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.
We are pleased to invite you all to the upcoming Posthumanities Hub and The Eco- and Bioart Lab Webinar on “MAKING SANCTUARY” with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe.
The event takes place on 10th March 2022 at 13:15-15:00 CET on Zoom (for registration, see below).
The webinar is organised in collaboration with theTema Genus Higher Seminar Series.
“Making Sanctuary”
Abstract:
The Afrocene is the glitch in the algorithms of progress, the crack on the modern tarmacs that flatten the wilds, the disability of ontology – a crip-onto(ethico-epistemo)logy that speculates about and murmurs with the animist meanderings of blackness (where blackness is the decolonial unsettling of stability in its racializing flows). The Afrocene is failure. The failure of Man. Fire on the mountain. This failure, however, is alive and teeming with experimental life-deaths, the unthought, the unspoken, nomadic archetypes, diasporic identities, queer bodies, amniotic gods, and multispecies constellations in an always ‘teenage’ indetermiverse. In this talk, Bayo Akomolafe uses his concept of the Afrocene to bracket the anxieties of the Anthropocene; to suggest that climate chaos is the intensity of a cartographical project dedicated to centralizing unbothered continuity; to tell the story of the slave ship and its unexpected guest; to move beyond critique and identitarian tropes (without abandoning them) in order to signal a different politics of descent and of becoming-fugitive; to theorize what a postactivism might look like; to trace out a different therapeutic-political ethnography of losing one’s way in order to find it; and, to embark on an animism of the peri-feral: an invitation to the task of making sanctuary as the world ends once again.
Bio:
Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Visionary Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains’.
Warm welcome to The Posthumanities Hub & The Eco- and Bioart Lab Seminar on “Toxic/Trans/Bodies” with speakers dr Wibke Straube (Karlstad University, SE) and Andria Nyberg Forshage (writer, poet and theorist based in Stockholm, SE)!
The seminar (originally scheduled for February 2021) takes place on 9th September 2021 at 13:15 – 15:00 CEST on Zoom.
When: 9th September 2021, 13:15 – 15:00 CEST
Where: On Zoom (more info below)
Photo included in the poster: Andria Nyberg Forshage
REGISTRATION:In order to take part in the seminar, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 7th September 2021 at noon (CEST) the latest.
The Zoom link will be sent to you on 8th September in the evening.
Speakers:
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
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. 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.
Welcome to The Posthumanities Hub Seminar on ‘Becoming better ancestors to more-than-human future generations’ with speakers Associate Prof. Christina Fredengren and Prof. Cecilia Åsberg!
Becoming better ancestors to more-than-human future generations
Abstract
In this work-in-progress seminar, Christina Fredengren and Cecilia Åsberg present research that deals with the major question of how to better re-tie the material and immaterial knots between past, present and future generations. This is a question that is intimately tied to issues of sustainability, to how ancestors and successors are articulated – and questions of who inherits whom – and where matters of responsibility and care, as well as time, place and difference, come into play. Drawing on such, previously often unconnected, discussions and field philosophical work at a Swedish waste-to-energy plant, Fredengren and Åsberg suggest ways forward for moving toward inventive modes of becoming better ancestors. Such measures aspire to impact on how to approach sustainability, intergenerational justice and care in postnatural heritage management and everyday life. The research is part of the FORMAS-funded project “Checking in with Deep Time”.
Bios:
Christina Fredengren
Associate Professor at the Archaeological Research Laboratory, Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies, Stockholm University, with several international publications in archaeology, feminist posthumanities, natural/cultural heritage and environmental humanities. Heading the Stockholm University Environmental Humanities Research School and one of the founders of Stockholm University Environmental Humanities Network. Doctorate in Archaeology at Stockholm University 2004, key member of The Posthumanities Hub and the Seed Box: An Environmental Humanities Collaboratory, and Pi of research project Checking in with Deep Time (funded by Formas- A Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development) as well as Pi of Water of the Times (funded by the Swedish Science Council, Berit Wallenberg foundation), and Pi of Curating Time (funded by the SeedBox).
Cecilia Åsberg
Professor of Gender, nature, culture at Linköping University, Department of Thematic Studies, Fellow of Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, and recently guest professor at KTH Royal Institute of Technology with a longstanding engagement in feminist cultural studies of science, medicine, technology and embodiment, in the environmental arts and the societal relevance of more-than-human humanities. She works in the versatile art and science spectrum of feminist posthumanities with funded projects on environmental communication, AI art, coastal and oceanic humanities and deep time sustainability. The first Scandinavian Doctorate in Gender Studies, and avid international networker and Founding Director of the Swedish Seed Box research programme in environmental humanities, she is since 2008 founder and director of The Posthumanities Hub.
Welcome to the Posthumanities Hub Seminar on ‘AI and the Posthumanities’ with an exciting list of speakers!
This event, engaging AI and non-AI researchers alike, aims to open up a space for the lively conversations on AI as a societal challenge for citizenship, the artistic imaginary, education, democracy, human and the more-than human, while mobilising various approaches, ranging from feminist and decolonial perspectives to sustainability and technology in society.
The seminar takes shape of a researchers’ ‘speed dating’ event, focused on exciting new perspectives on AI, where short (5 minute) presentations by each of the invited speakers will be followed by the joint discussion.
The session will be chaired by Lina Rahm, Adam Wickberg and Cecilia Åsberg, all from The Posthumanities Hub.
When: April 22, 2021, from 10:00-12:00 CEST.
Where: On zoom. In order to take part in the seminar, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 20th April 2021 at noon (CEST) the latest.
Please see more info below.
Image of dog created using Artificial Intelligence (Mark Breadon, CC0)
Invited speakers:
Johannes Bruder is a researcher at the Institute of Experimental Design and Media Cultures and the Critical Media Lab Basel. Johannes’s research targets infrastructures, technologies, and media that support epistemologies & empiricisms in art, design, science and their (sub)cultural distortions. His current research interests include interactions between psychological research and computing / AI, narratives and dispositifs of creative practice, and media studies of psychic life.
Teresa Ceratto-Pargman is associate professor (docent) of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) at Stockholm university. Her research is situated at the intersection of Educational Technology and HCI. It seeks to contribute to the study of the increasing digitalisation of everyday practices and mainly to reflect on the opportunities and challenges that this process brings to epistemic and social practices in education. She is the PI of the WASP-HS research project “Ethical and Legal Challenges in Relationship to AI-driven Practices in Higher Education”.
Katherine Harrison is senior lecturer at the Department of Thematic Studies (Gender Studies) at Linköping university. Her research explores how material technical constraints and social norms intersect in the design and development of digital media technologies. She is currently engaged in two large research projects: “Robotic care practices: Creating trust, empathy and accountability in human-robot encounters” and “Sustainability means inclusivity: engaging citizens in early stage smart city development”
André Holzapfel is associate professor at the Media Technology and Interaction Design Department at KTH. His research is within the area of Sound and Music Computing, broadly focusing on analysis of audio and symbolic data as well as the analysis of motion capture signals. He is currently the PI of the WASP-HS-funded project “AI and the Artistic Imaginary: Socio-cultural consequences and challenges of creative-AI technology”.
Åsa Johansson Palmkvist is a PhD student in Gender, Organisation and Technology in the Department of Industrial Economics and Management, KTH. Drawing on feminist theory, STS and organization studies, her PhD project aims at exploring how AI research links to the inclusion and exclusion of different people and enables and restricts specific ways of existing in this world.
Anne Kaun is professor in media and communication studies. Her research interests include media theory, mediated temporalities, algorithmic culture, automation and artificial intelligence from a humanistic social science perspective. She is currently leading the Swedish Network for Automated Decision-Making in the Public Sector, funded by Riksbankens Jubileumsfond. This network investigates the extensive implementation of automated decision-making in the welfare sector in Sweden to meet contemporary challenges including increasing costs and decreasing resources.
Cecilia Magnusson Sjöberg is Professor and Subject Director of Law and Information Technology at the Swedish Law & Informatics Research Institute, Stockholm University. In 1992 she was awarded a LL.D. degree, with a doctoral thesis addressing legal automation with special focus on digitalisation in public administration. She has many years of experience of legal system design and management, giving rise to issues around cyber security. As such, legal implications of e-government remain as one of her major fields of interest.
Simone Natale, is an Associate Professor at the University of Turin, Italy, and Assistant Editor of Media, Culture & Society. Natale’s research focuses broadly on media history, media theory and digital media. Simone is the author of the two monographs Deceitful Media: Artificial Intelligence and Social Life after the Turing Test (Oxford University Press, 2021) and Supernatural Entertainments: Victorian Spiritualism and the Rise of Modern Media Culture (Penn State University Press, 2016)
Jesper Olsson, is a Professor at Linköping University; his research explores the relationship between literature, art, and media – from phonographs to digital networks – and approaches media as ecologies and infrastructures in culture, society, and everyday life. Olsson is leading a number of research projects including the Linköping University-based research group Literature, Media Histories, and Information Cultures, covering questions of archives and databases, distribution and transmission, noise and meaning, inter- and trans-medial art, media technologies and cultural memory, media technologies and the history of the senses, bio-media, appropriation and remediation, trans- and post-literacy. Olsson is also the program director of the interdisciplinary research program The Seed Box.
Hannah Pelikan is a PhD Candidate at Linköping University. She won the graduation award of the faculty for electrical engineering, mathematics and computer science for her master thesis on the impact of robots on teamwork in the surgical operating room. Pelikan’s current projects involve Cozmo robots in family homes and autonomous buses in regular traffic. Hannah has previously published on the DaVinci surgical system and on the Nao robot. Her work contributes to the design of human-friendly robots that respect human interaction practices and thereby are more intuitive to interact with.
Bojana Romic, is an artist and media theorist. Romic is currently Marie Skłodowska Curie Seal of Excellence researcher and senior lecturer at Malmö University, working on a project The Robot as a Technocultural Icon. Her research is situated in the crossroads between audience studies, aesthetics of technology and image politics.
Jenny Sundén is Professor at Karlstad University. Sundén’s work is situated in the intersection of digital media studies, cultural studies, science and technology studies (STS), feminist and queer theory, and affect theory. She currently works on questions of technological brokenness, disruption, and delay as a contribution to queer theory and queer lives, as well as on feminist uses of humour as forms of resistance in social media, focusing on how humour and laughter may rewire shame and acts of shaming.
