Events archive 2017 - THE POSTHUMANITIES HUB

Here is what we’ve been up to since the start of 2017:

Congratulations to “hubbers” Desirée Ljuncrantz (Tema G, Liu) and Marianna Szczygielska (Central European University, visiting PhD student at Tema G in 2015/16) who successfully defended their PhD theses!
We recommend you look up Royal Holloway Centre for the GeoHumanities‘ website for more information on interdisciplinary relations between geography and arts and humanities scholarship and practice; blog, forum, call for papers, and more!
A two-day workshop Eco/Decolonial Arts: Open-ended Poetic/Philosophical Forays whose aim was to develop transversal dialogues between various ways of engagement with both ecocritical/ecological and decolonial perspectives took place at Tema G on June 28 and 29. See: Eco. Decolonial Arts Programme
A Seed Box funded workshop “Plantarium: Re-Imagining Green Futurities” organised by Olga Cielemecka and Marianna Szczygielska took place in June, 1st-2nd, at Linkoping University. It brought together activists, artists, workers, independent researchers, and academics to rethink the generative potentialities of the botanical. Read more about the event. Many thanks to our invited keynote speakers Cate Sandilands and Michael Marder, Mirko Nikolic for a plant yoga session and Christina Sadlbauer and Regula Heggli for vegetal speed dating, and all participants for making it such a special event!

Thanks to Pieta Hyvärinen, the recordings of Cate Sandilands’ and Michael Marder’s lectures for the “Plantarium” workshop are available online. Please find the recordings of the talks on Pieta’s website here.

Professor Cecilia Åsberg, director and founder of the Posthumanities Hub, gave a keynote lecture at the 8th Annual Conference on the New Materialisms “Environmental Humanities and New Materialisms: The Ethics of Decolonizing Nature and Culture.” The conference took place at Maison de l’UNESCO in Paris on June 7-9, 2017. Professor Åsberg gave a lecture entitled “A Thousand Tiny Anthropocenes” on ecological humanities, mapping out their challenges and potentials as feminist posthumanities.
We had an immense pleasure to host an Advanced Seminar with Professor Catriona Sandilands (York University Toronto) on June 5th at Tema g. Catriona (Cate) Sandilands is a Professor in the Faculty of Environmental Studies at York University (Toronto); she is a 2016 Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation Fellow, Immediate Past President of the Association for the Study of Literature and Environment; and former Canada Research Chair in Sustainability and Culture. She has published over 60 articles on topics in the Environmental Humanities ranging from ecofeminist philosophy and queer ecology to the biopolitics of national parks and urban gardens. Her seminar will focus on queer and feminist ecocriticism, and will include particular attention to questions of multispecies biopolitics and queer affects.
Curated talks around Automata, a thought-provoking performance on stage at Orionteatern in Stockholm are now available online here. A recording of a discussion “Free-spirited cyborgs and controlled bodies” is also available online. Chaired by Carl Åkerlund this panel discussion between Samira Ariadad, Helena Granström, Waldemar Ingdahl and the founder and director of Posthumanities Hub, Cecilia Åsberg, took place on May 6th in Orion Theatre following a staging of Automata.
The Eco- and Bioart Research Network was officially launched at the Posthumanities International Network symposium “Bioart and Postnatural Ecologies: Posthumanities for the Anthropocene” on 28th April 2017 at LiU. The programme of this fantastic event is available here: BIOART AND POSTNATURAL ECOLOGIES Symposium 28 April.
Pelin Kumbet was an Erasmus + visiting researcher at TEMA Genus in April 2017. Pelin obtained her PhD at Department of Western Languages and Literatures, Kocaeli University in Turkey. Pelin’s doctoral dissertation concerns posthuman bodies in Kazuo Ishiguro’s, Indra Sinha’s, and Justina Robson’s novels, and was written under the supervision of Prof Serpil Oppermann.
The Seed Box visiting professor Cheryl Fish from the City University of New York (USA) gave a talk on Wednesday, 12 April, from 10:15-12:00 in Lethe. Cheryl is an environmental justice scholar, a fiction writer and poet based in New York. The title of her talk is “Mining and (Re)Moval in Sápmi: Liselotte Wajstedt’s Documentary Kiruna: Space Road (Kiruna— Rymdvägen) and Indigenous Environmental Justice.”
New research group was established at TEMA Genus: Queer Death Studies Network. This network, started by by Annika Jonsson (Gender Studies, Karlstad University), Varpu Alasuutari (Gender Studies, University of Turku), Marietta Radomska (Gender Studies, Linköping Univ), Line Henriksen (Gender Studies, Univ of Copenhagen), Tara Mehrabi (Gender Studies, Linköping Univ), and Nina Lykke (Gender Studies, Linköping Univ) and launched at the g16 conference, works within the field of death studies understood in a broad sense, which can relate to death, dying and mourning, human as well as non-human. On March 28-29, the team held a workshop to introduce this new network. The event took place at Tema Genus, Linköping University.
“Writing with Undisciplined Discipline: A Writing Workshop with Environmental Humanities” organized in a collaboration between KTH and LiU environmental humanities researchers and generously supported by the Seed Box, took place Stockholm in January 26-27, 2017. The workshop revolved around the idea to write ~slowly, ethically, and collaboratively into the Anthropocene. Read more about the event here.
The Seed Box Board finalized funding decisions for the first-ever call for “Seed Money” for environmental humanities projects! Lucky awardees, project titles, and amounts are available on the project website.
Congratulations to our new doctors: Tara Mehrabi and Helga Sadowski successfully defended their PhD theses on December 9th, 2016 at Tema Genus! Hip hip hooray!
Olga Cielemęcka (LiU) presented her project on “Love stories in the Anthropocene” as part of the Environmental Humanities Forum seminar series. The seminar took place on January 24th, 2017. Thank you for joining us for this event!
The Posthumanities Hub is proud to announce a new collaboration with the Hybrid Matters Network based in Helsinki, Finland! As part of this exciting new collaboration, PoHum Hub founder Cecilia Åsberg will travel to Helsinki in November to serve as respondent to a series of keynotes at their upcoming symposium. Dr. Åsberg will respond to talks by Jussi Parikka (University of Southhampton), Jennifer Gabrys (Goldsmith’s University of London), and Steen Rasmussen (University of Southern Denmark), on topics ranging from synthetic biology to computational planets to media geologies
We are happy to announce our collaboration with Critical Posthumanities Network. The academics, artists and writers connected by the Critical Posthumanism Network share the conviction that the decentring and critiques of the human implied in posthumanism offer paradigms that speak searchingly of the immediate present and of imminent futures. At the same time those very paradigms will also benefit from a self-critical and historicizing move bearing upon prefigurations, disavowals and alternative/emergent scenarios of the human, nonhuman, posthuman.