Wow, we are growing as a research group! Exciting things may be lurking ahead – and challenges for extra-ordinary academics like us. This is why we work together: to support each other and do really inventive, good quality research and edgy research training across the borders of nations, disciplines and universities. Together, apart and in various constellations with other curious research partners.
Call for our first meeting this term, dears!
A warm welcome to all you group members for our first zoom meeting this term, Thursday 1 Sep, 13:15 hrs! Group members and team on location – this is who we are whom work in the closer group. Zoom link will be sent out over email.
September 1 we launch this new fall term of 2022 with a group meeting where new postdoc researchers and visiting scholars say hello, and we meet and greet and discuss our priorities and themes for the year ahead. The Posthumanities Hub research group members commit often to the group one year at the time (with parts of their research), except of course for the PhD candidates and postdocs or more senior research staff whom have longer employment contracts – and visiting scholars who are with us for shorter periods. Together we set the living agenda for online webinars this fall, applications we do best together or for other co-written efforts of research.
Thank you for making the time and the space in your schedules and hearts for the off-road activities of The Posthumanities Hub.
Welcome to The Posthumanities Hub & The Eco- and Bioart Lab Hybrid Seminar on “Design Ecologies: Towards Artistic and Postconventional (Research) Practices” with speakers Carrie Foulkes (University of Glasgow) and Dr Lynn Wilson (University of Glasgow), which takes place on 14th June at 13:15-15:00 CEST in the room Faros (Tema building, Campus Valla, Linköping University), and on Zoom (for registration details, see below)
Generous emptiness: sculptural and architectural encounters
Abstract:
Photo: Carrie Foulkes, Monument on a Hill
This talk will ponder different kinds of ‘emptiness’ and their potentialities. As a way into thinking about some relevant themes, I’ll introduce the Sun Hive, exploring the hive’s material and conceptual aspects and how it symbolises a certain kind of relationship between humans and honeybees. Unlike many other forms of bee box that already have frames installed inside them, the Sun Hive provides a colony with a primarily ’empty’ space in which to build their comb, contained by a form that reflects and honours the bees’ natural preferences. The hive is imbued with an ethos of generosity, love and respect rather than of control.
Thinking about the Sun Hive will enable a consideration of some of the meaningful and generative ways in which an artistic practice can meet with a scientific method of observation in an ecological context. We’ll also look at spatial sculptural/installation practices as transformative sites in terms of human health and wellbeing. I’ll narrate embodied encounters with artworks and the ways in which these have resonated and provided support during a time of bereavement. The talk will close with a reflection on some of the ways in which built environments can be conducive to contemplative states, drawing on examples of remarkable public spaces such as the Kamppi Chapel – “the chapel of silence” – in Helsinki, and contrasting this with the prevalent strategy of ‘hostile architecture’ in urban design.
Bio:
Carrie Foulkes is a British essayist and poet whose multidisciplinary practice also encompasses visual and live arts. She is particularly interested in the intersections of experimental literature, narrative studies, bodywork, performance, medical humanities and bioethics. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Glasgow and a visiting researcher at Linköping University. https://carriefoulkes.com/
Circular Design Perspectives from the UK. The Case for Multidisciplinary Practice
Photo: Lynn I. Wilson, Circular Design Perspectives from the UK
Abstract
The implementation of a circular economy requires a multidisciplinary approach to close the loop and advance research and practice across citizens, consumers, and businesses. Artists and designers have a vital role to play in advancing conceptual and practical applications of circular thinking – new material research, design for disassembly, zero waste design and design for durability.
The presentation will begin with an overview from Lynn about her experience of applying western art and design teaching practices with indigenous people in sub-Saharan Africa and how this earlier experience shaped her understanding of the current global environmental crisis. From there, the presentation will share examples from Lynn’s practice as a consultant working with design led and non-design led businesses and academics, critiquing solutions for a more sustainable society. Lynn will present her new project – Circular Materials Repository, working in collaboration with the Creative Informatics Centre, Edinburgh College of Art, Edinburgh University.
Bio:
Dr Lynn Wilson is a Scottish textile designer, circular design practitioner, researcher, and lecturer, who recently completed a social science PhD at the Adam Smith Business School, University of Glasgow. Her consultancy, Circular Design Scotland advances circular design knowledge through working with artists, designers, and businesses and is currently a post-doctoral researcher at the University of the Arts London, Centre for Circular Design.
Join us on 25th May 2022 for this one of a kind event: Tema Genus Higher Seminar with independent artist and professor of art Katja Aglert, focused on “Archipelagic Rehearsals: Abstract as Score”!
When: 25th May 2022, 13:15-15:00
Where: Room TEMCAS, Tema building, Campus Valla, Linköping University, SE. (see the map)
Archipelagic Rehearsals – Abstract as Score A lecture performance by Katja Aglert
Abstract This paper, in the form of a lecture performance, unfolds from my ongoing transdisciplinary artistic research around multispecies encounters, with a focus on humans and Spanish slugs. These relations and stories highlight issues of migration, biodiversity, coexistence, and the interconnectivity of things. Today, the Spanish slug Arion vulgaris – in Sweden named “the killer slug” – is perceived as an invasive species, and is at the centre of a Western narrative, reifying the binary categorisations, such as nature-city, wildlife-pest. Can artistic processual practice, participatory research, and storytelling with slugs challenge the binary world view with humans at the centre, and perform new imaginaries of ”the world” as ”we” know it? Building on concepts such as archipelagic thinking (Glissant), and more-than-human participatory research (Bastian, Jones, Moore and Roe), I seek to artistically discuss and perform responses to the principal question of how we can still use language and simultaneously avoid the confirmation of the order we attempt to question (Aglert). The lecture performance is a participatory, live editorial, an open-ended, multi-disciplinary experiment that explores the possibilities to renegotiate and destabilise the common conditions for an academic presentation. The lecture performance is a method that unsettles fixed meanings and allows for new interconnections between the arts and academia. Furthermore, it can create new knowledge, stories and artistic materialisations related to more-than-human storytelling. As such, choosing the hybrid format of a lecture performance amounts to an experiment that explores the possibility of materially aligning the trajectory of choices with the research topic.
Bio:
Katja Aglert is an independent artist, and professor, Tema Genus, Linköping University. Web: http://www.katjaaglert.com/
It is our great pleasure to welcome you all to the upcoming Posthumanities Hub and The Eco- and Bioart Lab Seminar/Webinar with Prof. Thom van Dooren (University of Sydney/University of Oslo) on “The craft of poisoning: learning not to eat cane toads“
The seminar/webinar will have a hybrid format.
When: 30th May, 13:15 – 15:00 CEST
Where: Room FAROS, Tema building, Linköping University (Campus Valla) & on Zoom. For the registration link, see below.
The craft of poisoning: learning not to eat cane toads
Abstract:
Since their introduction in 1935, cane toads have been making their way across the top half of the Australian continent. As they’ve moved, they have left a wave of death in their wake, animals poisoned by the unfamiliar toxins that toad’s carry. All efforts to eradicate toads, or even slow their advance, have failed. In recent years, however, a new set of approaches to coexistence with cane toads have begun to emerge. These approaches centre on large scale efforts to teach native species not to eat toads through a ‘conditioned taste aversion’ that is produced with the use of nauseating toxins. This paper explores the history and ethics of these multispecies pedagogical experiments. It asks how the various toxic substances that are deployed by both toads and by scientists open up new possibilities for learning, for becoming differently together, for reshaping ecosystems and shared lives, while also carrying with them significant, and often mortal, dangers.
Bio:
Thom van Dooren is Deputy Director at the Sydney Environment Institute and an Associate Professor in the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney, and a Professor II in the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities at the University of Oslo. His research and writing focus on some of the many philosophical, ethical, cultural, and political issues that arise in the context of species extinctions and human entanglements with threatened species and places. He is the author of Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia UP 2014), The Wake of Crows: Living and Dying in Shared Worlds (Columbia UP 2019), and A World in a Shell: Snail Stories for a Time of Extinctions (MIT 2022). www.thomvandooren.org
