News and events

  • 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.

    Categories: Events

  • Posthumanism and Education Round-table – December 8, 2020

    Thursday, November 26, 2020 | By

    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.

    Categories: Events

  • June 1, 2020: Posthuman Energy/ies Online Panel

    Tuesday, May 12, 2020 | By

    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.

    Categories: Events

  • POSTPONED: Posthumanism and Education Round-table – March 19

    Friday, February 28, 2020 | By

    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!

    Categories: Events

  • To be rescheduled: Samantha Frost’s talk on “Attentive bodies: rethinking self and world” on February 28, 2020

    Tuesday, February 18, 2020 | By

    UPDATE: due to illness, the talk will be rescheduled. The new date/time will be announced as soon as it is set.

    Dr. Samantha Frost (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) will be presenting the talk “Attentive bodies: rethinking self and world” on February 28, 4-6 pm, in Cairns 207 at Brock University. All are welcome!

    Categories: Events

  • Francesca Ferrando’s talk on “How Philosophical Posthumanism Can Bring Change” on February 14, 2020

    Friday, January 31, 2020 | By

    Dr. Francesca Ferrando (NYU) will be presenting the talk “How Philosophical Posthumanism Can Bring Change” on February 14, 3-5pm, in Cairns 207 at Brock University. All are welcome.

    Categories: Events

  • Imre Szeman’s January 15 talk on “Quitting (the) Habit: Fossil Fuels, Governmentality, and the Politics of Energy Dependency”

    Thursday, January 02, 2020 | By

    The Posthumanism Research Network presents a talk by Dr. Imre Szeman on “”Quitting (the) Habit: Fossil Fuels, Governmentality, and the Politics of Energy Dependency” at Wilfrid Laurier University on January 15, 4-6pm.

    Categories: Events

  • From Annihilation to High Life – Call for proposals

    Wednesday, November 27, 2019 | By

    The Posthumanism Research Network, jointly with the Film Studies Association of Canada (FSAC) will be hosting a panel on the theme “From Annihilation to High Life: Feminist Posthumanism and Postfeminist Humanism in Contemporary Science Fiction Film.” The panel will be held in early June at congress in London (Ontario).

     

    Categories: Events

  • Posthuman Energy/ies: call for proposals

    Sunday, November 24, 2019 | By

    Consider submitting your work for presentation at the joint Posthumanism Research Network and EPTC panel in June 2020.

    Categories: Events

  • Catriona Sandilands’ talk on “Invasive Plantimacies? Queering Kinship” on November 12, 2019

    Saturday, October 26, 2019 | By

    You are all invited to attend Dr. Catriona Sandilands’ public talk on “Invasive Plantimacies? Queering Kinship” on Tuesday, November 12, 2019.

    Categories: Events

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