The Posthumanities Hub

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PH & EBL Webinar: “Oceanic Humanities for the Global South”, 15th September 2022, 13:15-15:00 CEST

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On September 3, 2022

In Events, Webinars

Welcome to The Posthumanities Hub and The Eco- and Bioart Lab Webinar “Oceanic Humanities for the Global South” with Prof. Em. Isabel Hofmeyr, Dr Charne Lavery and Dr Phindezwa Mnyaka!

When: 15th September 2022, 13:15-15:00

Where: On Zoom (see registration details below)

“Oceanic Humanities for the Global South”

Rising sea levels, as the most visible sign of climate change, require new styles of research and writing in the humanities: an oceanic humanities. It is also important that this research speaks simultaneously to environmental and decolonial themes, recognising not only environmental crisis but also global inequality as legacies of empire.

The Oceanic Humanities for the Global South project pursues a research agenda that combines critical oceanic studies with postcolonial theorizations of the seas to evolve an oceanic humanities appropriate to global south. It aims to engage with both human and non-human aspects of the ocean, with the depth and the surface of the seas; to decolonize histories of oceanic space, while providing new approaches to aesthetic understandings of water.

Based in Johannesburg and Cape Town, South Africa, the principal investigators, Isabel Hofmeyr, Charne Lavery and Phindezwa Mnyaka, will provide an overview of the collaborative project so far and outline questions for the future.

Bios:

Isabel Hofmeyr is Professor Emeritus at the University of the Witwatersrand and Distinguished Scholar in Residence at NYU. She has worked extensively on the Indian Ocean world and oceanic themes more generally. Her most recent book is Dockside Reading: Hydrocolonialism and the Custom House (2022. With Charne Lavery, she co-directs the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South (www.oceanichumanities.com). 

Charne Lavery a Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Pretoria and Research Associated based at WISER, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa. She explores ocean writing of the global South in a time of environmental change. Her first monograph, Writing Ocean Worlds: Indian Ocean Fiction in English, appeared in 2021. With Isabel Hofmeyr, she co-directs the Oceanic Humanities for the Global South (www.oceanichumanities.com).

Phindezwa ‘Phindi’ Mnyaka is a senior lecturer in the Department of History at the University of the Western Cape. She teaches courses on Africa’s colonial history, including gender and colonialism. Her research interests include mid-century photography in southern Africa. She has published widely on these. She also has an interest in different modes of historical engagement. Since 2019 she has convened a postgraduate course on experimental history writing drawing from a range of genres and disciplines. 

REGISTRATION:

In order to register for the webinar, please click on the link:

https://liu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Aqc-qgqzIiG9LF3ixaySt8ClOClZvVMlKK

The Posthumanities Hub Seminar “Toxic/Trans/Bodies” – new date TBA (Feb 2021)

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On February 27, 2020

In News

Welcome to The Posthumanities Hub Seminar “Toxic/Trans/Bodies” with speakers Andria Nyberg Forshage (writer, poet and theorist based in Stockholm, SE) and dr Wibke Straube (Karlstad University, SE)!

When: Feb 2021

Where: online

 

More info:

t4t4t4t4t: Fourfold Sex and Trans-Individuation at the End of the World

by Andria Nyberg Forshage

Abstract

At present, 20th-century notions of bodily immune systems modelled as repressive-productive sovereign border controls — and vice versa — are at once being superseded, obsolesced, reinforced and reinvigorated as perhaps never before. At the same time, 21st-century notions of desiring-productive, flexible, molecular immuno-security, already dated as hyper-modern, are being folded into and onto any imaginable kind of body, society, or network. In terms of data, flesh, sex, nation, sense-making, resource extraction, ecological disaster, and ongoing resistance, it is at once a situation of planetary global or civil war, armed peace, state of emergency, and stasis.  

Departing from a scenario of societal collapse following transgender bioterrorism on a hormonal and molecular scale as imagined in Torrey Peters’ sci-fi novella Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones (2016), this talk explores the drift of t4t desiring-machines in and through the bodies, farms, fields and factories of contemporary and imagined pharmacopornographic capitalism. Where t4t designates trans for trans desire, in the trans woman commune the logograph becomes self-replicating as desire and senseless noise, burnt and embedded through fleshy, tranimal metabolism. 

Connecting the fourfold of subjectivation as theorised by Gilles Deleuze in Foucault (1988) with the t4t fourfold complexes of infectious human-animal-societal undoings, as developed through a reading of Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, how might t4t4t4t4t be understood as an operation-operator of what Gilbert Simondon has termed the transindividual?

Bio

Andria Nyberg Forshage is a writer, theorist and poet, part of the editorial team for the Paletten Art Journal and currently working with the Knowledge Hub at Public Art Agency Sweden. She has previously presented research at conferences including the First International Trans*Studies Conference at the University of Arizona and The First International Queer Death Studies Conference at Karlstad University. They have a room of their own in Stockholm and a Scorpio rising.

 

Chemicals, endocrine disruptors and unruly bodies in trans and queer art

by Wibke Straube

Abstract:

In 2018, the post of a vegan group on facebook went viral which argued, that trans and queer bodies are the “damaged” outcome of environmental pollution and endocrine disruption by POP. The post argued further that to lobby for trans and gay rights would mean to support a capitalist, exploitative system of ecological destruction. In response other vegans and this group in particular, dismissed this (cishetero)econormative position and argued this is merely one individual’s opinion. In my talk, I would like to firstly address this “singular” opinion and unpack the idea of the trans and intersex bodies as a result of endocrine disrupting chemical. I will to do this by considering the trans and intersex body as bodily entangled with environmental pollution and toxic contamination (Ah-King/Hayward 2014; DiChiro 2010; Pollock 2016). Secondly, and most centrally, I explore how endocrine disrupting toxins emerge in trans and queer art, intoxicate art practices and artistic bodies, and foster creative pollution that subverts the gender binary norms of EDC discourses and reclaims the toxic body as a monstrous, alien becoming through and within Otherness.

Bio:

Wibke Straube, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies, Karlstad University, SE. Their work focuses on intersectional analysis of trans, non-binary and queer embodiment, affective methodologies and the affinities of different socially marginalised bodies, their forms of survival and possibilities to create zones of liveability. They have published in Environmental Humanities and NORMA International Journal for Masculinity Studies, among others. E-mail: wibke.straube[at]kau.se

Seminar with Dr Otso Kortekangas on “Indigenous avant la lettre. The origins and livelihoods of the Sámi in European scholarly thought 1930–1950.”

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On February 4, 2020

In Uncategorized

Welcome to KTH Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment Higher Seminar with Dr Otso Kortekangas on ”Indigenous avant la lettre. The origins and livelihoods of the Sámi in European scholarly thought 1930–1960”

Time: Mon 2020-02-10 13.15 – 14.45

Lecturer: Otso Kortekangas, KTH, Div. History of Science, Technology and Environment and Stockholm University

Location: Teknikringen 74D, 5th floor, Seminar room

Short excerpt of the abstract:

My project studies the pre-history of the concept indigenous. It shows in
what ways Nordic and European scholars produced the Sámi as precisely indigenous before the term itself was widely in use. When this UN-backed concept gained ground during and following the anti- and postcolonial political processes of the 1960’s, the Nordic Sámi minority could tap in to the global indigenous identity movement.2 This was possible since both the scholarly and, with a certain delay, the popular understanding had gravitated to a direction where the Sámi were considered the original inhabitants of the northern areas of Fennoscandia. Ever since the indigenous label was introduced in the Nordic countries, it has become the first and foremost label and lens through which the Sámi population is studied.

The Posthumanities Hub Seminar with Prof. Patricia MacCormack, 30th January 2020, 13:15-15:00, KTH

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On January 9, 2020

In Events, KTH, News

Manifesto

Welcome to the first Posthumanities Hub event in 2020 – the seminar with Prof. Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK) on A Joyful Apocalypse: Activism for the End of the Anthropocene.

When: 30th January, 13:15 – 15:00

Where: the seminar room at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm (Teknikringen 74 D, Stockholm).

Facebook event

OBS! Please REGISTER FOR THIS EVENT by sending an email to: the.posthumanities.hub[at]gmail.com

Abstract:

To end the anthropocene  is a call to activism at a time where ways of living seem impossible to proscribe and the world’s many urban and natural environments and organisms are increasingly transforming, some becoming more vulnerable while others increase their exertion of power over global systems of information and control. During these ages it can be difficult to imagine new and multiple ways of existing where hopelessness and imagination exist simultaneously. Beyond the Posthuman, but firmly within this world, my concept of the Ahuman acknowledges we aren’t nonhuman, but devalues the term human and its thus far devastating consequences for the world in order to suggest vitalistic, perhaps even optimistic, ways to negotiate some of the difficulties in thinking and acting in a world where meaning and reality are tentative but material actuality and lives (of all varieties) are in need of novel modes of intervention and interaction for the liberation and creative freedom of all organisms and the ecology of the Earth as a whole. Collapsing activism, artistic practice and affirmative ethics, while introducing some radical contemporary ideas such as human extinction and vegan abolition this paper navigates the ways in which we must compose the human differently, specifically beyond nihilism and post – and trans-humanism and outside human privilege. This is in order to actively think and live with connectivity (actual not virtual), viscerally, with passion and grace, toward a new world. The irony of the apocalypse is that the world continues nonetheless.  How can we live more ethically? How can the end of the human (even the posthuman) mean the end of human privilege as that which assists in opening the world to all life and to the human apocalypse being the birth of the world through deep ecology?

Bio:

Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Cinesexuality (2008), Posthuman Ethics (2012) and The Ahuman Manifesto (2020), the editor of The Animal Catalyst: Toward Ahuman Theory (2014) and the co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008), Deleuze and the Animal (2017) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (2018). She publishes extensively in the posthuman, queer theory, animal studies, horror film, and Continental Philosophy.

The event is organised in collaboration with the Konstfack Research Week 2020 – see the detailed programme here.

 

Dr. Tara Mehrabi’s Talk at KTH Royal Insitute of Technology Stockholm (6th November)

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On November 1, 2018

In Events, KTH, News

The Posthumanities Hub has a great pleasure to welcome to KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm our guest, Dr. Tara Mehrabi (University of Turku, FI/Karlstad University, SE).

On 6th November Dr. Mehrabi gives a talk on “Queer Ecologies of Death” at KTH.

OBS!!! The event takes place in the seminar room at Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Insitute of Technology in Stockholm (address: Teknikringen 74 D, 5th floor).

It is open to the public and free of charge.

Queer Ecologies of Death

Abstract:
In this paper I explore the human-fly relation within the context of laboratory sciences. I rely on my ethnographic material collected from one year of participatory observation in an Alzheimer’s laboratory in Sweden in which scientists work with Drosophila Melanogaster, commonly known as fruit flies. Drawing on new materialism, posthuman theories and queer theories I explore queer ecologies of death. In other words, I explore how flies bodies as waste crosses the boundaries of natural/artificial, inside/outside, nature/laboratory, safe/hazardous and life/death. I argue that thinking with queer ecologies of death suggests understanding of nature, agency, non/human, and intimacy in ways that goes beyond the limits of human exceptionalism and hierarchical binary logic.

Bio:
Tara Mehrabi, PhD, is a Postdoc at the Unit of Gender Studies, University of Turku (Finland) and Lecturer at the Centre for Gender Studies, Karlstad University (Sweden). She is a feminist technoscience studies scholar who is interested in the intersection of gender studies, medical humanities and environmental humanities. Her doctoral dissertation, Making Death Matter (2016), is an ethnographic study of Alzheimer’s sciences in a Drosophila lab from a feminist materialism perspective. She is a founding member of Queer Death Studies Network. Website: https://taramehrabi.wordpress.com/.

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