bio to fungalturn@gmail.com by Friday, October 13, 2023.

    For questions and inquiries please reach out to either Dr. Elif Sendur elifsendur@gmail.com or Dr. Allison Mackey dramackey@gmail.com

     

    Appel à contributions : le tournant fongique

    Un corpus grandissant, comprenant fiction contemporaine, films, ainsi que des réseaux plus orientés vers les sphères politiques et pratiques, tels que formés par des collectifs dédiés à la publication de zines, l’organisation de conférences ou l’écriture, se saisit de discours portant sur le fait fongique, afin de penser les limites poreuses et perméables des corps, de reconsidérer notre relation à l’espace, au temps, à la mort et à la décomposition, et de concevoir de nouvelles méthodes de perception, d’existence et de résistance au pouvoir. L’aspect peut-être le plus attrayant de cette nouvelle forme de coexistence spatiale, où politique, ontologies et savoirs se trouvent placés en état d’intersection, tient à la position liminaire de l’organisme fongique : ni pleinement animal, ni végétal, mais lié à chacun biologiquement et évolutionnairement parlant. Ce paradigme, structurellement marqué par la bifurcation et l’ambivalence propres aux enchevêtrements fongiques, évoque et implique une gamme de relations désarçonnantes et symbiotiques, dans lesquelles un environnement objectifié, se rapportant à un Anthropos tout-puissant, cède la place à un devenir intra-actif (tel que proposé par Karen Barad). En effet, ce que les réseaux de filaments mycéliaux proposent, ce sont des organismes relationnels fructifères, mais, plus important encore, ce qu’ils soulignent, c’est la possibilité d’une résilience informée par relationnalité, qui réfute les corrélations linéaires de simple causalité.

    Quand bien même l’intérêt porté aux réseaux fongiques n’est pas nouveau[2], on observe dans sa traduction récente, par exemple dans la dernière adaptation sous forme de jeu vidéo de The Last of Us, création de HBO, les zines publiés par le Spore Liberation Front, ou encore les bustes fongiques de Xiaojing Yan, une intention plus apparente, plus marquée, que les ontologies qui leurs sont liées défassent et déconstruisent nos approches existantes quant à la question de notre être au monde, et de notre devenir avec lui. Aussi, un tel balayage nous permet de constater un investissement du fait fongique et de ses réseaux mycélaires, à travers les potentialités ontologiques et politiques qu’ils renferment, marqué par une imminence et une urgence accrues. Nous proposons de désigner ce regain d’intérêt sous le vocable de tournant fongique. Ce regain d’intérêt ne se limite par ailleurs pas aux seules créations littéraires, filmiques et esthétiques : ainsi, les rencontres intitulées The Radical Mycology, qui se tiennent chaque année depuis 2011, permettent aux participants de chanter les vertus des champignons et de leurs réseaux mycélaires, à l’intersection des champs politique et éthique. Pareillement, Mushroom Writing School désigne désormais un type de collectif d’écriture qui place l’accent sur les pratiques créatives en réseaux d’inspiration mycélaire.

    Lorsque Anna Tsing examina et retraça les relations matérielles aux multiples strates formées par les champignons matsutake, elle prononça par la même occasion la fin de l’hégémonie de la perspective de l’homme chrétien occidental, assurant que “[l]e temps est venu pour de nouvelles manières de raconter de vraies histoires au-delà des premiers principes de la civilisation. Débarrassées de l’Homme et de la Nature, toutes les créatures peuvent renaître à la vie, et les hommes et les femmes peuvent s’exprimer sans être enfermés dans les limites d’une rationalité imaginée étroitement.” (vii). Pour autant, une des difficultés principales que rencontre celui ou celle qui aborde les perspectives liminales, multiples et fortement stratifiées qu’ouvrent les réseaux fongiques, consiste dans la capacité à imaginer et concevoir, en dehors de cadres rationnels, les ontologies radicales qu’elles constituent. Ainsi que le soulève Merlin Sheldrake dans Entangled Life : “Est-il possible pour nous humains, dotés que nous sommes de cerveaux, corps et langages animaux, d’apprendre à comprendre des organismes si différents ? Et comment pourrions-nous être changés au cours de ce processus ?” (29) Que pourrait signifier le fait de porter notre attention sur le fait fongique—pas seulement les champignons en tant qu’organismes visibles et fructifères, mais l’entièreté de leurs complexes réseaux mycorhiziens interspécifiques—au-delà de la logique figurative, en tant que paradigme matériel pouvant, potentiellement, remettre en cause les cadres de pensée humanistes ? Ainsi Eugenia Bone considère-t-elle que l’examen du fait fongique nous apprend que “tout ce qui vit est pluriel.” (283). Dans ce sens, en tant qu’entités radicalement écologiques, les champignons incarnent la réalité fondamentale de l’état écologique d’interconnexion, de collaboration et d’enchevêtrement interspécifique. La notion de “poétique du compost” avancée par Serpil Oppermann réconcilie une “décomposition continuelle avec une recomposition” qui “nous conduit à l’écart de l’anthropocentricité, en transformant les lieux de décomposition en lieux vibrant d’imaginations fécondes.” (136-137).

    Le présent appel à contributions invite à considérer et investir les espaces et organismes fongiques comme des lieux de connexion à part entière entre arts et sciences, des lieux de pluralité et de résilience, traversant la littérature, le film, les arts et les médias. Au-delà d’une simple prise en compte des champignons en tant que métaphore, comment peut-on également prendre part à l’opération de ces territoires du fongique, dans leur refus de disparaître, et leur capacité à s’épanouir dans des conditions extrêmes––accomplissant une régénération vitale à partir de la mort et de la décomposition––dans leur potentialité aussi de défaire notre manière de considérer comme acquises nos ontologies comme nos épistémologies anthropocentriques ?

    Dans ce contexte, nous adressons notre appel dans le but de recueillir les contributions portant, de façon non exclusive, sur les sujets suivants :

    • Spatialité et environnement fongiques
    • Concepts tels que contamination, résistance et résilience fongiques
    • Spatialité queer, devenir queer et weird dans la littérature et les médias spéculatifs
    • Excès d’espace et corps/porosité/fusion/co-constitution/contamination/concorporation
    • Approches fongiques de l’Anthropocène, du Capitalocène, etc.
    • Représentation fongique dans le bio-art, les médias visuels et la littérature
    • Résistances et résiliences écocritiques par le biais des organismes fongiques dans la littérature et les médias
    • Réappropriations néolibérales de discours fongiques et posthumanistes portant sur la multiplicité, et critiques de celles-ci
    • Approches matérielles des réseaux fongiques et mycélaires
    • Économies de champignons/économies fongiques et critique dans et autour de ses rapports réels de productions/distribution et échange
    • Décompositions et recompositions onto-épistémiques et fongique.
    • Nous invitons également les essais créatifs sur les champignons, les réseaux fongiques et les enchevêtrements, les œuvres d’art originales, des pièces performatives, des poèmes et d’autres arts.

    Veuillez envoyer votre proposition de chapitre de 600 à 900 mots avec un titre provisoire, une bibliographie et votre courte biographie à fungalturn@gmail.com pour le Vendredi, 13 octobre 2023.

    Pour des questions ou préoccupations à propos de cet appel à contributions, veuillez contacter  Dr Elif Sendur elifsendur@gmail.com  et/ou Dr Allison Mackey dramackey@gmail.com.

    Tentative Timeline for the Special Issue/ Chronologie provisoire pour cet hors- série.

    Deadline to submit initial abstracts: October 13, 2023, Friday

    Acceptance notices for the abstracts: October 27, 2023, Friday

    First drafts deadline: January 12, 2024, Friday

    Peer Reviews deadline: February 23, 2024, Friday

    Second Round of Edits Deadline: March 22, 2024 Friday

    Final version submissions deadline:  May 3, 2024 Friday

    Bibliography

    Barad, Karen. Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Duke university Press, 2007.

    Bone, Eugenia. Mycophilia: Revelations from the weird world of mushrooms. Rodale Books, 2011.

    https://www.corporealwriting.com/mushroom

    Oppermann, Serpil. “Compost” Veer Ecology: A Companion for Environmental Thinking. Eds. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Lowell Duckert. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.

    Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life : How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, Random House Publishing Group, 2020.

    Spore Liberation Front. “Radical Mycology: an SLF Primer” .ed1. 2009. https://we.riseup.net/assets/287443/radical+mycology.pdf

    https://radicalmycologyconvergence.com

    Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. “The Mushroom at the End of the World.” The Mushroom at the End of the World. Princeton University Press, 2015.

    [1] For example Suzanne Simard’s introduction of the notion of the wood wide web (to describe the complex underground web of roots and mycorrhizal fungi that connect trees and other plants to one another) in the 1990s drew serious attention to the idea of mycelial relations.

    [2] En effet, l’introduction par Suzanne Simard, dans les années 1990, de la notion de Wood Wide Web (mettant en avant le complexe réseau de racines et champignons mycorhiziens qui connecte arbres et autres plantes les uns et unes aux autres), entraîna dans son sillage un fort intérêt pour les relations mycéliales.

    Categories: news

  • Special PRI panel at Congress

    Tuesday, May 23, 2023 | By

    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

    Friday, March 10, 2023 | By

    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”

    Friday, February 17, 2023 | By

    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!

    Thursday, December 01, 2022 | By

    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

    Tuesday, September 13, 2022 | By

    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 Brussels, Senatsverwaltung für Kultur und Europa Berlin, Deutschlandfunk Kultur in collaboration with the CTM Festival, Konstnärsnämnden Sweden, ZKM Karlsruhe in partnership with Akademie Solitude, and the Max-Planck Gesellschaft.

    Categories: event

  • Performing Planetarity: Presentation by Joanna Zylinska on September 21st, 2022 – 1pm ET

    Wednesday, September 07, 2022 | By

     

    Link to Event: https://stream.lifesizecloud.com/extension/12627650/edf0a4e1-a920-44e8-8744-5dacc2c88b7c

    Link to Bio

    ABSTRACT: This talk will present an overview of Joanna Zylinska’ performative method of working within an academic context, as a theorist and artist. Departing from the problem of the constitution of the human as both a species and a historical subject, Zylinska will use the geological probe of ‘deep time’ to analyse the emergence of the human in conjunction with the surrounding technologies. These include tools and other artefacts but also communication in its various modes, be it everyday language, storytelling, ethics, art and media. The planetary perspective of Zylinska’s work – as highlighted in the theoretical concepts and practical projects presented in her talk – finds its anchoring in the socio-political concerns of the here and now: from the ecological and economic crises through to the problem of individual and social coexistence. It is through the notion of praxis that an encounter between thinking, seeing and making in Zylinska’s work yields both a methodology and a ‘minimal ethics’. Bringing the two together, the talk will negotiate the complex set of responsibilities that need to be exercised by humans not just towards one another but also towards nonhuman beings – including planet Earth as our habitat.

    Categories: event

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

    Tuesday, April 19, 2022 | By

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

     

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