News and events

  • Decentering the Nature-Culture Divide in Diplomacy

    Monday, February 07, 2022 | By

    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

    Thursday, February 03, 2022 | By

    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.

  • Explorations in Empirical Posthumanisms (New Date!)

    Wednesday, November 24, 2021 | By

    This diverse group of speakers apply a posthumanist lens to pressing social and environmental issues. The presentations include discussions of the entanglement of racialization, affect, and the body, and multispeciesrelationships in both Toronto and internationally.

    When: Thursday, December 9, Ontario Time: 3-4:30 PM 

    Where: LifeSize interactive video conferencing: https://stream.lifesizecloud.com/extension/12627650/edf0a4e1-a920-44e8-8744-5dacc2c88b7c 

    Chaired by: Mickey Vallee (Canada Research Chair in Community, Identity and Digital Media, Athabasca University) 

    Speakers

    Sarah Elton is a critical food systems researcher, investigating the food-biosphere-health nexus. She is a collaborator with Feeding the City,, external link, opens in new window a multidisciplinary study involving several universities and investigating the impact of COVID-19 on Canadian food systems. She is the primary investigator of the research that tracks the impact of the pandemic on the Ontario Food Terminal, Canada’s largest wholesale market of fresh produce that sources food for Toronto, Ontario, and the Maritimes. This study is funded by a Faculty of Arts research award. Her recent doctoral work examined the relationship between humans and nonhuman nature in a study of urban gardens in Toronto and won the 2019-2020 Joan Eakin Award for Methodological Excellence in a Qualitative Doctoral Dissertation. She also is the author of two best-selling books: Locavore (2010, Harper Collins Canada) and Consumed: Food for a Finite Planet (2013, University of Chicago Press). 
     
    Andrew Brooks is Lecturer in Media Cultures in the School of Arts and Media, UNSW. His research proposes strategies for reading and listening to contemporary media events, systems, and infrastructures. His current research is organised around three main projects: the politics of noise and listening; infrastructural inequalities; and the politics of race and embodiment in media culture. 
     
    Nick Fox is one of the UK’s leading proponents of new materialist and posthuman social theory as applied to sociology, with books including ‘The Body’ (Polity, 2012) and the ground-breaking ‘Sociology and the New Materialism’ (Sage, 2017; with Pam Alldred, Brunel University London).  He has written widely on new materialist theory and sexualities, health, environment and research methods, having published over 70 peer-reviewed papers.  Nick has also been the invited speaker at major conferences including the Hellenic Sociological Association, BSA Medical Sociology conference, University of Melbourne Gender and Research conference and the Korean Society for Social Theory. 

    Abstracts

    Murmur: noise beyond representation 
    Andrew Brooks (University of New South Wales) 
    This talk develops a conceptual and philosophical reading of the sonic figure of the murmur. A murmur draws disparate voices together in a continuous and processual unfolding. Thinking with its multiplicity, the murmur might be better understood as an  expression of foundational noise that precedes and exceeds representation. Here the murmur is developed as a figure of incommensurable difference that is both a precondition for the emergence of the subject and other individuations and mediations of the object, as well as a force of interruption and potentiality. Taken as an expression of a foundational noise, the murmur is theorised as an expression of Blackness itself, which, drawing on the work of Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten, Saidiya Hartman, and Denise Ferreira da Silva can be understood as an irreducible excess that is both anti- and ante- a regulative order that calls it into being. Such incommensurable difference is unable to be captured and contained either by the figure of the sovereign subject constructed in post-Enlightenment European thought or by the processes of racialisation that produce and uphold supremacy of this figure. Here I argue that noise, in its figuration as a murmur, interrupts the univocity of being that is so central to Western knowledge and suggests a relation of affectability that moves beyond the given grounds of representation. Considering listening as a modality of attuning to noise, we might restage Delueze’s famous statement – we do not yet know what a body can do – via Hortense Spillers’s conception of the Black maternal flesh as that which comes before the body and ask, as Moten and Harney (2021, 82) implore us to: ‘Can we imagine we don’t know what flesh can do?’ This paper suggests that attunement to the sonicity of the murmur allows us to attune to the possibilities of the flesh as a site that both moves us outside the grammar of ‘Man’ and toward new conceptions of solidarity. 
     
    Relational health: Theorizing plants as health-supporting actors 
    Sarah Elton (Ryerson University) 
    The social sciences are beginning to explore how plants are imbricated in sociopolitical processes, including ones that produce health. I theorize people-plant relations and the agency of plants in the production of health, drawing on data from a multispecies ethnography conducted in Toronto’s largest social housing community during the 2018 growing season. In the presentation, I draw on posthumanist theory to explore how food-producing plants can be sociopolitical actors too. 
     
    Climate change, environmental justice and the unusual capacities of posthumans 
    Nick Fox (University of Huddersfield) 
    This paper explores a posthumanist and new materialist approach to sustainable development policy.  I trace a humanist and anthropocentric emphasis in policy discussions of ‘sustainable development’ that reaches back almost 50 years, and still underpins recent United Nations (UN) statements and policies on sustainable development.  This has tied policies to counter environmental challenges such as anthropogenic climate change firmly to sustaining and extending future human prosperity.  The paper will then chart a path beyond humanism and anthropocentrism, to establish a posthuman environmentalism.  This acknowledges human matter as an integral (rather than opposed) element within an all-encompassing ‘environment’.  Posthumanism simultaneously rejects the homogeneity implied by terms such as ‘humanity’ or ‘human species’, as based on a stereotypical ‘human’ that turns out to be white, male and from the global North.  Instead, ‘posthumans’ are heterogeneous, gaining a diverse range of context-specific capacities as they interact with other matter.  Some of these capacities (such as empathy, altruism, conceptual thinking and modelling futures) are highly unusual, and – paradoxically – may be key to addressing the current crises of environmental degradation and anthropogenic climate change. 

     

    Categories: event

  • New play i/O by partner theatre company Post Humains on stage Nov 16 – Dec 4

    Monday, November 15, 2021 | By

    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.

    Categories: news

  • Save the date: Upcoming talk with Dr Emily Jones on November 17, 2021

    Friday, November 05, 2021 | By

    Please join the Posthumanism Research Insititute for a talk by Dr Emily Jones entitled Posthuman International Law and the Rights of Nature which will be held on Wednesday, November 17, 2021, from 10:00-11:30 am EST (via video conferencing).

    Abstract: The rights of nature are beginning to be recognised globally. Seeking to challenge and re-think the anthropocentrism which permeates International Environmental Law, in this lecture, I will discuss the synergies between posthuman theory and the legal recognition of the rights of nature. The lecture will draw on multiple examples of contexts where nature’s rights have been recognised, including in New Zealand, India, Ecuador, the US, and beyond to think through the similarities and differences between these contexts and the lessons to be learned. Calling for the recognition of the rights of nature in international law i.e. globally, I will conclude by reflecting on the ways in which posthuman theory can be applied to help inform this project, seeking to ensure that the rights of nature movement can live up to its transformative posthuman potential.

    Speaker biography: Dr Emily Jones is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Law and Human Rights Centre at the University of Essex, UK. Emily is a generalist public international lawyer whose interdisciplinary work combines theory and practice. Her work cuts across: posthuman legal theory; gender and international law; international environmental law; the law of the sea; science, technology and international law; gender and conflict; and political economy, imperialism and international law.

    Pre-registration required. To register, email Mitch Goldsmith at mg12vh@brocku.ca

    Categories: event

  • Public talk by Rick Dolphijn – October 7, 2021

    Monday, September 27, 2021 | By

    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.

     

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    Categories: event, news

  • 20th Anniversary of Atanarjuat – “Posthumanism: Philosophy Cinema Media” inaugural event

    Sunday, September 26, 2021 | By

    The first of a series of events in the “Posthumanism: Philosophy Cinema Media” series takes place on October 6, 2021. This event celebrates the 20th anniversary of Zacharias Kunuk’s Atanarjuat. Kunuk and team members will take part in the round-table also featured a panel of international scholars. Registration here or by scanning the QR code on the poster.

    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.

    Categories: event, news

  • First issue out! Interconnections. Journal of Posthumanism/Interconnexions. Revue de posthumanisme

    Wednesday, September 01, 2021 | By

    We are proud to announce the publication of the inaugural issue of our journal. You can read it here.

    Categories: news

  • Deleuze and Cosmology Series // Série Deleuze et la Cosmologie | March 31, 2021

    Friday, March 26, 2021 | By

    You are cordially invited to the fourth and final presentation/discussion group of the 2021 Deleuze and Cosmology Series. This final installment entitled “Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Chaosmological Thinking” will be presented by Dr. Alain Beaulieu from the Department of Philosophy at Laurentian University. You are welcome to join us and to invite any and all students or colleagues that you think would be interested.

    When: Wednesday March 31, 2021 at 4 p.m. EST

    Zoom link: laurentian.zoom.us/j/91808556392

    See poster for more information or visit our website @ https://www3.laurentian.ca/deleuzecosmo/

  • PRI Roundtable: Posthuman Spirituality | March 8, 2021

    Monday, February 08, 2021 | By

     

    The roundtable will be held virtually over Zoom:

    https://brocku-ca.zoom.us/j/85018677066

    The event will be held on Monday, March 8, 2021 from 4-6pm EST.

    Five presenters will discuss some aspect of spirituality, broadly conceived, and how it intersects, or not, with posthumanism, either in theory or practice. Each presenter will speak for approximately 10 minutes. After all the presentations there will be approximately one hour of discussion. These roundtables are largely informal and serve as an opportunity to think and discuss posthuman issues with interested colleagues.

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