Call for applications: Seminar on Contemporary Theory, Creativity, The Earth and Us
February 14, 2019 | Utrecht University
Rick Dolphijn
Close Reading Session: Still Alive and Already Dead
February 21, 2019 | University of Amsterdam
Rosi Braidotti, Rick Dolphijn and Susanne Winterling
Workshop: a Necropolitics of Life
February 22, 2019 | Sonic Acts Festival at Vlaams Cultuurhuis de Brakke Grond
Rick Dolphijn, Rosi Braidotti and Susanne Winterling
Rethinking Death… and Ways to Live
Led by Rick Dolphijn, Sonic Acts and Platform for Posthuman Ecologies and the Contemporary (post)-Humanities (Utrecht University) are organising a seminar in collaboration with the Research School for Media Studies (RMeS). The seminar comprises a close reading session, a workshop with prominent guests – among others, Rosi Braidotti and Susanne Winterling – and a Sonic Acts festival visit and intervention, and aims to map some key thoughts that relate to life and death from a posthuman perspective.
At the interstices of contemporary philosophy and contemporary art, psychoanalysis and ecology, we get together for a triptych of events that explore the concepts of death and life differently. Leaving modernist and anthropocentric oppositions behind us, our aim is to explore how different ideas of death give rise to different forms of life, and how these concepts relate to the organic and the inorganic, to space and time.
Enrolment
Please note that this seminar is intended for PhD candidates and RMa students. A limited number of external artists and practitioners can also apply via Sonic Acts by sending a CV, a short biography and motivation letter outlining why you would like to attend to workshop[at]sonicacts[dot]com.
Late or incomplete applications will not be considered. If we receive more applications than expected, a careful selection will be made based on motivation and diversity of backgrounds. More information, including a detailed schedule, will be sent to the selected participants. The deadline for applications is 1 February 2019.
Fee
Participants pay a €50 contribution for the seminar. The fee also grants access to the Sonic Acts conference on Friday 22 February.
Rick Dolphijn teaches and does research on media theory and cultural theory. He has written on new materialism, ecology, ecosophy and art and has great interest in the developments in continental philosophy and speculative thought. His academic work has appeared in journals like Angelaki, Continental Philosophy Review (with Iris van der Tuin), Collapse and Deleuze Studies. He currently holds a Senior Fellowship at the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University.
Rosi Braidotti is a contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician. A ground-breaking scholar in both materialism, continental philosophy and gender studies, she has enriched the Information Age with her postmodern feminist considerations of cyberspace, prosthesis and the materiality of difference. Braidotti is the founding director of the Centre for the Humanities in Utrecht, and the author of numerous books, including Nomadic Subjects (2011), The Posthuman (2013), and co-editor of publications such as The Posthuman Glossary (2018; with Maria Hlavajova).
Susanne M. Winterling works across a range of media to explore the sentient economy, digital cultures and the social life of materials across our built environment. Her practice reflects upon political as well as aesthetic entanglements and power structures among human/animal/matter. Winterling also remains focused on historical feminist practices and the commons, and puts spotlight on different ways of knowledge through embodiment. Prevailing modernistic concepts, power structures and hierarchical historiographies are captured and investigated in her work in the form of spatial constellations.
