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Tag: The Posthumanities Hub & The Eco- and Bioart Lab Seminars Page 1 of 2

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

PH & EBL hybrid seminar on “Design Ecologies: Towards Artistic and Postconventional (Research) Practices”, 14th June!

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On June 4, 2022

In Events, Webinars

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.

Twitter: @LynnIWilson

Instagram: @LynnIWilson

www.circulareconomywardrobe

www.lynnwilson.co.uk

TEDx Bath: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYqXf6ewboo

REGISTRATION

REGISTER HERE: https://liu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Ukd-ihrzMuGNMnDeKr_jKdV9x3cdrjdt4X

PH & EBL Seminar/Webinar with Prof. Thom van Dooren, 30th May, 13:15-15:00 CEST

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On May 16, 2022

In Events

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

REGISTER HERE:  https://liu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5csd-6rrDoqHteMOaRhfLomKPCSZuh01xBa

PH & EBL Webinar on ‘MAKING SANCTUARY’ with Dr Bayo Akomolafe, 10th March 13:15-15:00 CET

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On March 3, 2022

In Events, Webinars

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 the Tema 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’.

www.bayoakomolafe.net

www.emergencenetwork.org

REGISTRATION:

Please, register for the event by clicking the link:

https://liu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Aod–rrjIuGNLP7oKe2HIOC8jF616aZ0Fs

short version: https://bit.ly/3MhdNyy

PH & EBL Webinar on “Saturation Epistemologies”, 14th February, 17:15-19:00 CET

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On January 30, 2022

In Events, News, Webinars

We are pleased to invite you all to the upcoming Posthumanities Hub and The Eco- and Bioart Lab Webinar on “SATURATION EPISTEMOLOGIES” with Melody Jue (UC Santa Barbara) and Rafico Ruiz (Canadian Centre for Architecture).

The event takes place on 14th February 2022 at 17:15-19:00 CET on Zoom (for registration, see below).

Webinar on ‘Saturation Epistemologies’ with Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz

In this presentation, Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz discuss saturation epistemologies in their recent collection Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke Press, 2021). Poised as an alternative framework to object-focused inquiries and metaphors of entanglement, saturation points us to those situations where substances are not so easily isolated or tangled but may be materially or figuratively co-present. While saturation starts as a form of watery thinking, they show how it also draws our attention to thresholds, phase changes, and precipitates of matter. 

Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke 2020) and co-editor (with Rafico Ruiz) of Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke 2021). Her articles have appeared in Grey Room, Configurations, Media+Environment, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Resilience.

Rafico Ruiz is a researcher and curator. His work addresses infrastructure building in the Arctic, post–global warming ice, and practices of settler accountability. Ruiz is the author most recently of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier (2021), and the co-editor (with Melody Jue) of Saturation: An Elemental Politics (2021), both published by Duke University Press. His articles have appeared in Communication +1, Continuum, the Journal of Northern Studies, and Resilience. He is currently the Associate Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, and the co-curator of the upcoming exhibition ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home.

REGISTRATION:

Please, register for the event by clicking the link:

https://liu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5crdO2oqzkvGtUi_Da_SlyDcQQIlKLyKuy6

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