The Posthumanities Hub

More-than-human humanities research group!

Tag: the posthuman

REMINDER: Prof. Rosi Braidotti’s summer school “Posthuman Ethics, Pain and Endurance (How to Live an Anti-Fascist Life and Endure the Pain)”

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On June 20, 2018

In Events, News, summer school

Prof. Rosi Braidotti’s summer school “Posthuman Ethics, Pain and
Endurance (How to Live an Anti-Fascist Life and Endure the Pain)”

20-24th of August 2018
uu summer school UU logo
Drift 13, 004 – Utrecht University, 3512 BR Utrecht, the Netherlands
Course Director: Prof. Rosi Braidotti
Lecturers: Prof. Rosi Braidotti (Utrecht University), Dr. Rick Dolphijn
(Utrecht University), Lucas van der Velden (Sonic Acts), and Simone
Bignall (Flinders, University of South Australia)

The 2018 summer school, titled “Posthuman Ethics, Pain and Endurance,” which will take place between the 20th-24th of August 2018 at Utrecht University, in Utrecht, the Netherlands, combines an introduction to the basic tenets of Braidotti’s brand of critical posthuman theory with an overview on contemporary debates about the ethical implications of posthumanism and the so-called ‘posthuman turn’.
While the emphasis of the course will be on the mutually enriching relationship between the posthuman, neo-materialism, and the ethics of affirmation, this year the main topic will be both the practical and theoretical issues around the notions of pain and endurance in the contemporary world.
How does a vision of the posthuman subject as a process of interaction between human, non-human and inhuman forces help us cope with the multi-facetted challenges of the contemporary world, caught between the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction? How does the neo-Spinozist notion of endurance foster the project of constructing an affirmative ethics for posthuman subjects, at a time of social and political regression on so many fronts? How does
this vital ethics of affirmation help us confront suffering, death and dying? What does it mean to lead an anti-fascist life in brutal times?
Following an established tradition, each day of the course is structured as follows: the mornings are devoted to plenary keynote lectures, by the course leader, invited teachers and special guests. The afternoons are devoted to parallel seminar sessions. All of the participants will be sub-divided into smaller tutoring groups, led by a team of tutors who follow the same group throughout.
Participants will be notified of the group they have been assigned to and receive the name and contact details of their tutor before the summer school starts. Rosi Braidotti will be present every afternoon, will visit all the groups and will participate in all of them in turns. Adjustments and changes to the assigned groups can be made if necessary. At the end of the afternoon all the tutorial groups come together for a closing plenary discussion session, chaired by Braidotti.
Please click on the following registration link if you are interested in participating:
https://www.utrechtsummerschool.nl/courses/culture/posthuman_ethics_pain_and_endurance
Or send an e-mail to receive more information to: gw.braidottiass@uu.nl
*Please note that all participants of this summer school are expected to
have read several selected entries of The Posthuman Glossary
(Bloomsbury 2018, see https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/posthumanglossary-9781350030244/),
plus the Posthuman (Polity 2013).
*Please note that the course fees (excluding housing) are 300.00 euros.
You can receive 2.0 ECTS for active participation during this summer
school.

For a pdf version of this call see here.

For ‘Posthuman Glossary’ flyer see here.

QUITE FRANKLY: It’s a Monster Conference University Club of Western Australia 18-19 October 2018 (DEADLINE EXTENDED until 7th April)

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On March 30, 2018

In Call for Papers, Conferences, Events, News

2017-08-30-Quite-Frankly-web-banner-900x300Image source: https://www.conferenceonline.com/abstract/alogin/?clear=1&warehouse_id=1423

Quite Frankly: It’s a Monster Conference presented by SymbioticA and
Somatechnics will be held in the University of Western Australia on the
18-19 of October 2018.
2018 marks 200 years since the publication of Mary Shelley’s
Frankenstein: or, The Modern Prometheus. Shelley’s “Creature” is usually
conceived as a human creation, the stitched-together, tragic victim of
scientific and technological experimentation. We rupture these stitches,
revealing that the Creature is more than the sum of its parts. We invite
papers, panels, and artistic and scientific provocations to explore the
dynamic ecosystems evolving within and from the gaps between the
Creature’s fragments.
Keynote speakers are Karen Barad, Ambelin Kwaymullina, Kira O’Reilly and
Fiona Wood.
For more see:
http://www.symbiotica.uwa.edu.au/activities/symposiums/quite-frankly-2018

You can find the call for papers here. The submission deadline has been extended until 7th April 2018.

Quite Frankly conference is part of the Unhallowed Arts Festival which
includes a series of exhibitions (Perth Institute of Contemporary Arts,
WA Art Gallery, Cullity Gallery, MOANA, Paper Mountain and Old Customs
House Fremantle), a day-long Film Festival and other performances. For
more information, see the developments of the Unhallowed Arts site:
http://unhallowedarts.org/

 

Mini-symposium ‘Becoming with Alien Encounters and Speculative Storytelling’: Part 3

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On March 30, 2018

In Events, News, Symposiums

Void person_horisontalImage source: Chuck Tingle’s Complete Guide to the Void (2017)

Dear all,

There are only a few days left till the Symposium “Becoming with Alien Encounters and Speculative Storytelling”, co-organised by The Posthumanities Hub and TEMA GENUS Higher Seminar Series at Linköping University, we also continue to provide you with some sneak peeks into what you’ll be able to fully enjoy on 5th April at Tema Genus!

More specifically, every second day we give you a little insight into what our speakers are going to talk about. Or, in other words, every second day you’ll be able to learn a bit more about each presenter and their paper! Stay tuned! 🙂

Today we have a great pleasure to present our next speaker, Dr. Line Henriksen!

Bio: 

Line Henriksen is a lecturer in Gender Studies at the University of Copenhagen and holds a PhD in Gender Studies from the Unit of Gender Studies at Linköping University, Sweden. She has published on the subjects of monster theory, hauntology and digital media in journals such as Women & Performance and Somatechnics, and her fiction has appeared in Andromeda Spaceways and Tales to Terrify, among others. She is a founding member of the Monster Network.

Paper abstract: 

From the Void – Speculative Storytelling and Encounters with Nothingness

The void is a recurring figure within the genre of speculative fiction. Whether in the shape of the emptiness of outer space or the depths of the sea, the void embodies nothingness as well as the limits of human understanding and imagination. This, the void’s associations with emptiness and the ‘beyond-human’, makes it a favoured antagonist within speculative fiction, but also a space of infinite possibilities – a blank page that is never quite as blank as one expects. In this paper, I explore contemporary speculative tales of nothingness as they relate to questions of storytelling and encounters with the (never fully) blank page.

Prof. Rosi Braidotti’s 2018 Summer School at Utrecht University (The Netherlands)

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On February 26, 2018

In Events, summer school

The day-to-day draft programme for Prof. Rosi Braidotti’s 2018 summer school at Utrecht University (the Netherlands) is now available online!

 The 2018 summer school, titled “Posthuman Ethics, Pain and Endurance,” which will take place between the 20th-24th of August 2018 at Utrecht University, in Utrecht, the Netherlands, combines an introduction to the basic tenets of  Braidotti’s brand of critical posthuman theory with an overview on contemporary debates about the ethical implications of posthumanism and the so-called ‘posthuman turn’. See the day-to-day programme summer school UU

The intensive course “Posthuman Ethics, Pain and Endurance” offers an overview of the contemporary debates about the ethical implications of posthumanism and the so-called ‘posthuman turn’ as well as Rosi Braidotti’s brand of critical feminist posthuman theory. The focus of the course this year will be on the relationship between the posthuman and the neo-materialist, vital ethics of affirmation, with special emphasis on how they deal with the complex issues around the lived experiences of pain, resistance, suffering and dying. Deleuze famously describes ethics as the aspiration to live an anti-fascist life. What does this mean for posthuman subjects situated between the Fourth Industrial Revolution and the Sixth Extinction? In the brutal context of the Anthropocene and climate change, of rising populism, growing poverty and inequality, how does posthuman ethics help us to deal affirmatively with these challenges?

These issues will be outlined, explored and assessed by addressing the following questions: How does a vision of the posthuman subject as a transversal an affirmative process of interaction between human, non-human and inhuman forces, help us cope with the complex and often painful challenges of the contemporary world? How does it affect the feminist quest for social justice, as well as environmental sustainability? How does it intersect with indigenous epistemologies and anti-racist politics? How does the neo-Spinozist notion of endurance foster the project of constructing an affirmative ethics for posthuman subjects? How does the idea of endurance connect to the philosophical tradition of neo-stoicism, and to Foucault’s re-reading of it? How does a posthuman ethics of affirmation help us practically to confront the lived reality of pain, death and dying?

Please click on the following registration link if you are interested in participating: https://www.utrechtsummerschool.nl/courses/culture/posthuman_ethics_pain_and_endurance       

Or send an e-mail to receive more information to: gw.braidottiass@uu.nl

COMPULSORY READING:

The basic textbook for the course is The Posthuman Glossary    (Bloomsbury Academic 2018), edited by Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, which all participants are expected to buy.

 

BACKGROUND READING:

Please note that all participants are expected to have read Rosi Braidotti’s book The Posthuman (Polity Press 2013), and for an introduction to brutalism, the special issue of e-flux, co-edited by Rosi Braidotti, Timotheus Vermeulen et alia, which can be found here: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/83/

 *Please note that the course fees (excluding housing) are 300.00 euros. You can receive 2.0 ECTS for active participation during this summer school.

 

Feminist posthumanities is for everybody!

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On August 23, 2017

In News, Uncategorised

Human nature is not the oxymoron we imagined it to be. In this new planetary age of the Anthropocene, defined by human-induced climatic, biological, and even geological transformations, we humans are fully in nature. And nature is fully in us. This was, of course, always the case, but it is more conspicuously so now than ever before: people are entangled in co-constitutive relationships with nature and the environment, with other animals and organisms, with medicine and technology, with science and epistemic politics. We live and die, play, thrive, and suffer by each other. For example, think of “mad cow” disease, where humans feeding cows with by-products from slaughtered sheep infected with the prionic disorder “scrapie” in turn generates prion disorders in cows that get transmitted to human beef consumers through a series of transcorporeal (Alaimo 2010) gestures across species. We can think, too, of pollen allergies and their increased prevalence as an index of our environed embodiment. Or how hormone-like substances seep from plastics into microorganisms, fish bodies, human infants in increasingly aggressive polymere ecologies. While culture and nature never were in fact separated but for academic divisions of labour, we live in a time when the so called “human mastery”, alterations, and especially the “slow violence” (Nixon 2011) of these naturcultural relationships of embodied environments and environed embodiments appear to us more clearly. For such power-imbued yet generative relationships, we need a more-than-human humanities. We also need expertise on human differences; those between men and women; between men and men, or women and women; transgender, and internal to our, after all, not-so-fully rational human (and microbial) Selfhood. More-than-human and human differences (gender, class, race, nationality, age, sexual orientation, specie- or land relationality, etc) interplay in intricate ways, socially. Our work at the Posthumanities Hub, take such differences very seriously as we make our case for diverse feminist forms of the posthumanities (Wolfe 2003). Our starting points are diverse too; a love for science, art and philosophy,  postnatural feminisms, technological empowerment, humanities disciplines like history, literature, philosophy, languages, the cyborg ontology and situated epistemology of Donna Haraway (1991), anti-racist justice movements and anti-colonial environmentalism, veganism, plant theory, and multispecies justice. All of these are critical and creative endevours that provide mind-sets and society’s psyche with new concepts to guide thought and practice.  At The Posthumanities Hub, we embrace a feminist posthumanities that stands able to frame naturecultures unfolding and recalibrate humanities analytics for an Anthropocene of many differences. We aim for alliances and research worthy of our complex times, a humanities for our  “postnatural” condition of human and nonhuman co-constitution of the planetary.

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