v annual conferences on the new...
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V Annual Conferences on the New Materialisms
NEW MATERIALIST METHODOLOGIES:
Gender, Politics and the Digital
25-26 September 2014 - Barcelona
The theory of new materialism is traversing many disciplines of knowledge: from quantum physics to art
theory. This allows a search for a common ground for interdisciplinary studies. In addition, these theoretical
approaches are proving themselves as a suitable “ethic-onto-epistemological” framework (Barad, 2007) that
permits the examination of social phenomena from multidimensional perspectives, alongside offering new ways
to theorize and challenge the divisions between matter and discourse, nature and culture, etc. However, the
methodological parameters of these approaches remain underdeveloped and somewhat unclear especially when
related to feminist theories and politics. New materialism has been coined as a “third wave feminist
epistemology” (van der Tuin, 2009) in the present globalized information society, and it is because of this that a
profound reassessment of some of the core research concepts is needed if these ways of theorizing want to
configure themselves as an alternative to social constructivist approaches specifically in the context of digital
cultures and political engagement. To these methodological concerns, we have included ‘gender’, ‘politics’ and
‘the digital’ because of their centrality in scholarly debates produced in feminist journals and scholarship. The
terms also remain key for contemporary feminist practice. Can we still consider gender as a key concept for
feminist politics? How is social change conceived of and produced within a new materialist framework? How is
digital inter-connectedness affecting/affected by new materialisms, and most importantly different forms of
life?
We are very happy to welcome you all in Barcelona!
Organising committee: Beatriz Revelles Benavente, Ana M. González Ramos, Krizia Nardini, Iris
van der Tuin, Milla Tiainen, Illona Hongiston, Cecilia Åsberg and Katve-Kaisa Kontturi
Advisory Board: Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Milágros Sáinz Ibáñez, Barbara Bolt, Rick Dolphijn,
Marta Aymerich, Cecilia Castaño Collado, Begonya Enguix Grau, Juliet Webster
New Materialist Methodologies is associated with:
- The international conference series on New Materialisms held at Anglia Ruskin University (in
2010), Utrecht University (2011), Linköping University (2012) and University of Turku (2013).
- The ISCH COST Action IS1307 New materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How
matter comes to matter’ of which it is the kick-off conference
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CONFERENCE VENUE
Building MediaTic
Carrer de Roc Boronat, 117 – Barcelona
Locations:
The registration desk will be held at the 7th floor.
Keynote lectures will be held at the 7th floor on the room called William Mitchell.
All the other sessions will be distributed around several rooms on the 6th, 7th, and 8th floors.
Please Notice: will need an access card to enter the building, which will be given to you together
with your conference bag. You will need to return the access card once the conference is over.
The GALA DINNER will be held at the resourant HORIGINAL: Carrer de Ferlandina, 29, 08001 Barcelona
PROGRAMME
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THURSDAY 25
08.30-09.00
REGISTRATION (7th
floor)
09.00-09.30
Welcoming speech: Marta Aymerich (Vice-rector UOC University), Ana M. González Ramos(Gender &
ICT, UOC), Iris van der Tuin (COSt Action ISCH1307) and Beatriz Revelles Benavente (chair of the
conference board)
William Mitchell Room (7th
FLOOR)
09.30 – 11.00
Peta Hinton: Nothing Matters: An Im/Possible Politics of Life Itself
Respondent: Kathrin Thiele
William Mitchell Room (7th
FLOOR)
Chair: Krizia Nardini
COFFEE BREAK William Mitchell Room (7th
FLOOR)
11.00 – 11.30
11.30 – 13.30
WILIAM
MITCHELL
ROOM (7th
FLOOR)
Demonstrating
Demonstration
- Iris van der Tuin
& Maaike Bleeker
- Cathrine Hasse
- Barbara Bolt
- Cecilia Åsberg
Chair: Milla
Tiainen
ROOM 705
(7th
FLOOR)
Subject(s) of
techno-artistic
practices
- Miguel Penas
- Pedro Jacobetty,
Débora Lanzeni &
Maxigas
- Valentina
Montero & Lucía
Engaña
- Heidi Fast
Chair: Jelena
Djuric
ROOM 8A
(8th
FLOOR)
Smelling, Gaming,
Connecting: DIY
Gender and media
and the Digital
Materiality of
Politics
- Megan Boler
- Jen Jerson &
Suzanne de Castell
- Melanie McBride
- Jason Nolan
Chair: Nevena
Dakovic
ROOM 6A
(6th
FLOOR)
Putting concepts
to work
- Linnea Bodén
- Karin Gunnarsson
- Riika Hohti
- Sofie Sauzet
Chair: María del
Mar Alonso-
Almeida
TERRACE
ROOM
(6th
FLOOR)
Bodies in
art/digital theory
- Jules Sturm
- Waltraud Ernst
- Amparo Lasén
&Antonio Agustín
García
- Christian Mieves
Chair: Ana
Mouraz
LUNCH BREAK OPEN SOURCE (7th
FLOOR)
13.30 – 14.00
14.00 – 16.00
WILLIAM
MITCHELL
ROOM (7th
FLOOR)
Networking
workshop*
ROOM 705 (7th
FLOOR)
Methodological
workshop**
COFFEE BREAK William Mitchell Room (7th
FLOOR)
16.00 – 16.30
16.30-18.30
Diffractive
ecologies
- Corinna Bath
- Dagmar Lorenz-
Meyer
- Marie-Pier
Boucher
- Alanna Thain
Chair: Iris van der
Tuin
Intra-acting the
artistic/media
space
- Vappu Jalonen
- Martta Heikkila
- Gregory J.
Seigworth
- Arnette Arlander
Chair: Maaike
Bleeker
Embodying
questions
- Bettina
Papenburg
- Tereza Virtová
- Zuzana Stefkova
- Mónica Cano
Chair: Hannah
Meissner
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FRIDAY 26 9.30 – 11.00
Felicity Colman: Feminicity: platforms, filters, catalysers
Respondent: Ana María González Ramos
William Mitchell Room (7th
FLOOR)
Chair: Beatriz Revelles Benavente
COFFEE BREAK William Mitchell Room
11.00 – 11.30 7th
FLOOR
11.30 – 13.30
Towards New
Materialist
Politics of
Musicking
- Taru Leppanen
- Pirkko Moisala
- Milla Tiainen
- Hanna Vääitäinen
Chair: Illona
Hongisto
Tracing bodies
and selves
- Boka En & Agnes
Fülöp
- Teresa Samper
- Katarzyna
Wolanik Boström
- Michael Jonik
Chair: Doris
Allhutter
Becoming political
- David Chandler
- Bjorn
Thorsteinsson
- Katja Cicigoj &
Franciska Aigner
- Signe Leth
Gammelgaard
Chair: Kathrin
Thiele
Education and the
matter of
information
- Nikki Rotas
- Ana Mouraz
- Marc Kosciejew
- Helga Sadowski
Chair: José
Carmelo Gomes
Practicing
politics
- Josef Barla
- Doris
Leibetseder
- Sigrid Schmitz
- Valeria Morabito
Chair: Dagmar
Lorenz-Meyer
LUNCH BREAK OPEN SOURCE (7th
FLOOR)
13.30 – 14.00
14.00 – 15.30
Jussi Parikka: Digital Culture as the Desire of the Geophysical: A Geology of Media
Respondent: Elisènda Ardèvol
William Mitchel Room (7th
FLOOR)
Chair: Pau Alsina
15.30-17.30
(Micro)politics of
sex & gender
- Monika
Rogowska-
Stangret
- Lotta Kahkonen
- Rene Kaiser
- Whitney Stark
Chair: Malou
Juelskjaer
Methodologies@di
gital
- Débora Lanzeni
- Rumen Rachev
- Vera Bühlmann
- Eva Zekany
Chair: Waltraud
Ernst
Doing Art 2.0
- Dorota Golanska
- Pau Alsina
- Eliza Steinbock
- Audrey Samson
& Winnie Soon
Chair: Catherine
Hasse
Engaging
matter(s)
- Olga Cielemecka
- Jelena Djuric &
Ljiljana Rogac-
Mijatovic
- Tanja Traxler
- Erin K Stapleton
Chair: Hillevi
Lenz Taguchi
Relational
agencies
- Doris Allhutter
- Agnes Kovacs
- Sigridur
Thorgeirsdottir
- Hanna Meissner
Chair: Felicity
Colman
17.30 – 18.00 William Mitchell Room (7th
floor)
COFFEE BREAK
18.00 – 19.00 Closing roundtable: Where are we going? Futuring New materialisms
Participants: Milágros Sainz Ibañez, Barbara Bolt, Beatriz Revelles Benavente and Krizia Nardini.
20.30 GALA DINNER: Resourant HORIGINAL
Carrer de Ferlandina, 29, 08001 Barcelona
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* Networking workshop:
Moderators: Iris van der Tuin & Cecilia Åsberg (presenting the COST Action ISCH 1307)
Participants:
Milagros Sáinz Ibáñez & Ana María González Ramos & Cecilia Castaño (GENTIC group):
Relating gender and ICT in the information society.
Adelina Sánchez Espinosa (presenting the GEMMA program & the PhD program of gender
studies)
Guobjorg Raanveig: Icelandic Landscapes: Beauty and the Aesthetic in Environmental
Decision-Making
Monika Rogowska-Stangret: Feminist philosophy & gender studies. Problems of opposition
between Western and Eastern feminisms
Andrea García-Santesmases & Núria Vergés Bosch: Questioning gender identity from disability
** Methodological workshop:
Moderators: Illona Hongisto, Katve-Kaisa Kontturi & Milla Tiainen
Participants:
Katarzyna Szopa: Somantics. The New-Materialist Poetics of Relations
Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir
Tomás Karger: Knowledge production and Attention Allocation in Open-Source Software
Development
Artemis Alexiou: The [Not] Text and Gender Ideology in Feminist Periodicals [England c. 1888
– 1920]: Design, Gender, Class Politics and Factual, Material, Iconic Not-Textual Mechanisms
Pedro Jacobetty: Online Gestures and Traces: Towards an Internet Archaeology
Vlasta Stulíková: From Gardens to Bins: Food Waste through the Lens of Symmetrical
Anthropology
Dieuwke Hannah Boersma: Dancing disabled futures
Veronica Black: The skin as metaphor and the implication on the body
Aggeliki Sifaki: I am the Teacher who dares (not) to tell her name: Silent sexualities in the
Greek School Environment.
Tereza Virtová: Workers of the New Era: ethnography of young migrant workers, labor market
and changes in manual occupations
Abelardo Gil-Fournier: Color erosion. Inks and dyes in the pixel era.
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LIST OF PARTICIPANTS
Franziska Aigner……………………… [email protected]
Artemis Alexiou……………………… [email protected]
Sylvie Allendyke…………………….. [email protected]
Doris Allhutter……………………….. [email protected]
María del Mar Alonso-Almeida……… [email protected]
Pau Alsina……………………………. [email protected]
Annette Arlander…………………….. [email protected]
Elisenda Ardèvol Piera ………………. [email protected]
Cecilia Åsberg …………………… [email protected]
Marta Aymerich ....................................... [email protected] Josef Barla…………………………… [email protected]
Corinna Bath…………………………. [email protected]
Arantza Begueria ...................................... [email protected]
Veronica Black………………………. [email protected]
Maaike Bleeker………………………. [email protected]
Linnea Bodén…………………………. [email protected]
Dieuwke Boersma…………………….. [email protected]
Megan Boler…………………………… [email protected]
Barbara Bolt ........................................... [email protected]
Marie Pier Bouchen ............................... [email protected]
Vera Buhman ......................................... [email protected]
Blanca Callen ............................................. [email protected]
Vanessa Cameron-Lewis……………… [email protected]
Mónica Cano Abadía…………………. [email protected]
José Caramelo Gomes………………… [email protected]
Cecilia Castaño ……………………… [email protected]
Suzanne de Castell ................................ [email protected]
David Chandler…………………….. [email protected]
Masaya Chiba………………………….. [email protected]
Katja Čičigoj…………………………. [email protected]
Olga Cielemecka……………………… [email protected]
Felicity Colman……………………….. [email protected]
Nevena Dakovic………………………. [email protected]
Jelena Djuric…………………………… [email protected]
Lucía Egaña Rojas…………………….. [email protected]
Boka En……………………………….. [email protected]
Begonya Enguix Grau…………………. [email protected]
Martina Erlemann …………………… [email protected]
Waltraud Ernst…………………………. [email protected]
Jose Luis Esteban Casero . ..................... [email protected]
Helene Falkenberg……………………… [email protected]
Heidi Fast………………………………. [email protected]
Ágnes E. Fülöp…………………………. [email protected]
Signe Gammelgaard…………………… [email protected]
Itziar Gandarias Goikoetxea……………… [email protected]
Antonio Agustín García…………………. [email protected]
Esmeralda Garcia Morales
Andrea García-Santesmases………… [email protected]
Dorota Golanska…………………….. [email protected]
Ana M. González Ramos…………………. [email protected]
Karin Gunnarsson………………….. ….. [email protected]
Trine Krigsvoll Haagensen…………. [email protected]
Lonni Hall……………………………. [email protected]
Ines Handler.................................................. [email protected]
Cathrine Hasse……………………….. [email protected]
Liv Hausken…………………………….. [email protected]
Martta Heikkilä…………………………. [email protected]
Peta Hinton ……………………………… [email protected]
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Aud Sissel Hoel………………………. [email protected]
Vanina Hofman ........................................... [email protected]
Riikka Hohti……………………………… [email protected]
Ilona Hongisto…………………………. [email protected]
Vincenzo Ienuso .......................................... [email protected]
Pedro Jacobetty……………………… [email protected]
Vappu Jalonen……………………… [email protected]
Jen Jerson.................................................. [email protected]
Guðbjörg Rannveig Jóhannesdóttir …… [email protected]
Pirkko Moisala........................................... [email protected]
Malou Juelskjaer……………………….. [email protected]
Maxigas ...................................................... [email protected]
Melanie McBride ....................................... [email protected]
Lotta Kähkönen………………………… [email protected]
Rene Kaiser…………………………… [email protected]
Tomas Karger………………………. [email protected]
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi…………………….. [email protected]
Marc Kosciejew ......................................... [email protected]
Agnes Kovacs………………………… [email protected]
Amparo Lasén…………………………. [email protected]
Doris Leibetseder………………… . [email protected]
Debora Lanzeni ........................................ [email protected]
Hillevi Lenz Taguchi………………….. [email protected]
Taru Leppänen……………………… [email protected]
Endla Lõhkivi………………………….. [email protected]
Daniel Lopez ........................................... [email protected]
Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer………………… [email protected]
Rosella Magli ......................................... [email protected]
Hanna Meissner……………………. [email protected]
Julia Mendes …………………………… [email protected]
Christian Mieves……………………….. [email protected]
Cristina Miranda de Almeida.................. [email protected]
Valentina Montero …………………… [email protected]
Matthias Moosburger…………………… [email protected]
Valeria Morabito……………………. [email protected]
Monica Moreno ............................................ [email protected]
Ana Mouraz……………………………… [email protected]
Krizia Nardini…………………………… [email protected]
Basia Nikiforova…………………... [email protected]
Jason Nolan………………………… [email protected]
Libora Oates-Indruchova ........................... [email protected]
Niina Oisalo………………………. [email protected]
Bettina Papenburg………………………. [email protected]
Jussi Parikka ……………………………. [email protected]
Miguel Penas López………………… [email protected]
Josefin Persdotter………………………. [email protected]
Rumen Rachev……………………… [email protected]
Beatriz Revelles…………………….. [email protected]
Ana Rodera………………………… [email protected]
Ana Rodriguez ....................................... [email protected]
Ljiljana Rogac Mijatovic…………….. [email protected]
Monika Rogowska-Stangret………….. [email protected]
Nikki Rotas……………………………. [email protected]
Helga Sadowski………………………… [email protected]
Milágros Sáinz Ibáñez ………………… [email protected]
Teresa Samper………………………… [email protected]
Audrey Samson ......................................... [email protected]
Adelina Sánchez Espinosa ………………. [email protected]
Sofie Sauzet……………………………… [email protected]
Sigrid Schmitz……………………… [email protected]
Gregory Seigworth…………………….. [email protected]
Aggeliki Sifaki……………………… [email protected]
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Clare Stanhope ………………………. [email protected]
Erin Stapleton …..……………………… [email protected]
Whitney Stark………………………. [email protected]
Zuzana Stefkova…………………..…. [email protected]
Eliza Steinbock……………………… [email protected]
Vlasta Stulíková……………………… [email protected]
Jules Sturm………………………………. [email protected]
Winnie Soon ……………………………… [email protected]
Katarzyna Szopa………………………. [email protected]
Alanna Thain……………………………. [email protected]
Kathrin Thiele…………………………… [email protected]
Björn Thorsteinsson…………………… [email protected]
Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir ........................... [email protected]
Milla Tiainen…………………………….. [email protected]
Tanja Traxler……………………………… [email protected]
Hanna Väätäinen………………………… [email protected]
Iris van der Tuin………………………… [email protected]
Natalie van Gaalen……………………… [email protected]
Andrea de Pilar Vargas Londoño ............ [email protected]
Núria Vergés…………………………….. [email protected]
Irma Vila ................................................... [email protected]
Tereza Virtová………………………. [email protected]
Pau Walder ............................................ [email protected]
Katarzyna Wolanik Bostrom…………….. [email protected]
Eva Zekany……………………………… [email protected]
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LIST OF ABSTRACTS
Abstracts of Keynote Lectures
Peta Hinton
Nothing Matters: An Im/Possible Politics of Life Itself
Respondent: Kathrin Thiele
Indeed, is it not rather the very nature of existence that is at issue, or rather nonexistence, or rather
the conditions of im/possibilities for non/existence?
(Karen Barad – ‘What is the Measure of Nothingness?’)
With its reconfiguring of materiality as indeterminate and autopoietic force, new materialism makes a
substantial contribution to contemporary cultural debate. The (broadened) ontology it proposes not
only puts into question the nature of materiality itself, but also the status and shape of the human
actors who would ordinarily comprise our conventional understandings of “the social” and its
political dimensions. It shifts the notion and nature of what politics constitutes, indeed, to the point
that some have been forced to ask how it is that the posthumanist disposition of a new materialist
understanding of (material) agency continues to be relevant to a specifically feminist political
enterprise, for instance. However, a query sits at the heart of this important reworking of the political,
and it is one that attaches itself to the way matter, and relatedly “life”, are positioned as a condition of
what a new materialist politics comprises. Specifically, how does its largely neo-vitalist commitments
align with an affirmative agenda to orient, and perhaps even circumscribe, the forms of social
transformation with which new materialist analyses are concerned? Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) recent
engagement with life/death relationality is an important testing ground for this query as it unfolds a
significantly convoluted notion of life, as well as a politics and ethics that arrives from it.
Nevertheless, a close reading of her argument finds that a robust sense of negativity, in the form of
death and the inhuman, is potentially displaced with her privileging of potentia as the active force that
makes political and ethical change available. Thus, life, self-affected and transformative, offers a
political paradigm of generativity and possibility that, even if it recognises negativity, remains loyal
to the promise that values and relations can materialize differently, and in particular directions. These
potential commitments can be challenged by Karen Barad’s (2012) attention to nothingness in her
more recent discussions with the quantum vacuum. Here, nothingness is not the pure absence of
matter, but a radical openness ‘at the core of mattering’ (18). It marks an ontological in/determinacy
that makes life’s self-affirming capacities im/possible: an entangled im/materialization that puts death
right at the heart of lively generation. With this reading of Barad’s argument, I will explore the
provocations of the claim that “nothing matters” for a new materialist politics of life, perhaps even to
suggest that death, disorientation, failure, and stasis figure as the very nature of how the political
constitutes.
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Felicity Colman
Feminicity: Platforms, Filters, Catalysers
Respondent: Ana María González Ramos
The “New Materialisms” and the “New Feminist Materialisms” offer ways of bringing trans and inter
disciplinary knowledge to critiques of uneven power structures of the politics of identities. In this
endeavour, they address the politics of institutionally and legally constituted being. New Materialisms
are producing methodologies for analyzing, critiquing, and removing the production of Difference as
it is historically and hierarchically practiced in the disciplinary fields of the Humanities and Sciences
(cf. Coole and Frost 2010; Hekman 2010; Van Der Tuin 2014). Materialist critiques involve
exploration of the terms of scientific, onformatic, cognitively, sensorially, and epistemically
constructed exchange and correspondence, and examination of the ontological changes that the
technologies of conduction of those exchanges and their produced models engender. Given the
primacy of the image of a political body that operates, variously, as a materialist informatics; a
collective platform (in the case of nation states) or as an individuated (raced, sexed, gendered) lcb
[living capital body], in almost all forms of communication in both these disciplines and in other
forms of human relations, a consideration of new materialist methodologies specifically for a study of
trans-media forms, and of technology as a filter, catalyzer, and sometime creator of ontologies is
called for. This paper takes up this address of the media produced image, as the matter of the medium,
through the challenge posed by the conference theme of New
Materialist Methodologies: Gender, Politics, [and the] Digital.' Faced with this encounter, this paper
offers the ways in which a new materialist model, “Feminicity,” can be used to think about the
encounters between the domains of gender, politics and the technological [analogue, digital,
biological], as manifested in images. Feminicity marks out an actualization of feminist practices
where a change has occurred in the material value systems and platforms that are used as political and
cultural organisers of how difference is made visible. The body of digital feminicity draws from the
processual and philosophical fields of feminist media practices, and seeks to avoid the perpetuation of
a political position of the disposition of lack. Examples of Feminicity – as a materialist practice
expressive of the politics of diverse matters– are found in theoretical and crafted materialist
work. This paper asks how instances of Feminicity; materialist media and film practices described as
feminist can assist in thinking through images that act as an expression of a political time, or as an
intensive experiential moment, and if and how they are creative of an ontological ‘reality’, or
aesthetic of a particular political form of identity.
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Jussi Parikka
Digital Culture as the Desire of the Geophysical: A Geology of Media
Respondent: Elisènda Ardèvol
This talk address the turn to the Earth of the planetary geopolitical in contexts of posthuman theory
(Braidotti) and new materialism. In new materialism as a methodology and a body of diverse theories
of agency of matter, it has become evident that new materialism does not have to be “new”. A variety
of steps in feminist theory and broader philosophical and art discourses have for example over the
20th century provided insights to the non-signifying materials that not merely of the human.
Simondon’s theory of individuation, Robert Smithson’s land art-related thoughts and many more
contexts provided early insights to the later new materialism. Instead of claims of neglecting the old,
new materialism can act as cartographic enterprise to understand the complex material links across
different regimes of contemporary culture. In this sense I want to speak to the notion of “geology of
media” but more broadly also contextualise some new materialist ideas in relation to digital culture.
This amounts to the surprising materialies through which to understand the planetary and its residue –
for instance pollution. The talk is hence also an attempt to address some themes emerging in new
materialism as a relevant agenda for any understanding of the social and ecological impact of
contemporary design and technology. Indeed, new materialism as a body of living theoretisations
does not need to look at the future or accelerate, but it can also act as a way to understand for instance
the role of Earth’s slow long term durations for the current digital.
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Abstracts of papers presented in Panels
Doris Allhutter
Austrian Academy of Sciences, Institute of Technology Assessment, Vienna
Ideology, hegemony and material-discursive performativity: some thoughts on theory-political
implications of new materialism
Materialist accounts of power aim at explaining how (economic, political, epistemic) structures and socio-
material practices work together in complex ways to reproduce and shift social formations, such as class and
gender relations or relations between society and technology. In science and technology studies, for example,
the notion of a co-emergence of society and technology refers to a process in which political frameworks,
economic structures and ideologies are entangled with sociotechnical micro-practices that are enmeshed in
hegemonies as well as in embodied experiences and sociomaterial concepts.
Marxist, post-Marxist and new materialist approaches have theorized modes of power in terms of ideology,
hegemony or material-discursive performativity. Whereas ideology critique and concepts of hegemony tend to
focus on structures and the macro-levels of society, new materialist research mostly centers on micro-practices
or the intermediate levels of society, technology or science. The first two do not take into account the agentive
capacities of matter or materiality and bodies in a deeper way. New materialism, on the other hand, remains
rather vague when it comes to analyse dynamics of the re-establishment of power structures in society.
My presentation reconsiders the way in which concepts of ideology, hegemony and material-discursive
performativity can be made productive to grasp various dynamics of the (re-)configuration of power in society-
technology relations. In this manner it aims at sketching out some theory-political implications of new
materialism regarding the way the relation between structure, practices and agency is theorized.
Dr. Pau Alsina
Lecturer at the Arts and Humanities Department, Open University of Catalonia
Hardware Matters: debunking the immateriality myth in Digital Art and its consequences regarding
agency distribution.
The Digital has been largely thought as immaterial due its processual nature, but this has always been done as a
result of forgetting its technological substrate and prioritizing software over hardware, or better, discourse over
matter. But hardware matters once we are capable of overcome the confusion between atoms and bits and think
about machines agency in a productive way rather than a mere passive receptacle of human ideas. Traditional
Material and technical studies in Art History-even though they show us relevant social, economic or political
knowledge at that time- seem to have just an auxiliary dimension. This lack of sensibility for non-human agency
might be due several reasons, amongst them we find the preconception of a binary opposition between
machines and humans, a conception that assumes technology either as a determinist force or as a mere result of
social human agency. With Digital Art, and specially artworks delivered in the intersection between Art,
Science and Technology, things are not getting better while the tendency towards the shift from object to
process art oriented keeps aligned with the experimentation of new materials and technologies with great
obsolescence. Media Archaeology, Actor Network Theory, Object Oriented Ontology or Agential Realism
approaches differ in many ways but they are all share key changes of the traditional roles asigned to subjects
and objects, redistributing the agencies between them and establishing new and fruitful ways of connecting
discourse and matter, from Wolfgang Ernst's Machines Agency to Karen Barad's Posthuman Performativity.
Our objective in this paper is to explore their contributions towards the development of a neo-materialist
approach to Art History, and precisely to the study of Digital Art practices.
Annette Arlander
University of the Arts, Helsinki
From interaction to intra-action in performing landscape
When trying to understand and articulate an artistic practice called performing landscape, it proved helpful to
understand various (f)actors like the wind, the tripod, the scarf, the body, and so on as interacting collaborators
within an assemblage of various materialities (Bennett 2010). Prompted by Rosi Braidotti’s (2013) overview of
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the discussions around the posthuman, however, we could ask whether it is possible to understand the
interaction more like an intra-action (Barad 2007), where the entanglement of the various components is the
pre-condition rather than the result of the action. Perhaps the split of the artist into a performer in front of the
camera and a witness behind it, could be understood as an agential cut of sorts? In the case of performing with
plants, intra-action is intuitively easier to assume, due to the symbiotic interdependence of animals and plants in
their exchange of oxygen and carbon dioxide. But could we understand performing for camera with a small
swing attached to a tree, as an intra-action as well? This case study within the field of performance as research
and artistic research is related to the mattering of the digital, since the practice itself is to a large extent digital,
although the main focus of the paper is on methodological questions.
Cecilia Åsberg
Associate Professor, Head of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. Director of The Posthumanities
Hub, and Co-Director of GEXcel International Collegium for Transdiciplinary Gender Studies
Bodies Out of Order: Working Out Feminist Practices of the Posthumanities
Bodies are not what they used to be. Life after the Life Sciences takes on new forms, teach us new words, like
epigenetics, neuroplasticity and translational medicine, while also evidencing a highly ambivalent form of
“transcorporeality” (Stacy Alaimo) that is not new at all, but was there all along. Perhaps we are slowly
awakening from a modern illusion that kept nature from culture, human from animal, technical from biological,
and word from world. Less divided, more differentiated. In that case, we need to recalibrate and reinvent our
feminist methodological practices and analytical tools – perhaps even change our conversational habits across
the arts and sciences. When we are always already becoming with others, with the world, the posthuman ethics
of entanglement entails both responsibilities, opportunities and limitations. In this paper, I will first explore a
present bodyscape in the open-ended posthuman register of transcorporeal reciprocity. I will then halt in
particular at the paradoxical natures and cultures of Alzheimer’s Disease for how they suggest thinking beyond
recognition, derogatory difference and the flattening equality of sameness. Finally, I will tentatively suggest
some strange new materialist methodological alliances, drawing on work within feminist theory and science
studies and other interdisciplinary forms of the critical and creative humanities to inform a kind of
posthumanities of critique, creativity, and onto-ethical entanglement.
Josef Barla
University of Vienna, Department of Philosophy
Diffracting race: science, technology, and the mechanics of materializing marked bodies
New materialist approaches have shifted the focus toward matter and material bodies in their very becomings.
In doing so, social and linguistic constructionist accounts of the body have been problematized for not only
reifying the dualism of (passive) matter and (active) mind, but also for running the risk of theorizing the body
primarily as a mere object on that powerful discourses act upon. Instead of being plastic matter or first and
foremost the product of social and discursive practices, new materialist theories emphasized that bodies have to
be considered as potentially unruly and as agentic ‘entities’ (or actors) themselves. In this paper, I will ask what
it means to acknowledge the body as a material-semiotic actor, that is, a generative axis of the apparatus of
bodily production, as Donna Haraway has put it, for the understanding of race? What does it mean to argue that
objects and, for that matter, bodies do not pre-exist as such nor can they be understood sufficiently as mere
socio-historical constructions or discursive effects? Does such an account circumvent the limitations of social
constructionist theorizations of race? Do new materialist theories allow for better understandings of the very
processes through which race materializes—not only as meaning and ideology, but also as racialized matter and
bodies? Against the backdrop of these questions, I will discuss two phenomena—the UK Border Agency’s
Human Provenance Project and the spirometer—as material-discursive apparatuses of bodily production. That
is, as generative sites where racialized bodies come to matter in both senses of the word. If race today does not
enter only through the skin, as Frantz Fanon has stressed using the term epidermalization, but is increasingly
read off of the very interior of the body, that is, of DNA, isotopes, or the alleged efficiency of certain organs,
the question has to be what new materialist theories can set against such attempts of a reterritorialization of
race?
Corinna Bath
Maria-Goeppert-Mayer chair for “Gender, Technology and Mobility”
Institute for Flight Guidance, TU Braunschweig, Germany
Diffractive Design of ICT
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Over the past 50 years, several critical methods and methodologies have been developed in computer science, in
order to create better socio-material worlds. Most prominent is the participatory design (PD) approach of the
Scandinavian school in the 1970/80s. Located in the Marxist tradition early PD researchers started technology
development processes from political antagonisms, namely, class struggles – compared to the “harmony
perspective” of the socio-technical systems approach or the dominant a-political, objectivist view of software
engineering. They aimed at giving a voice to those, who were disadvantaged in structural hierarchies and the
technology design process. Interestingly, within this frame several successful feminist technology design
projects had been conducted at workplaces such as libraries, offices and hospitals.
Today, economic conditions, gender relations and technologies have shifted as well as academic concepts that
aim to understand the entanglements of gender, politics and the digital. Participatory design is nowadays often
understood as involving users in the design process without taking into account political conditions, contexts or
implications. Science and technology studies expressed doubt whether designers can build “emancipation” into
technologies, whereas gender studies questioned the subject woman, heteronormativity and asked: for whom?
Moreover, the digital not only entered workplaces but all aspects of life. Nevertheless, some approaches still
aim to translate critical and gender analyses into technological designs or combine critical and gender theory
with design methodologies (for instance, “Mind Scripting” by Doris Allhutter et al., the “Values in Design”
initiative in the US or the “Reflective Design” approach by Phoebe Sengers et al.). My contribution will
introduce “diffractive design” as a vision and technology design methodology that reads all these approaches
and current gender theory “through one another” (Barad). “Diffractive design” is a collective effort towards
livable lives (Butler) in livable worlds (Haraway).
Maaike Bleeker & Dr. Iris van der Tuin
Utrecht University, Department of Media & Culture Studies
‘Hunting for Higgs: Performance Studies, Particle Physics and Philosophy of Science’
Demonstrating Demonstration
This presentation stages performative encounters between Humanities and Science for a new materialist
perspective on what constitutes knowledge, how knowledge is produced and how it is shared. Crucial to
understanding knowledge and how it comes to be, we argue, is to develop an understanding of how matter and
meaning are entangled in practices of research as well as practices of knowledge transmission. Within the
humanities, this entanglement has been subject of ground breaking work by Butler, among others,
demonstrating the importance of this perspective for an understanding of how materiality and performativity are
indistinguishable in the ways in which bodies come to matter. Following Butler, Barad, Kirby and others, we
investigate the productivity of this perspective not only for understanding human bodies and by extension of
what it means to be human, but also for our understanding of knowledge production in the so-called hard
sciences.
Our paper takes its inspiration from the format of the scientific demonstration. A scientific
demonstration is a scientific experiment carried out for the purposes of demonstrating scientific principles,
rather than for hypothesis testing or knowledge gathering (although they may originally have been carried out
for these purposes). Scientific demonstrations are performances for, and sometimes with, an audience carried
out as part of teaching science to students and the general audience. Scientific demonstrations have been, and
still are, popular as entertainment (in planetariums, natural history museums, on television, etc.). The rich
history of these practices gains new actuality in the context of current questions about the entanglement of
meaning and matter, the embodied character of the production and transmission of knowledge, and the
creativity involved in these practices. Furthermore, scientific demonstrations raise important questions about the
repeatability of scientific experiments and the ways in knowledge is a sociomaterial product emerging from ‘the
mangle of practice’ (Pickering 1995). Bruno Latour (1987) and others propose to conceive of this ‘mangle’ in
terms of a network of interactions between human and non-human actors. Not only scientists perform, so do
their instruments and even the objects under investigation. New materialism adds to this that “[b]eings do not
pre-exist their relatings” (Haraway 2003, p. 6). We propose to engage with this topic by means of a series of
demonstrations of demonstrations. That is, we propose a staging of examples of scientific demonstrations
combined with reflection about them and their implications. This may imply a staging which will be partly set
and partly improvised.
Linnea Bodén
Educational practice, Department of Social and Welfare Studies, Linköping University
The presence of the concept of school absence. Researching school absenteeism as phenomena
School absence is a concept loaded with assumptions on problematic behaviours associated with young
students. Challenging the perspective of the concept of school absence as a linguistic unit that in a
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representationalist way describes the individual actions of students, what is explored in this paper are
methodologies for putting the concept of school absence to work as a material-discursive phenomena (Barad
1999; 2007). In a vast majority of Swedish schools, computer technologies have become a part of the everyday
school practice as teachers before, during, or after each lesson digitally register the students’ absences. The
software is regarded as a problem-solving tool to make the management of the absences more efficient (Bodén
2013). This practice sheds light on how school absences are treated as observable incidents, easily
distinguishable from their surroundings; “out there” to be collected, represented and transformed into binary
text in computer software. From an agential realist (Barad 2007) stance, the paper aims at investigating the
concept of school absence as phenomena. By exploring methodological strategies that challenge notions on
school absences as stable facts, the purpose is to open up for the practices and the doings of the concept in intra
actions between computer software, environments, mobile phones, parents, schedules, students, teachers, etc.
The paper thus offers an elaboration of the concept of school absence, when the agencies of materialities are
inevitably part of the phenomena.One question that the paper wishes to evoke is “(How) can concepts like
school absence –heavily charged with preconceptions of the responsible and autonomous (but also blameable)
student –be transformed into productive new-materialist approaches within educational research?”
Megan Boler
Professor, University of Toronto, Canada
Women’s “Connective Labor” in the Hybrid Occupy
Movement: the Embodied Politics of Gender and Technologies
Situated squarely in the conference call identification of “third-wave feminist epistemologies” that draw
distinctively on materialist analyses, this paper highlights our mixed-methods, research-based insights into
“politics,” “digital,” and “gender” and uses grounded theory to argue for new understandings of politics in the
context of digital or hybrid social movements. To
illustrate the materiality of technologies as engaged by women participants of the Occupy movement from
across North America, we examine three major “leadership” roles adopted by women in the horizontally-
structured Occupy movement. Using social technologies such as Facebook, Twitter, and livestreaming as modes
of activist engagement, women developed and occupied unique roles such as that of the “Admin” (Social Media
Administrator), the “Documentarian,” and the “Connector”-- DIY or “do-it-yourself” roles (Ratto and Boler,
2014) that emerge primarily in the context of the online spaces of Facebook pages, websites, affinity groups,
and working committees from work within digital and information-communication technologies as well as both
within the offline, face-to-face (F2F) General Assembly (GA) meetings held during the Occupy encampments.
Drawing upon the insights of 75 Occupy activists from Toronto and across the United States interviewed as part
of the three-year funded study “Social Media in the Hands of Young Citizens,” this talk explores the urgent
need for new conceptualization of “politics” as expressed in the material practices of social movement
participants (Federici 2008). The women’s adoption of these hybrid roles illustrates, we argue, the emerging
notion of ‘connective labor’ an extended enactment of Bennett and Segerberg’s (2012) notion of ‘the logic of
connective action’, augmenting its logic to reveal the often hidden labor (Hochschild 1983) of women in
sustaining the networked and affective dimension of social movements. This paper highlights the gendered,
hybrid, embodied and material nature of women’s ‘connective labor’ that has supported, and in many ways
sustained, the contemporary Occupy movement.
Barbara Bolt
University of Melbourne
Reconciliation Elegy: The expansive force in Robert Motherwell’s Elegy for a Spanish Republic
Between 1949 and 1991, Robert Motherwell painted more than 170 abstract works that constitute, what we now
know of as the series Elegy to the Spanish Republic. Central to this paper will be a specific work in this series,
the Reconciliation Elegy (1977), a work commissioned for the East Building of the National Gallery of Art in
Washington. The elegies point back to a specific event in history, the Spanish Civil War. Historically, Picasso’s
Guernica (1937), a work also concerned with the Spanish conflict, is seen as the most powerful anti-war
painting of the twentieth century in the way that it captures and expresses the horrors of war. The power of
Motherwell’s elegy paintings, on the other hand, was nullified by the discourse of abstract expressionism, which
reduced his paintings to aesthetic concerns, and by cold war politics. However Motherwell writes about the
impetus for the Reconciliation Elegy and the fact that the elegies speak of a terrible death that must not be
forgotten.
This paper addresses the question of Reconciliation NOW: How might one re-invoke the power of
Motherwell’s Reconciliation Elegy in this time and place? How might one re-activate the ghosts of
Motherwell’s elegies and give them back their voices? Through a series of figurative drawings and paintings,
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Black with No Way Out (after Motherwell) and Elegy to an Oz Republic, which reference Robert Motherwell’s
1983 lithograph Black with No Way Out and his Elegy to the Spanish Republic (1963-1975) respectively, this
paper examines how we may activate the expansive force operating in Motherwell’s Reconciliation Elegy as a
gesture towards reconciliation. In doing this, the paper asks us to consider not what is pictured, but what are the
conditions through which these works work. It proposes that, figured performatively, citation is not about re-
presenting or re-producing forms, but rather is concerned with invoking the imperceptible forces beneath
perception. This expansive force undoes “the image” and produces something true-to-life. Thus the task is not
just to invoke the name and history of Robert Motherwell, but also to attend to the forces, which are unleashed
in and through the work and demonstrate how they come to bear on us.
Marie-Pier Boucher
Duke University
Levitation as Therapeutics of Enchantment
Following the increasing coincidence of arts and the life sciences, and the corresponding controversies
surrounding the status of life’s materiality, I will speculate on how a new materialist approach can create new
cases that go beyond the exploitation of the activity of living beings in new contexts. I will focus on the impact
of architecture of Thomas Saraceno and Arakawa and Gins on our sense of wellbeing by considering the
aesthetics of inhabitation beyond vision and movement, looking at proprioceptive experiences that are at once
between vision and movement and yet neither. More precisely, I will question our sense of weightedness and
weightlessness by interrogating how the integration of gravitational changes in architectural structures can be
conceptualized in terms of therapeutical techniques. A therapeutical technique, I will suggest, differs from a
curative one in that it problematizes a modality of being as opposed to identifying a problem to be solved.
My analysis will focus on how experimentation with gravity engages the mental-physical continuum with new
aesthetic experiences that open up new modes of looking, comprehending, and attaching ourselves to life. From
a new materialist point of view, a therapeutical technique is one that acts as a mental pause, which introduces
cycles into the physical reality of experience. These cycles are crucial because they break the linearity of time
and enable the production and expression of change and novelty. More precisely, the difference introduced by a
gravitational change is (1) relational since it concerns the ways in which elements of a context combine and
recombine in a and (2) pragmatic because the recombination changes the overall ecology of practices. In brief,
my talk will interrogate how new materialist considerations can help us rethink relational politics in the light of
recent scientific and artistic experimentations on gravity and levitation.
Dr. phil. Vera Bühlmann,
Applied-virtuality lab at CAAD ITA, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zürich.
Universal Genitality
Acts of Engendering by Abstract Thought, or Reclaiming »the Mathematical« from the Celibacy Imposed on it
under the Domination of its Applicability in Purely General Terms. Mathematics is universal and precisely
because of this, its »symbolical manifestations« are held to be neutral, sterile, and a-sexual. Indeed, there seems
to be hardly any other statement which feels as non-refutable today as this one. My paper proposes a change in
perspective. It will emphasize the millennia old tradition of seeing in »the Mathematical« the art of learning
(with an indefinite object, hence grammatically in a non-transitive sense). With »digital materiality«
consolidated in quantum-electro-dynamic circuits and their carries (semiconductors), this perspective gains new
relevancy today. Conceived as an art, learning (the Mathematical) can hardly be characterized as sterile and
independent of »affection« – in this sense, »learning« stands diametrically opposed to »knowing«, which is
supposed to be what it is precisely because it counts as absolutely sterile and purified from all investments of an
economy of desire and ideology. My paper will discuss the political-methodological importance of being
considerate and clear with regard to how we conceive the status of mathematic’s symbolical manifestations,
especially as we seek to overcome the distinction between artifical (deliberate) and natural (necessary). If we
regard mathematic’s symbolical manifestations as engendered by learning (rather than as the object of learning,
with learning as remembering or recollection of original knowledge) they must count – in their mathematically
incarnated symbolic universality – as genital, I will argue, and all things intelligible and sensible (encodable,
decipherable, communicable, exchangeable) must count as artificial symbolizations which make up the very
fabric of »the real« (as the realm where we register effects in space and time). What we can know, then, is not
co-extensive with what we can learn: in the virtuality of what can be learnt, we can value imagination,
dreaming, fantasy, discretion, distinction, taste as autonomous factors of thought’s creativity which, as in the
case of literacy and artisanry, must not fall in its totality beneath the reign of scientificity.
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Mónica Cano Abadía
University of Zaragoza, Spain
Natural and cultural bodies. Intersectionality as feminist methodology
Sarah Ahmed claims that Judith Butler ‘reduces matter to culture’. However, Butler’s theory allows a more
intersectional approach, that can help to understand how biology and sociality are actually intertwined. Butler
considers materialism through the deconstruction of the notion of bodymatter. Matter is conformed by power,
by cultural and historical mechanisms. Anne FaustoSterling, in Sexing the Body, uses Elisabeth A. Grosz’s
model of the Band of Möbius to understand that the biological body and cultural contexts are two sides of the
same reality: we can never isolate the materiality of nature from culture or history. As Grosz suggests, this
model provides tools to problematize the categories that we use in feminism, such as body, gender, sex,
sexuality or desire. On the other hand, intersectionality5 is a relevant concept in social studies that refers to the
intersection of the categories above with other central identity traits as class, race, nationality, religion, age,
species, ethnicity, geopolitical positioning, etc. It is essential to incorporate the perspective of intersectionality
in our feminist methodologies in at least two levels: there is an intersection between the different categories that
conform us and, in addition, each category is the result of transversality. Thus, the oppression that results from a
functional diversity, for example, can be intertwined with another derived from sex, but sex itself is the result of
intersections at different levels: anatomical, chromosomal, aesthetic, hormonal, cultural. Intersectionality allows
to see the world in a certain way that can help us to minimize the oppressions arising from our actions, which
not only affect people around us but many other people, animals and ecosystems.
David Chandler
Department of Politics and International Relations, University of Westminster
Politics of Entanglement: The Onto-Ethics of New Materialism
As Karen Barad observes, a new materialist understanding of our entanglement with the world means
that ethico-political concerns can no longer be extricated from our practices of knowing and being - from our
(re)production of the world. The politics of new materialism are onto-ethical politics - the politics of
entanglement.[1] In this relational ontology, there can be no separation between agential subject and world
as object: no politics that presuppose modernist forms of representationalism and linear and reductionist cause-
and-effect ontologies of power. The onto-ethical problematic is therefore how to take responsibility for
the future effects of our decisions/practices despite not knowing what they may be.[2] Politics (or being
political) thus becomes a process of self-reflection, a mode of being rather than some separate activity in
a separate (public) sphere: an ongoing process of work on the self (which can be performed by collectivities as
much as by individuals). However, what sets apart this process of the government of the self apart from
the classical assumptions of the inner philosophical will as a path to truth,[3] is the fact that this process is
externalised. While the Socratic injunction to ‘know thyself’ was orientated towards a contemplative existence,
the ethico-political injunction of new materialism holds the promise of transforming the world. This is because
the complex and ever surprising reality of the world provides the agenda for the continuous political work of
self-reflexive being – becoming political. Revealing – through climate crisis, war, poverty and inequality - the
multiple consequences of our embedded relations to others mediated through assemblages of emergent chains of
contingent causation – we thereby govern the world through reflexively governing ourselves.
[1] Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway.
[2] Cilliers, Complexity and Postmodernism; Connolly, The Fragility of Things.
[3] See Foucault, Government of the Self and Others.
Katja Čičigoj
PhD fellow at the Graduate Center for the Study of Culture, Justus-Leibig University, Gießen
Franziska Aigner
MA Philosophy and Contemporary Critical Theory, CRMEP, Kingston University, London
On difference that makes a difference and how some things come to matter and others not
Our point of departure will be Karen Barad's account of agential realism. We will investigate Barad's onto-
epistemology and the implications of thinking the performativity of matter in its relation to material-discursive
apparatuses within the macroscopic world. As we are zooming out from micro to macro-scale, from quantum
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phenomena to the world of classical physics, special attention will be paid to caring for the situatedness and
specificity that this perspective demands.
In particular, we would like to focus on Barad's notion of agency. In 'Meeting the Universe Halfway' (Barad,
2007), agency is proposed as the space of possibility opened up by ontological indeterminacies, entailed in the
exclusions of what did not come to matter within particular intra-actions. Starting from Barad's notion of
agency, we would like to investigate its conceptual and political ramifications for the macroscopic world, and
how it could be developed further. First, we will inquire what the relation between ontological indeterminacy
and agency allows us to think, and more importantly how it manifests in the macroscopic world. Secondly, we
will move on to question how and in which way one could think a differentiation of the space of possibilities
opened up by ontological indeterminacies. For these purposes, Manuel DeLanda's materialist reading of Gilles
Deleuze's ontology of the virtual and actual will be useful as we move towards differentiating this space of
possibilities.
Olga Cielemecka
Warsaw University, Poland; University of Alberta, Canada
Neomaterialist methodologies: the idea of a common use
In this paper I would like to elaborate on the question of “the common” taken from the perspective of
neomaterialist feminist theory, and address it both as a methodological and ethico-political problem.
New materialist approaches purposely blur boundaries between, on the one hand, different disciplines and their
theoretical “dictionaries”, and, on the other, the traditional difference that separates life from thinking, and
theory from practice. How can we think about theoretical encounters and dialogues within and between the
humanities and science, different theoretical perspectives, ways of thinking, traditions and concepts, in a way
that will remain critical but at the same time prolific and creative? What ethical motivation and political
potential may feminist new materialism bring if we think of it as a form of activity, a never-ending life practice
and engagement in the world?
To address these questions I will draw on the idea of a “common use” which was expressed by the Italian
philosopher Giorgio Agamben in his book “The Highest Poverty”. In his book a claim of use is presented as an
alternative to the right of ownership, and, hopefully, it will give pass to a new form-of-life in which things
circulate while being used and transformed freely. Common use constitutes a certain praxis and relation to the
world: the inability to possess things creates a sphere of the common, in which things cannot be abused or
appropriated. The subject is no longer located in front of the object which they can own, but rather participates
in things and in the world; uses, modifies, and shares them. Could this proposition be valid when thinking about
ideas, concepts, and theories? Could they be used freely, open to remixing, putting in a new context, re-edition,
playful re-invention, and by that clear the path for new forms of life and modes of thinking that aren’t abstracted
from the world, but rather immanently enrooted in it?
Jelena Djuric
Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade
& Ljiljana Rogac-Mijatovic
Faculty of Dramatic Arts in Belgrade
New materialism and alternative culture
In the text we will research possibilities of the prefix „post“ (which appears in all “epistemological turns”
beginning with structurally fixed classifications of modernity’s „secular humanism“), in the search of notion of
the “new materialism”. The important consequences of new theoretical approach to social change go through
political engagement that has particularly been the issue in a “third wave feminism” epistemology. This is the
problem of possibility to commit to change any constitutive inequalities that structure the society, without using
fixed categories (such as “gender”, “race”, “class” etc.). Although talking of reality incorporates the symbol-
ic/power structures of human interests, the change of politics of representation and signification is necessary. It
calls for the relevant questions on different epistemic/ontological matters and ethics of social processes.
However, instead of just being critical, engaging in creating alternative culture means inspiring ways of
thinking that affirm different perspectives.
Lucía Egaña Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
Valentina Montero
Universidad de Barcelona
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Unstable methodologies for erratic practices: Analysis of some techno-artistic practices in Latin America
from feminist epistemological perspectives.
To approach the study of media art, raises a huge methodological challenge: In a vast cloud, under the media art
label, we understand all those practices in the field of art that makes use of the ICT's, electronic devices, and
knowledge and experimental practices linked to science (physics, mathematics, mechanics or biology) in a
transdisciplinary mood. Aesthetics, sociology or art-history appears to be unable to describe, understand and
systematize by themselves, a series of heterogeneous practices in constant change, and where the traditional and
canonical concept of artwork -associated to the finished, the original artwork result of geniality- seems to be
obsolete. Against this background, we watch how research methodologies and feminist theories, both becoming
from fields as the post-structuralist thinking and the visual studies, allow us to aboard analytically the new
models of artistic development whose hybridation matches with a change in the identity perspective in today's
society. The practice of media art in Latin America, along the fascination and trauma of the the technological
fetish produced by the capitalist consumer system, brings the emergency of series of marginal and hybrid
practices defined by their implication in immediatly relevant problems (as environmental, politics, economics
and social issues) - and determined by the material precarity. This bastard condition, typified by the error and
the bad copy, by invisibility or instability, contains also peculiar ideological positions. Its rhizomatic, nomadic
and trans-disciplinary nature implies to be in a constant exercise of subversion and critic against the hegemonic
standards of the ruling international aesthetic and also to the traditional conceptions and norms coming from
science.
This paper aims to use some elements coming form the feminist epistemology as "nomadism" (Rosi Braidotti),
"performativity" (Judith Butler), “situated knowledge” (Donna Haraway), “agential realism” and “intra-action”
(Karen Barad), from a neo-materialist and post-humanist perspective, in a dialogue with some examples of
media artworks in Latin America, in order to propose an interpretative methodology model, which allows us to
visualize and to strenght these practices.
Boka En and Ágnes Fülöp
University of Vienna
Know Improve Produce Thyself: Numbers, devices, discourses and bodies in self-tracking movements
The idea of self-tracking or the quantified self refers to individuals’ gathering of data about themselves and their
surroundings, primarily for the purpose of self- improvement. These data are collected with various digital
devices such as mobile phones, computer software or RFID tags, and range from environmental (e.g. visited
locations, weather) and biological or health-related (e.g. body weight, menstrual cycle) information to mental
and cognitive (e.g. IQ, reaction time) aspects.
Crucial to self-tracking is the idea that humans are deficient in and because of their subjectivity: introspection
and reflection are thought to provide users with the ability to improve themselves. As the phrase ‘quantified
self’ alludes to, this aim is linked to the imagined objectivity of numbers which are seen as more trustworthy
than ‘fickle’ humans. Self-tracking therefore firmly corresponds to neoliberal ideals of the responsible, self-
monitoring and self-disciplining subject and the internalised importance of efficiency and performance. Self-
tracking blurs the boundaries between human and machine: not only do devices and digital repositories of one’s
‘tracking record’ become an inextricable part of the self, they also influence users’ perspectives on reality and in
turn reality itself by e.g. affecting bodily practices, behaviours and social and sociotechnical relations. In this
process, technologies, numbers and human subjects co-constitute their own and each other’s meanings and
places in the world, including the (ostensible lack of) meanings and places of gender.
Based on an analysis of website content and online news articles about self- tracking movements, our
methodological framework combines Donna Haraway’s material-semiotic generative nodes and Karen Barad’s
agential realism. We argue that this frameworks allows us to better understand how numbers, devices,
discourses and bodies interact to co-produce subjects-in-phenomena, where self-tracking provides an
opportunity for tracing the material effects of sociodigital networks and examining the role of numbers in the
materialisation of neoliberal gendered subjects.
Waltraud Ernst
Johannes Kepler University Linz, Austria
Affirming conceptual shifts: processes of gender, sex and sexuality
On which conceptual paths do cultural assumptions about women and men enter research on humans as well as
on organic and non-organic entities? How is it possible to analyse hidden assumptions about gender, to reflect
on guiding norms and stereotypes ? How to eventually redirect research questions, experiments, methodologies
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as well as methods of data interpretation? Can we invent sex/gender/sexuality differently? Can we think of
gender and diversity in ways that enables scholarship and innovation efforts to lead to emancipatory and
empowering effects for all genders in a democratic future? Does new materialism offer new ways to investigate
the social, symbolic and material reality of sex, gender and sexuality without reinforcing binary gender norms?
In my paper I will examine these questions by discussing epistemological approaches of new feminist
materialism (Barad 2007; Hekman 2010) with Isabelle Stengers account on a collectively affirmed
"cosmopolitical" space (Stengers 2011) on the one side. On the other side I will relate Judith Butler’s theory of
gender (2004) to new materialist accounts. I will claim that Butler, in fact, was the first new materialist in
developing a dynamic conception of the human gendered, sexed and sexualized body. This dynamic conception
of the gendered, sexed and sexualized human I will try to connect to other materialized phenomena. I will try to
show that a new materialist account does not necessarily lead to a new affirmation of universal (bodily?)
differences between women and men, but rather to affirmations of historical shifts in relations between all
genders and gendered phenomena and shifts in meanings of the generation of differences through certain
interpretations of natural and cultural processes.
Heidi Fast
Doctor of Arts Candidate, Aalto University, Helsinki, Finland School of Art, Design and Architecture
Affective Transconnectedness of Vocal Voice
The aim of this presentation is to revisit the possible feminine quality and non- dichotomous gender position of
affective, co-attuning vocal voice-matter as a particular “resonance field”. The inquiry is part of my artistic
research approached in a very practical and embodied manner by 1. developing an artistic method based on the
affective potentials of voice, in co-operation with HYKS Psychiatric Centrum in Helsinki, and it´s patients. 2.
By he creation of three artistic parts of the research (Hospital Symphonies), first of which being Vocal
Sculpture for the Psychiatric Centrum. The presentation draws especially from both, the immanent experiences
of the creation process of Vocal Sculpture with psychotic patients, and, from a feminist, psychoanalyst, artist
Bracha Ettinger´s concept “matrixial resonance field” – a specific quality of affective transconnectedness.
Ettinger´s concept is modelled from the prenatal condition of intimate sharing, that is a feminine position per se.
Although as Ettinger emhasizes, the position is as possible to “male” also, and achievable later in life also. Her
theory applies to the mental field, but is read here through the material intensities of embodiment. Co-poietic
vocal moments with the patients are perceived as appearances of a specific resonance field of co-attuning voice.
Is it valuable to read this condition of intimate sharing, critically, through the perspective of gender relatedness
or feminist reading? Can the understanding add movement to the fixated perceptions of gender? The new
materialist reading is inevitably present in my research in both, the immanent, vocal art events and the
theoretical analysis and methodology. The questions are approached by the methodology of artistic research,
because it can take seriously also 1) experience, that cannot be measurable, b) experience, that is particularly
non- individual and shared (like co-attuning voice), c) experience, that is not possibly to split between body and
mind (like vocalizing).
Signe Leth, Gammelgaard
Master's program in University of Copenhagen, Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
Cutting up the sensible: Rancièrian politics in a new materialist perspective
The question of ethics and politics in a new materialist framework is a key issue in current debates and sparks
research in a wide array of fields from matters of sex and gender to ecology and art theory. However, what is
often left out in these discussions is a strong definition of how politics essentially can be perceived and
specifically its relation to democracy.
This paper will address that issue through the theory of radical democracy and politics as rupture in Jacques
Rancière’s writings and compare these to Karen Barad’s notions of indeterminacy and onto- epistemology.
Where Rancière takes as his starting point the definition of democracy as equality, Barad interrogates the world
in its onto-epistemological condition. Developing the lines of intersection between these two theoretical
approaches will enable me to discuss in detail the problem of politics and aesthetics in new materialism as well
as taking Ranciere’s work beyond the scope of definitions into a field of ontology and epistemology. My main
focus will be the relation between the Baradian ‘cut’ and Rancière’s ‘division of the sensible’, and how they
both illuminate possibilities of emergence rather than accessibility. In conclusion this paper, by relating issues
of the onto-epistemological approach of new materialism to Rancière’s conception of politics, will provide a
solid framework for the politics of agency and possibilities for change.
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Jen Jerson Associate Professor, York University
& Suzanne de Castell Dean,
University of Ontario Institute of Technology
Talking Back: Feminist Activism & Digital Games
In 2012 and 2013, the sordid reality of digital games culture was exposed across the U.S., the U.K. and Canada
as major news outlets turned public attention on the violent, vitriolic and misogynistic harassment women game
players and critics face, primarily online (Consalvo, 2012; Jenson & de Castell, 2013). In tandem, digital games
came under closer scrutiny, as critics began to take serious measure of the character and extent of
representational concerns in largebudget, top-selling games--most prominently, the lack of a central female
character to play (Williams, et al., 2009), and the typical presentation of female characters as "damsels in
distress" (feministfrequency, 2013). The underlying premise of these critiques is that in restricting gender
representations to persistent heteronormative stereotypes featuring male central characters and sexualized and
subordinate female ones, the games industry attracts and rewards its targeted male gamer audiences to identify
with regressive forms of hegemonic masculinity (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005) that marginalize female
gamers and designers alike. In this talk we trace the ‘ripple effects’ of gendered stereotypes--effects identifiable
in three key sites: the representation of gender in games, the circulation of discriminatory discourses in online
gamerelated forums, and in debates and controversies contesting these constructs within player communities.
Our research analyzes the ways in which these ‘events’ are re-entrenching a binary gender and sexuality order
that is being regulated through digital and public ‘policing’ and harassment those who do not identify as cis-
male. While much of this ‘gender trouble’ (Butler, 1990) occurs through digital media (voice chat, in-game
chat, twitter, forum posts, comment threads, etc.), in this talk we highlight the material and ontological ‘effects’
of these gendered spaces.
Dr. Dorota Golańska
Assistant Professor at the Department of Transatlantic and Media Studies & Women’s Studies Center
University of Lodz
Remembering through Materiality: In Search of a Synaesthetic Approach to Memorial Art
Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s works on aesthetics, the paper explores diversified operations of public memorial
art connected to the events experienced as collective trauma. It critically assesses the usefulness of the existing
cultural studies approaches to investigate the ways in which present-day memorials operate and reveals that
contemporary memorial art constitutes an inspiring material for an analysis of what Deleuze names “intensity”
or “affect.” Importantly, it has to be underlined in this context that trauma, as an experience, remains beyond
representation; it is not possible to grasp and express it in language, yet it is possible to activate traumatic
experience in an affective/sensible manner. Taking this into consideration, the paper approaches selected pieces
of memorial art and analyzes how they act on and are activated by sensuous bodies of visitors, whose sight,
smell, hearing, and touch encounter their (architectural) space and subsequently translate into a lively and
vibrant “event,” an enduring sensible experience that mobilizes and animates critical thought. The analysis
especially focuses on a way of sensing movement and space as salient for the dynamic operations of these
artistic constructions. Through these investigations the paper also aims at evaluating the post-
deconstruction/new materialist theoretical framework and a synaesthetic approach to (memorial) art as well as
at assessing their potential for academic explorations within the fields of feminist studies, cultural studies, and
memory studies.
Karin Gunnarson
Stockholm University
How to map moving figures? Engaging in figurations of health within education
This paper takes point of departure in two tendencies being highlighted in education for the last twenty years, an
increase of health problems among children and youth and an intensified focus on schools’ assignment of health
promotion. The growth in mental ill-health at a global level and extensive public discussion on children and
youth at risk has created a mounting concern of young people's health (see e.g. (WHO 2005)). Following these
articulations the aim of this paper is two folded. First, the aim is to elaborate on how to enact a productive
methodological approach when investigating figurations of health in the apparatus of health promotion in
education. Second, the aim is to map how different figurations of health are produced.The paper is situated
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within a theoretical stance of feminist post-constructionism. When thinking with theories within feminist post-
constructionism diffraction becomes a vital methodological strategy (Barad 2007). Herein, knowledge-
production can be seen as a diffractive engagement where the researcher is entangled by involvement and
interference with different practices and actors connected to the apparatus (ibid.). Further, how different
figurations are produced within these entanglements. The notion of figuration articulates how things constantly
are produced and reproduced through interweaving of language, matter, bodies, technologies, facts and fictions.
Figurations are not representations but material-semiotic nodes in which entangled bodies and meanings comes
into being (Haraway 2004; 2008). This raises important questions of how to produce knowledge of figurations
of health with “confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction” (Haraway 1991, 148).
Because the stories being told produce difference in the world and are worldly and reworlding practices
(Haraway 2008).
Cathrine Hasse
Aarhus University
Wayfaring in practiced places
Doing fieldwork as a participant observer is an undertheorised approach in ethnographic studies. Especially
when participant observation is perceived as a project of learning mattering matter. In this paper I shall try to
open the black box from a new perspective using Karen Barad’s work on agential cuts in a diffracted reading
with Tim Ingold’s notion of wayfaring. These approaches are both useful when we try to understand how the
perception and bodily presence of the ethnographer is changed when moving through a geometrical space
becoming a practiced place through a process of cultural learning. It is in this process the analytical and
empirical fields are aligned and ethnography uses its strength when the purpose of research is to enhance our
knowing of what matters to people in practiced places.
Martta Heikkilä, PhD
Post-doctoral researcher, University of Helsinki; senior lecturer, Finnish Academy of Fine Arts
Post-structuralist – Post-human? The Notion of Fiction in Contemporary Art
How is the notion of fiction described in post-human and object-oriented and, respectively, in poststructuralist
theories of art? In my presentation, I shall compare from a methodological point of view the idea of fiction in
these contexts. The poststructuralist notion of fiction relies on the general notion that things do not have any
true idea, essence or origin beyond them in the Platonic sense, but each thing has its ground in the singular way
it presents itself. This is to say that their identity is originally fictioned, imagined and without ground. This
means also that the ground of things as they come into presence is, in a way, non-subjective and inhuman –
using Derrida’s expression, a text produces other texts. Yet, such ground is also anthropological in the sense
that these “texts” are fundamentally fictive: they are culturally produced and always dependent on their contexts
and current discourses. This is particularly true if we think of the production and multiple meanings of art. The
post-human, object-oriented theories bring forth the notion of a reality independent of subjectivity. Thus, the
existence of things, art included, is irreducible to subjective meanings or intentions. In art, images and objects
are produced, and as such, they appear as factual. One might thus understand the idea of art practice also as a
kind of fiction(ing) or myth: as for its origin, such fiction is non-subjective and non-familiar, that is, without
subjectivity outside of discourses. However, in speaking of any signification of art, experience and
interpretation are needed – yet, how are these aspects accommodated by the post-humanist theories? My paper
deals with these two notions of art as fiction – the poststructuralist with an emphasis on the cultural context, and
the post-human post-subjectivist one, with a focus on the object. To illuminate these viewpoints, I shall refer to
artist Mike Kelley’s essay “Myth Science” (1995) concerning art as a configuration comparable to fiction and
myth.
Riikka Hohti
University of Helsinki
“Well-being of the child” as emergent in the classroom intra-action
Well-being is currently used as a powerful concept in both research and policy. In public discourse, well-being
is linked with the questions of marginalization, and promoting well-being is often taken up as a means to an
end, such as effective learning or working. While often approached quantitatively through different indicators,
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as a material/economical, social, or psychological phenomenon, well-being seems to be slippery in relation to
qualitative approaches. This presentation is based on an ongoing doctoral study that is part of a project on
children’s narrated well-being. In the narrative ethnographic study on children’s perspectives on school, the
question “What is happening?” is examined through free-flowing observations, stories and thoughts written by
ten-year-old children in their own school classroom. To focus on relations, processes and movement rather than
fixed, separate and stable entities, this study takes a nomadic (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) and new materialist
(Barad 2007) approach. I ask, what becomes of well-being when understood as an emergent condition that is
mutually produced in the classroom through intra-actions between humans, things, doings and discursive ideas
such as discourses on gender and childhood. I consider the intra-actions not only being situated in factual,
fictional or virtual time and space but being “of spacetimemattering”(Juelskjær 2013). This way the study seeks
to challenge the static, dichotomically divided understandings of well-being/ill-being as resembling things that
can be measured or nailed down. Based on the children’s writings, I suggest that to understand well-being of the
child, material beings should be given a more significant role than just background or resource. Well-being
could be productively understood as situated and unfolding in- between space and time and the elements that
matter to the children.
Pedro Jacobetty, Maxigas and Débora Lanzeni
PhD students at IN3-UOC
Makers, hackers and Anonymous: Tracing material subjects.
Building on a broad selection of empirical work, this communication seeks to draw common epistemological
and methodological conclusions given the question of how subjects materialise in the ethnographic encounter.
The approach to these pieces of research investigates the role of materiality in the subjectivation processes of
three technologically intensive social formations: makers of the internet of things (IoT), the hackerspaces scene,
and Anonymous. The cases revolve around distinct sets of practices where subjectivation processes are closely
intertwined with technology development. While in the hackerspaces scene participants use rigorous,
technologically objectified protocols and devices to define group membership and identity, in Anonymous
participation is mediated by digital media literacy. IoT makers are often deeply embedded in public and private
institutions, while Anonymous seems to operate at their margins. Ultimately, all these cases are oriented
towards constituting themselves as catalysts of social change. These empirical works point to the importance of
identifying and characterising the possibilities for subject positions orbiting around material practices. Thus the
material subject can be understood as a function of material-discursive practice: a plane cutting across human
and non-human networks with the power of (de)stabilising them. The corollary of this notion is that the ability
to rearrange hybrid networks is a condition for the emergence and maintenance of material subjects. Such an
approach outlines a specific form of power operating through networks of subjectivation.
Vappu Jalonen
Doctoral candidate at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture, The Department of Art,
Helsinki, Finland
Diffraction.jpg
In this paper I take my own short fictocritical text as a starting point. The text describes an everyday situation of
constant photographing and focuses on the power relations between two female characters, the one taking the
pictures and the one being photographed. This paper is an attempt to rewrite the text diffractively through
reading, rethinking and simply paying attention to the material conditions of the everyday digital photograph.
Karen Barad, among others, writes about the apparatus and the observed object being inseparable. This means
studying – and therefore attending to – both the apparatus and the object.
Also when studying an image or a situation of taking one, as in my old text, the apparatus needs to be taken into
account.
Taking a photograph happens in the parameters set by a camera. The camera both does and doesn’t do what it
has been designed and programmed to do. Designing and engineering are not only functional practices but also
ideological, sometimes for instance racist. As most of the colour negatives were predicated on white skin, some
digital cameras only recognize white faces as faces.
However the camera does not always do what it has been programmed to do, for instance image artifacts
(errors) can be seen as an expression of the agency of a camera distinct from human design.
Paying attention to the material conditions of a thing, here a digital image, means both paying attention to that
what is needed for the image to happen and also what happens after the image has been taken. This includes
paying attention to the materials and resources that have been used to manufacture the camera, the designing
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and engineering, the manufacturing labor, the repetitive visual culture, the agency of the camera itself, the
circulation of the image files and their vulnerability, digital surveillance and so on. The diffractive method, as
introduced by Donna Haraway and Karen Barad, challenges one to think all these aspects in their various
complexities and entanglements and write about them through each other.
Dr Lotta Kähkönen
Postdoctoral Research Fellowm Gender Studies, School of History, Culture and Arts Studies, University of
Turku
Crossbreeding and reading gender variance in narratives
In this paper my focus is on the methodological challenges in the context of my study that aims to rethink the
ethics and politics of gender variance through narratives. My research materials draw from novels, plays,
biographies, print media, and songs that are all based on past lives of gender variant individuals published in the
last fifteen years. My project stems from a longstanding interest in how gender is narrated, and how narratives
work in our ways of experiencing and making sense of gender, embodiment, and life in a wider sense. In the
last fifteen years the discussions of transgender issues have become diverse and include tensions that are often
polarized between lived genders versus gender as merely theorized. These debates demonstrate the urgent need
for rethinking the complex and layered relationship between experience, material reality, politics and
theorization. My theoretical and methodological framework is an assemblage of interdisciplinary narrative
studies, transgender studies, queer theories and feminist new materialist thinking. The core challenge of my
approach is to re- elaborate and extend narrative analysis through feminist new materialist thinking. My attempt
to extend narrative methodology with feminist new materialism causes interruptions and challenges that are not
easily solved. Using some examples of my readings, I exemplify how I have readdressed concepts of gender,
sexual difference and agency in terms of indeterminate and not-yet-known. Overall, my questions are linked to
a larger question of what kind of ethical and political potential do these narratives and the methodological
crossbreeding in reading these narratives offer or curtail?
René Kaiser
Universiteit van Amsterdam (alumni)
Queerupting coming out – developing new sexual subjectivities through plasticity in activist contexts
In a small-scale sociological study, the narrative of coming out is identified as a driving mechanism of identity
politics and Foucualdian individualization. By juxtaposing accounts from self-identifying lgbt* activists and
self-identifying queer activists, the coming out narrative and its effects and affects on the subject are drawn out.
By analyzing the accounts of self-identifying queer activists and their mobilization of somaesthetic practices,
new ways of normalizing difference as alternative ways of coming out are conceptualized. Those tactics are
strategized through a theoretical conceptualization with the help of plasticity, a relatively new concept of the
French Philosopher Catherine Malabou. As a concept of new materialism it is developed further an applied to
the formation and active (plastic) creation of sexual subjectivity.
Thus, departing from the phenomenon of coming out among activists, strategies of self-hood formation by
working through politics, experiences, and the somatic all at once will be formalized. The central theory,
plasticity, will be developed as an alternative to deconstruction by marking queer-theory ‘s limits of anti-
essentialism and the limitations of the concept of fluidity. By comparing it to the Italian philosopher Rosi
Braidotti’s idea of nomadization, plasticity’s implications for personal (micro-)politics and -activism and their
role in larger social formation processes are highlighted.
Agnes Kovacs
Ph.D. candidate, Department of Gender Studies, Central European University
The Ontology of Georg Lukács and its Significance for Feminist Philosophy of Science
The Hungarian Marxist philosopher Georg Lukács is best known for his History and Class Consciousness
(HCC, 1923), where he developed the notion of class-specific standpoints on economy, history, and society, and
argued for the epistemic superiority of the standpoint of the proletariat. HCC served as an inspiration for North-
American scholars when developing feminist standpoint theory in the '70s and '80s. However, the applicability
of standpoint epistemology to the physical sciences remains contested; it is unclear whether there are class- or
gender-specific perspectives on inanimate nature, and what these would imply for the technical content of the
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sciences (physics, chemistry, etc.) investigating it. In HCC, Lukács himself restricted the scope of the
proletarian standpoint to the social world. However, he later deemed this position – and the whole book –
fundamentally mistaken, and toward the end of his life, he elaborated his revised view in a 2000-page-long
treatise, The Ontology of Social Being (1968). In the Ontology, the extension of Marxist standpoint theory to the
physical sciences is facilitated by the articulation of a Marxist ontology of nature, which then can be used to
evaluate the metaphysical content of scientific theories. By means of analogy, the feminist critique of the
physical sciences may proceed by comparing the metaphysical foundations of these disciplines to the principles
of feminist metaphysics. Just as Marxist ontology is centred on the claim that all being is complex and
historical, so is feminist metaphysics centred on anti-essentialism, relationalism, and the critique of dualisms
(Haslanger and Sveinsdóttir 2011). To illustrate how these principles or their obverse operate in physical and
chemical theory, I shall refer to feminist work on fluid mechanics (Hayles 1992), electromagnetism (Whitten
2001), theory of matter (Potter 2001), and chemical and general thermodynamics (Kovács 2012, 2013).
Dr. Marc Kosciejew
University of Malta
The Intersection of Documentation, Information, and Materialization
Documentation – documents and their associated practices – is pervasive in our world. Contemporary society
and its many institutions, not to mention personal lives, are awash in various kinds of documents requiring
diverse kinds of practices with them. Documentation, in many significant respects, is the lifeblood of
institutional, societal, political, economic, and personal settings and structures, helping connect these entities
together, internally and externally, ensure their particular mandates or missions are implemented and function,
help construct various kinds of meaning for different ends and purposes, and determine or influence action. Far
from being mute, disposable, or trivial objects, documents are essential in helping to instantiate ideas and, in so
doing, materialize information so that it becomes informing. Put differently, information is an effect of
documentation. Documentation science, therefore, is the study and analysis of “the document”: its purpose(s),
role(s), etc.; practices with it; its institutional embeddedness, connections, and relationships; and ultimately its
constitutive effects. A documentary analysis, for example, can concentrate on the various aspects – including
roles, purposes, effects – of a particular document or set of documents in order to understand their kinds of
agency and important place in helping construct, materialize, and entrench an idea or an identity. So then how
does matter come to matter? What are some of the crucial components, or “things”, that help matter to emerge,
to materialize, and become meaningful? What are some of the essential practices that help make this
materialization possible? This presentation argues that documentation plays a vital role in materializing the
matter of information. It offers a documentary approach to materialism by illuminating the central role played
by documents and their associated practices in the concepts and practices of materialization, specifically
materializing information.
Amparo Lasén & Antonio Agustín García
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Processes of double inscription: gender subjectivities, digital materialities and mixed feelings
The ubiquitous and growing shared agency between people and digital technologies remediates (Bolter and
Grusin, 2000) subjectivation processes, gender choreographies (Goffman) and performances, producing
multimedia digital inscriptions of bodies, affects, emotions and feelings. A double inscriptive process emerges
in these practices revealing the mutual configuration between the materialities of bodies and devices: in one
hand, digital devices produce and keep inscriptions, as images, sounds, texts and numbers, of our bodies,
interactions, activities, messages and relationships, that can be traced and tracked, facilitating reflexivity and
surveillance, as well as contributing to the shaping and materialisation of these aspects of our ordinary life. In
the other hand, our bodies and subjectivities are being inscribed by these practices, as we acquire habits,
gestures, skills, postures, poses, ways of seeing, looking, hearing and doing as a result of this shared agency and
this intimacy, with digital media.
Drawing on our research on mobile mediations of gender relations, heterosexual couples conflicts and
communication, and forms of self-pornification enacted in digital self–portraits practices, our paper describes
and discusses how our gendered subjectivities, affects and relationships are materialised in digital inscriptions,
that can be stored, shared and traced, while eliciting a complex array if mixed feelings and disquiets; regarding
for instance the territorial negotiations within the couple, enacted in communication rituals and rules; and the
embodiment processes and complex gaze game involved in online flirting and self-presentation. Our paper is
then an invitation to consider the inscriptions and enactments of gender choreographies in new media practices
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with a dionysian materialist (Sloterdijk, 1989) sensibility, highlighting the material and embodied conditions, as
well as the theatrical and performative aspects of subjection and subjectivity, fraught with complex modes of
affecting and being affected.
Débora Lanzeni
PhD student at UOC-IN3
Re-orientating digital, future and materialities in the ethnographic inquiry
The politics of new materialisms and the ontological turn in social sciences are changing the way that we
consider in our studies, materiality, space and time as well as how we conceive the perspective from where we
construct knowledge. On the other hand, these concerns seem to be less present in the way that we inquire on/at
the same categories in peoples' common sense. Informed by an ethnographic study of design processes of smart
digital technologies, this communication aims to explore how our orientation in the ethnographic fieldwork
towards the native (or others) categories of materiality and future is pervaded (or not) by the new politics of
matter and things (Bennett, 2009; Ahmed, 2010). Our insight is that these recent changes in our
epistemological orientation can inform the ethnographic fieldwork allowing us to understand how observing
categories of existence are enacted in concrete practices (Strathern, 2012). Thus, producing ethnographic
accounts about how materiality, digital and future could differ within the “same” western order/classification of
thoughts. Ultimately we want to extend Ahmed’s idea that orientation affects how subjects and objects
materialize to the domain of the ethnographic encounter and the “powers of difference” (Viveiros de Castro,
Pedersen, Holbraad, 2013) in the transduction of otherness to anthropological knowledge.
Doris Leibetseder
UC Berkeley
Precarious Sex: A Queer-feminist Ethics
The title 'Precarious Sex' not only refers to the precarious situation of queer and disabled people but also to the
fragility of biological sex and sexuality itself. This presentation gives an overview of my new project, which
deals in the first part with reproductive challenges for transgender, intersex and disabled people on an applied
ethical level. In the second part, on a meta-ethical level, I create an allied queer-feminist ethics, bringing
common issues concerning biological reproduction in transgender studies, feminism, queer theory, gender and
disability studies together. My aim is to include non-pathologizing and non-normative transgender, intersex and
critical disability issues in a feminist ethical agenda. My main question is: what possibilities of intra-actions
(Barad’s mutually transformative interplays) concerning reproduction exist for transgender, intersex and
disabled people and feminists? One of the topics I focus on in this queer-feminist ethics is Assisted
Reproductive and Genetic Technologies (ARGTs), which change and produce new individualities. Here we can
see the queer potential of ARGTs that is to create non-normative individualities. A queer-feminist ethics dealing
with ARGTs is therefore entangled with and not separable from ontology. Following Barad’s call for an
‘ethico-onto-epistemo-logy’ that takes the ‘intertwining of ethics, knowledge and being’ seriously, I use two
methods from new materialisms: The first is the affirmative reading of the materials that show the challenges of
transgender, intersex and people with disabilities in relation to ARGTs. Diffraction is the second method in
order to find out where there are overlaps or interferences, which leads to a performative mode in which the
themes are understood from within, as forming part of it.
Taru Leppänen
Acting Professor of Gender Studies, University of Turku, Finland
Becoming Deaf with Music
Music is often thought to be an art of listening. However, music has an eminent position in Deaf cultures; deaf
people enjoy music through processes of creating, producing and experiencing. My focus in this presentation
will be on Signmark (Marko Vuoriheimo), a deaf Finnish rap artist who describes his music as party hip hop
that takes a stand. Signmark’s performances are bilingual. He uses international sign language and his
collaborator Brandon sings in English. A pseudonym Vanillaplayers (Youtube 7.10.2013, Signmark: Smells
Like Victory) describes Signmark’s performing as follows: “He does everything that someone u would call ‘a
musician’ does. Sign language is his VOICE.” Nevertheless, in 2012 Signmark was denied the royalties by
Finnish copyright society Gramex which operates as a link between the users of recorded music and performing
artists and producers who make recorded music. Gramex has paid Signmark royalties as a producer, but
Signmark wishes to be treated as a creative musical artist as well. According to Gramex, the reason for denying
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the royalties is that Signmark does not produce sound. In this paper, I aim to explore Signmark’s musicianship
through new materialist understandings of vibrant – or vibratory – materialities and their affective interplays
(e.g. human bodies and sound waves mediated by air/technologies) as well as Deleuze’s views concerning the
interrelationships of gesture, face and language. These perspectives help me to re-conceptualize both music and
the processes of relating to and creating it in connection with Deaf cultures, beyond the territory of human
hearing. Music and musicianship thus start to become-imperceptible vis-à-vis their limiting determinations in
copyright law and more broadly.
Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer
Research Associate at Charles University
Making matter tangible: mapping new materialist methodologies
At the present time scholars in fields such as gender studies, anthropology and science and technology studies
have expressed their discontents with the persistence of unacknowledged dichotomies between the ‘empirical’
and the ‘conceptual’ and have called for ‘revitalisation’ and more inventive research methodologies for how we
make, share and translate different knowledges. These scholars observe a proliferation of derivative and ‘bland’
research, a tendency to erase the messiness of research and transform innovative findings back into
conventional presentational formats at the expense of other forms of knowledge translation. New feminist
materialist research too has been accused of adopting a ‘universalising ontology’ that erases the practices and
practicalities of knowledge making (Sullivan 2012). Against this background this paper begins to map research
practices and methodologies that have made matter tangible and afford reality ‘to act (speak, smell, taste) in
novel ways’ (Mann et al 2011). The paper starts by returning to the research strategies of those whose work
became closely associated with new feminist materialism in recent anthologies. Focussing on the methodologies
of materiality and the materiality of methodology I then turn to dispersed work that has attempted to make
kinaesthetic, audio and other sensory dimensions of matter/ings tangible and keep tensions, ambivalence and
pleasures alive. This includes experimental work on para-sites, the development of haptic or kinaesthetic
‘optics’, ‘theory athwart’ and the translation of academic research into dance and poetry.
Pirkko Moisala
Professor of Musicology, University of Helsinki, Finland
Materialities of Musicking – Assemblages of Belonging in a Himalayan Village
The presentation examines the materialities of musicking as agents of belonging in a Gurung village music
culture. The Gurung are one of the numerous indigenous peoples of Nepal. The paper draws from
ethnomusicological fieldworks conducted in one mountain village.
Belonging is understood here as processes that create and strengthen or dissolve “shared values, practices and
networks” (Anthias 2006, 21). I will investigate various kinds of musically created and expressed belongings
that arise from within material assemblages. I claim that while belonging is built on emotional investment,
affective bonds, and desire for attachment (Pfaff-Czarnecka & Toffin, xiii), the desires and possibilities for
belonging arise from various kinds of materialities. In the case of Gurung village, materialities of musicking as
forces in shifting assemblages of belonging include such “things” as, for instance, ecological and economical
resources, technologies like available media channels and instruments, and musicking and dancing bodies.
Hanna Meissner
Technische Universität Berlin, Center for Interdisciplinary Women’s and Gender Studies
Politics as encounter and response-ability
Starting from the question what the politics of new feminist materialism could be, my presentation explores the
possibilities of (re-)conceptualizing the political in terms of performativity and of theorizing coalition building
in terms of encounters and involvedness – not foremost as a matter of choice and decision, but as “the only way
you can figure you can stay alive” (Bernice Johnson Reagon). In our times of hegemonic anthropocentric rules
of the political (David Scott) I see important contributions of new (feminist) materialism in the challenge of
reconsidering our modes of encountering (human and more-than-human) others. ‘Others’ who, without
necessarily playing by the rules, are nevertheless agentive forces. Acknowledging our fundamental dependency
as living beings enmeshed in human and more-than-human worlds provides ethical grounds for working on
modes of encountering ‘others’ that accept and even embrace the fact that our own certainties will not remain
stable in the process. In particular, the notions of political subjectivity and agency will be fundamentally
unsettled. I propose a reading of Judith Butler’s antifoundationalist rethinking of humanist notions of
intentionality and political agency through Karen Barad’s critique of her attribution of matter’s dynamism and
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historicity solely to the agency of language or culture. My aim is to re-invigorate and to sharpen Butler's
rethinking of political subjectivity in light of Barad's critique by revisiting Butler’s claim that matter is “a ‘that
which’ which prompts and occasions”. I argue that this confounds any clear distinction of passivity and activity,
thus enabling a transformation of our understanding of subjectivity and agency in terms of being-with and
responding to the enigmatic address of the other (Basile)
Dr Christian Mieves
Senior Lecturer in Fine Art, Faculty of Arts, University of Wolverhampton
Electric Mud: Digital Art, Bad Painting and the Return of the Artist
This paper explores the notion of ‘bad painting’ as a modus of creation in digital contemporary artistic practice.
Referring to the work of German artist Albert Oehlen (born 1954) as a main case study, the paper asks to what
extent his computer generated paintings and its DIY aesthetic not only evokes distance and questions modes of
agency, the work also ‘devoids’ the viewer from visual pleasure, ‘by replacing it with a complex, new, hybrid
language: Electric Mud’ (Pontégnie 2011, 17).
The paper starts with a discussion of the extent to which bad painting deviates from traditional understandings
of skills, thus allowing a review of the relationship between painting, practitioner and tools. In 1978 Marcia
Tucker defined ‘Bad painting’, as ‘figurative work that defies either deliberately or by virtue of disinterest, the
classical canons of good taste, draftsman ship, acceptable source material’, therefore emphasizing the ‘bad’
artist’s agency in the interrogation of traditional modes of production. The paper will propose that, by
challenging technical and stylistic models, ‘Bad painting’, offers a fruitful way of reviewing our understanding
of techne beyond an instrumentalist understanding of tools and material. Beyond those materialistic readings,
bad painting offers an opportunity to understand the social cultural shifts in contemporary art, which has often
been referred to as deskilling (Roberts 2007) and the reluctance of artists to display skill (Elkins, 2005, 124).
The paper questions to what extent Oehlen’s digital work contributes to the idea of ‘deskilling’ in contemporary
artistic production, offering a way to revaluate artistic practice. How does the potential ‘appeal to a modern
interest’ (Harrison1989) relate to the idea of the ‘twofoldness’ of the canvas (Wollheim 1987) usually
associated with ‘bad painting’? Does the emphasis on unconstraint and blatant features favoured by ‘bad
painting’ provide the ideal site where to turn our attention from the artwork to the practitioner, her/his marks,
traces, tools and materials as essential parts of the artistic process – in opposition to the history of Western the
‘body of labour’ where traces are often concealed (Bryson 1983)?
Valeria Morabito
University of Bologna, University of Utrecht
Interdisciplinary new-materialism: relationships between postcolonial feminism and new materialist
feminismo
In opposition to the western philosophical tradition, new materialist theory does not perceive diversity as an
emblematic and invariable denigratory mark, but as a floating horizon of exchanges and becomings, toward
which our molecular subjectivities have to move. Hence, the focus point of new materialism is the redefinition
of differences and, specifically, of sexual differences as well as, more generically, the revaluation of differences
in a non-subaltern way. New materialist feminists have analyzed the way in which sameness and diversity had
interacted, generating asymmetric relations of power in the gender fields. Nevertheless, whereas the connections
between new materialism and feminism have recently been developed in a consistent and creative way (mostly
tanks to Rosi Braidotti), there is still a strong and exaggerated resistance in accepting this paradigm in the
postcolonial field, although the two theories share many points of view, as I want to show. Therefore, my aim
for this presentation is to highlight the strengths and the weakness of new materialist feminism in relation with
the theoretical positions of postcolonial feminism. The importance of this comparison lies on the idea that there
can be no effective politics for new materialism without the development of the ability of this theory to be
transdisciplinar, intersectional and capable to understand the dynamics of power at all levels and with different
prospective; this is the only way to create new politics of identity and resistance. Indeed, to answer to the
challenges and paradoxes of our contemporary era we need to create a space for transnational actions, that have
to be developed throughout the formulation of a new idea of subjectivity, materially embedded and embodies,
caught in a process of becoming, molecular and welcoming with all differences.
Melanie McBride
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PhD Candidate, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
The foul and the fragrant: Smells like material culture
Deemed a “simple residue of evolution” (Corbin, 1986), smell has been systematically marginalized from the
normative, Western sensory order (Drobnick, 2006; Howes, 2005) with little notice or inquiry from cultural
studies. This silence is especially concerning given the established role of the senses, and especially smell in
coding and constituting the Other both as an object of desire (hooks, 2000) and disgust (Rhys-Taylor, 2013).
Simultaneously, the emergence of a new class of so-called multi-modal and multi-sensory technologies has
served to reinforce a ‘hyperaesthesiac’ (Howes, 2005) techno-sensory paradigm that only recently included
olfactory and gustatory interfaces (Cheok et al., 2013). While Gitelman (2006) and others suggest that the life
and record of digital material culture is primarily understood through its social history, this orientation neglects
a ‘relational’ sensory (Pink, 2006) ecology in which technology use is practiced within and beyond ‘culture.’
Making sense of olfactory ways is also, finally, a learning opportunity that invites a direct and embodied
encounter with our most primary way of knowing and being in the world. Drawing on my doctoral research of
smell as a neglected modality of communication and culture, this paper proposes an intersectional (Mehrotra,
2010), sensory-ethnographic (Pink, 2009) framework for what I term ‘DIY olfactory learning’ as a means of
conceptualizing a richer and more inclusive material sensoria. If, as the transhumanists argue, the senses have
‘no future’ (Moravec, 1997) it is only because we neglected their presence
Ana Mouraz
Faculdade de Psicologia e de Ciências da Educação da Universidade do Porto.
Challenges of new materialism thesis in curriculum theory
Curriculum studies and curriculum theories have been largely influenced by constructionism approach in the
late two decades of twenty century (Pacheco, 2005). However some trends associated with criticism arising
from post modernism theories emphasizes some “lines of flight” that expand curriculum theory into more
comprehensive meanings (Weber & Reynolds, 2005). This presentation has two purposes. It wants to identify
the influences of new materialism thesis in theoretical and policy trends of curriculum studies and wants to
discuss to what extent can curriculum theory benefit from new materialist readings. Papers published in relevant
curriculum journals are analyzed. New materialism concepts and other related key words as agential realism,
matter realism were the first methodological criteria to select texts. They were after analyzed in their contents to
shape the influence of new materialism conceptual approach in curriculums studies. Results show that
curriculum that is relevant from a new materialism point of view is ethical and epistemological based.
Jason Nolan
Associate Professor, Ryerson University, Toronto, Canada
Autistic Self-Advocacy: adaptive design as social technology
Autistics and other people with disabilities are pathologized and infantilized, seen, in most cultural contexts, as
objects rather than individuals. In keeping with the themes of this conference, this paper describes adaptive
design as an intervention to the construction of the disabled other through the creation of adaptive objects that
reposition the disabled Other as both a maker of things and the things themselves as social technologies. From
my position as an autistic self-advocate and participant in the neurodiversity movement (Charlton, 1998;
Broderick & Ne’eman, 2008), I am proposing ‘user-initiated’ design as part of the global maker culture/DIY
movement to draw attention towards non-Western communal innovative practicesthat are centred in individual
needs and community values (Bal, Nolan & Seko, 2014). As many as 1 in 88 individuals globally are Autistic,
and they suffer from many forms of exclusion, bullying, marginalization and discrimination. Women are
particularly underdiagnosed even when diagnostic supports are available, due to gender-biased assessment
criteria and testing methods, and subsequently denied access to resources. The intersectionalities (Mehrotra,
2010) of gender, race, poverty and disability create even greater burdens on autistic individuals outsideof the
West where autism discourse is largely centred on young White males. Building on work with the Adaptive
Design Association (Stearns, 2003), and the GimpGirl Community (Cole,Nolan, Seko, Mancuso & Ospina,
2011), the user-initiate practices we have been developing in the Experiential Design and Gaming
Environments Lab support autistics’ ability to modify their sensory and social spaces to reduce stress and
anxiety and represent a low cost/high impact opportunity to improve the lives of autistics globally. The one-
size-fits-all medical model discourse of universal design can be challenged through digital social networks and
innovations of the global maker culture/DIY movement, as represented in our emerging pilot project with
communities in Ghana to develop localized adaptive design practices as the foundation for a multi-lingual
global social network.
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Bettina Papenburg,
Heinrich-Heine-Universität Dusseldorf
Art and Bioscience: Contemporary Chimeras in the Sculptures of Patricia Piccinini
Images of the biotechnologically modified body shape contemporary imaginations about the potentials and
threats arising in tandem with the new biosciences, for instance, molecular biology and genetic engineering. Art
is one of the practices providing imaginative and critical commentary on the biotechnological modification of
human and animal bodies. Specifically, “bio art”, a recent strand of art involving biotechnological methods
and/or manipulation of living systems, raises questions about the ethical implications of the scientific
manipulation of life and living systems. This paper aims to address these implications by considering selected
representations of contemporary chimeras through the matrix of “the monstrous” and “the grotesque” and by
combining these considerations with recent scholarship on affect. Specifically, this paper will critically and
creatively engage with of the work of Australian artist Patricia Piccinini. As my case study, I will take
Piccinini’s hyper-realist sculptures depicting hybrid creatures, which the artist frames as imaginary products of
bioscience. I will argue that Piccinini articulates imaginations about the genetically modified body through by
invoking registers such as “the monstrous” and “the grotesque”. Both tropes signify border objects and refer to
the marking, challenging and transforming of boundaries. The monstrous hints at a form of social and
categorical exclusion. The anthropologist Mary Douglas, for instance, has already pointed out in 1966, that the
monster is a category of exclusion enacting, negotiating and reshaping individual, social and cultural
boundaries. The grotesque (as introduced by the Russian scholar of literature Mikhail Bakhtin in 1968), instead,
denotes a generative form of subversion employing the body to pose a challenge to existing power
constellations. This paper will not only assess how Piccinini represents the “monstrous” and/or “grotesque”
body, but also how she sensualizes the encounter with these particular forms of embodiment. At the heart of my
inquiry is the query how, in her staging of non-normative bodies, Piccinini invokes affective inventories such as
disgust, care and the uncanny in combination with alternative sensory modalities to effectively intervene in
meaning-making processes going on around the biosciences today.
Miguel Penas López
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona/Université Toulouse II-Le Mirail
Simondon’s Critique of Hylomorphism as a Foundation for a New Materialism
In Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, the doctrine of materialism is explicitly rejected. Alongside with
hylomorphism, materialism is criticized as a reductionist theory in which matter is devoid of an inner
organization. Against them, Simondon argues for a conception of an active and highly organized matter. Thus,
Simondon sees matter as a reservoir of potentiality for dynamic change, as the source of transformations not yet
determined. Potentially indeterminate without being formless, this conception of matter allows articulating the
plural modes of individuation, namely physical, biological and psycho-collective.
Despite his rejection of traditional materialism, I think it is possible to posit the Simondonian critique of
hylomorphism as a foundation for the contemporary theories known as new materialisms. I propose a reading of
this critique in terms of origins, going through it in four steps: technological origin (acquisition of form),
biological origin (vital activity of fabrication), psycho-social origin (dissymmetry master-slave of Ancient
Greece) and physical origin (intrinsic qualities of matter). In doing so, I try to highlight the importance of
conceiving an active and genetic matter, instead of a passive and formless one, in order to overcome the aporias
present in the debates between reductionists and anti-reductionists, or between mechanism and vitalism. If
matter is not reduced to a mechanical realm of blind forces, and appears to be a creative source of self-
organization, then matter and life no longer need to be opposed. So in my view, Simondon paves the way for a
non-reductionist materialism which can be taken as a foundation for a pluralist ontology. The traditional
problem with matter lies not in matter itself, but in our conceptions of matter, and this is why a new materialism
is needed.
Josefin Persdotter
Gothenburg University, Department of Sociology and Work Science
Menstrual matters; exploring the multiple materiality of menstruating bodies
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Within New Materialist feminism and Posthumanism it has been argued that the body has been left behind in a
critically under-theorized limbo. Many have called for a stronger theoretical emphasis on the pre-discoursive
specificities of sexed/gendered bodies. Using the menstruating body, this paper explores existent theoretical
concepts from New Materialism, feminist STS scholars, sociologists, and posthumanists, surrounding
production of meaning where bodies, technologies, and discourses intra-act and co-produce meaning.
Wondering: How can we theoretically understand these complex processes of intra-action? And in particular:
How can we understand the role of bodies in this: as matter, as technology, as technology-magnets, and as
agents? It is argued that the multiple materialities of menstruating bodies make them a particularly interesting
case for theoretical explorations as they are inevitably and unceasingly intertwined with different materials and
technologies. It consists of matter ("the body"), it produces matter (menstrual blood, hormones, sweat, etc.); it
attracts matter, or technologies (Feminine Hygiene Care products, hormonal pharmaceuticals, smart phone apps,
etc.) and these affect, condition, and shape each-other, and co-produce meaning of how menstruating bodies, as
well as menstruation as such, are understood socially and physically. It is argued that these non-human material
"objects"/"things" (the body as matter, matter produced by the body, and technologies as matter) are vital
players in the creation of menstrual meanings, and particularities and difficulties in understanding bodies as
agents are discussed.
Rumen Rachev
Utrecht University, the Netherlands
Software Becomings: Mineralizing Matter Flows Through Daily Practices
This paper focuses on software, as a modality of becoming, arguing that software is a vibrant matter, in constant
state of unfolding, which reveals itself to the world through daily mineralizing practices. Engaging with new
materialism and other speculative ontologies, the paper will try to map out how software moves through
different planes of becomings.
How software comes to being software? What makes software different from an acoustic guitar or a sunflower
in the fields? Here I will trace how software comes to being software through variety of material assemblages
and I will stress the importance of situating software not as an object, but rather as a movement through material
processes, and outline the difficulty of analyzing software as having materiality. Software has to be perceived
as more than just voltage differences. Software is an event, which is in constant state of becoming; most
importantly- ‘becoming with’ (as used by Haraway (2007)) the environment that it exists in. As reflected by
Rob Kitchin and Martin Dodge, software is both a product of the world and the producer of it (Kitchin and
Dodge, 2011). Software reveals itself in code, which is the language through which software is initialized. In
this initialization, software is not a merely a static event, which can be easily defined and pointed out. It is an
event swirling in the terrain of immanence, always on the move, never fixed, although still existing within
hardware material forms. Writing against the immaterial portray of software and digital technologies in general,
I will argued that software has quite a material affective aspect, able to bring the virtual, in Deleuze sense, to
the actual. That is to say- software actualizes virtual potentialities and enables the materialization of networks,
which did not exist before. Borrowing the term ‘mineralization’ from Manuel De Landa (2000), software
mineralizes raw power to turn it into discursive assemblages. These assemblages posses the computational
power to abstract and disseminate subjectivity. Moreover, the software assemblages are not operating in a close
circuit- they connect with other assemblages, creating a milieu, in which technology and nature coexist in an
onto-ecological mediascapes.
dr Monika, Rogowska-Stangret
Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw
Of Other Spaces, of Other Times – Feminist Politics of New Materialism in the Context of Polish Anti-
gender Backlash
Recently, in Poland we experience a strong anti-gender backlash. The authorities and representatives of (some
fractions of) Catholic Church and conservative politicians attack gender (as a category used in both political
discourse, e.g. gender mainstreaming, gender equality etc. and in academic discourse, e.g. gender studies) as a
source of pedophilia, demoralization of children, as a reason of degradation of traditional values, collapse of the
family (being one of them), as a basis for so called “gender ideology” that threatens the morality of Polish
society. In my presentation I aim at providing a context of the anti-gender backlash sketched briefly above and
at trying to analyze this situation with reference to feminist theoretical apparatuses. On the one hand, it may
seem appropriate to use Judith Butler’s standpoint expressed in the book Excitable Speech: A Politics of the
Performative. Indeed the effort of the attackers is devoted to domestification of all signs of difference by
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defining the category of gender according to their vision of it as a devil or satanic power. The escape from the
“last word” would be from this point of view the best strategy that could be used by gender scholars, activists,
and politicians to deprive their opponents of the power to establish social relations. On the other hand however,
anti-gender backlash is not only a conflict about words, definitions, and ways of escaping from them. It has
predominantly material “nature”, it is embedded in the fight for both time and space. Both categories seem to
me to be the core concepts for feminist politics of new materialism (for rethinking politics of location see for
example Peta Hinton, for analysis of time and especially future as key concept for feminist theory and activism
see for instance Elizabeth Grosz). What is at stake in the mentioned conflict is not words and definitions (these
are tools), but spaces and times for political actions, theoretical queries and their interconnectedness. With
reference to the Polish context my paper aims to present feminist politics of new materialism as a “politics of
squatting” that aims at creating other spaces and other times.
Nikki Rotas
PhD Candidate, Department of Curriculum, Teaching and Learning
Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at The University of Toronto
Technologically Mediated Bodies: The use of wearable technologies in practices of school gardening
Drawing on a research study of urban school gardens in Toronto, Canada, I develop an intimate and ecological
understanding of curricular practice that re-thinks affectivity through technologically mediated bodies in the
context of a school garden. Using Braidotti’s (2013) “eco-philosophy of becoming” and Deleuze & Guattari’s
(1977) notion of “becoming machinic,” I specifically discuss the use of the GoPro (a ‘wearable’ camera) in
practices of school gardening. I argue that wearable technologies attend to the complexity and capacity of
technologically mediated environments in movement or “in-act” (Manning, 2013). This understanding suggests
that the GoPro is implicated in a generative movement, a “plugging-in” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1977) that works
to compose and re-compose human, animal, and thing bodies in an “ecology of operations” (Manning, 2013)
that absorbs territorially bounded relations, yet entertains becoming movements that are in emergent relation
with the world.
The above understanding is aligned with posthumanist and/or new materialist methodologies that examine the
ways in which the “plugging-in” of the human, nonhuman, camera, and garden-machine might alter
subjectivities. This paper will layout a methodology that resists interpretations of what data ‘is.’ In using a
deleuze/guattarian schizoanalytic framework, I do not only attend to the ‘how’ of practice (i.e., gardening,
teaching, researching etc), but also to the ‘how’ of the “in-act” of experience. Put differently, a schizoanalytic
framework will serve as a cartographical process that resists the ‘map as method,’ which results in the creation
of coded linkages, static data and/or fixed images or shots. In thinking beyond the image and/or data as fixed;
and in thinking research as the creation of more than the human’s perception and her practices enables
researchers to “inject fresh life into old questions” (Buchanan, 2008, p. 12) and the practices that produce
research and school.
Helga, Sadowski
PhD Candidate Tema Genus, Linköping University
New Materialist Readings of ASMR Videos and their Intimate Contact Zones
The YouTube-based ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) community can be described as a
subculture of people who provide and receive forms of digital touch. Performers upload videos in which they,
for example, perform virtual haircuts on the user or ‘reach out beyond the screen’ in order to ‘touch’ the user’s
body or to ‘whisper’ into their ear. On the receiving end, ASMRers seek to experience a particular ‘tickling in
the head’, a sensation often also described as ‘braingasm’. The existence of this sensation is scientifically
contested and sometimes seen as rather a social media–induced trend, while others see it as related to a crossing
of sensory pathways, comparable to synesthesia.
However, a closer look at ASMR videos and their (desired) affects opens up possibilities to investigate digital
interconnectedness: What is digital, real or virtual touch? How are the boundaries between the digital and the
material blurred here? How are, on the other hand, space-time distinctions unsettled when digital touch becomes
‘real’ touch, no matter when or where a video was recorded?
In my paper I want to demonstrate how ASMR videos are a beneficial case study for new materialist readings of
the digital. I therefore want to introduce a concept of digital intimacy, as a methodological tool to question the
hierarchies between virtual/real/digital and touch/related forms of intimacy, and ultimately to challenge the
divisions between matter and discourse.
More precisely, I want to argue that in this particular genre of ASMR videos, in which the performers almost
always are young women, new media are done differently, in a more phenomenal way: By creating digital-
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material contact zones they actively challenge digital dualist assumptions of the Internet and the digital as
spaces that transcendent social structures because they are somehow ‘not real’.
Teresa, Samper
Sociology and Social Antropology Departament. University of Valencia
Spatio-temporal and political displacement of HIV/Aids: from northern males in the 80s to southern
women in the 21st Century
In terms of geo-political importance HIV is moving. The Aids epidemic began as a male epidemic (mostly
white) from developed countries until, nowadays, it is defined as a women's epidemic (mostly black) from poor
countries. This picture is powerful; in Barad's words: “Reality is an ongoing dynamic of intra-activity” (2007,
206). My paper updates my doctoral thesis (in process) under Barad's proposal.
A first methodological outline could be an analysis of scientific publications (with its own rethorical and
pragmatical questions) about the AIDS pandemic as a good exclusion and inclusion exercise. For example, in
1983 (the same year that the retrovirus was “visible” in a laboratory) the New England Journal of Medicine
published «Immunodeficiency in female sexual partners of men with the acquired immunodeficiency
syndrome». However, women's vulnerability never became an important topic until the beginning of the 21st
Century! Another dimension is the ethically aware performative power of gay activism that was able of
redirected the epidemic (Epstein, 1996). Or, we need think about the Harding's project (2008) from the
standpoint of women's lives in households; this space was/is the scenario the most of male-to-female
transmission of HIV.
This epidemic could be paradigmatic for understanding the constant movement between the material world, the
biological and social being; and it is modelled on the “intra-action” of human agents (epidemiologist, virologist,
activists, patients, politics...) and non-human agents (virus, laboratories, risk concept, statistical machines,
scientifical publications...) This pandemic reveals us that there is a ethical dimension from knowledge
production, while we accept the socio-economical displacement from HIV as a “natural” evolution of epidemic.
This performativity of knowledge is “about making a difference in the world about taking responsibility for the
fact that our practices matter; the world is materialized differently through different practices (contingent
ontology)” (Barad: 2007, 89).
Sofie Sauzet
Aarhus University, Department of Education and University College Capital, Denmark
Methodological implications for hunting the ghostly concept of interprofessionalism as phenomenon
Interprofessionalism is a concept that, with the organizational becoming of University Colleges (UC’s) in
Denmark (2008), has been charged with promises for a brighter tomorrow for the welfare state. Usually
recognized as a type of collaboration across profession or common knowledge, interprofessionalism is said to
have positive effects on work on complex welfare issues (Zwarenstein and Reeves 2009; Edwards 2010; Paradis
and Reeves 2012). In the 1990´s there were around 120 independent higher educational organizations in
Denmark that offered professional bachelor-programs. In 2008 these had been fusioned into 7 UC’s. I’ve been
doing ethnography in a UC from 2010-2014, and here interprofessionalism has emerged as phenomenon (Barad
2007; Barad 2010) in entanglement with political pro-fusion debates, as argument for the creation of
collaborations between staff, as ideal for educational activities across programs, and as visions for
organizational developments and buildings of new state-of-the-art campuses (Sauzet 2011). Thus
interprofessionalism seems to emerge as phenomenon in entanglement with organizational becomings.Working
with concepts as phenomena, understood as entangled intra-actions between a mutually emergent ‘it’ and ‘I’
(Barad 2007, 128), my research strategy has become attuned towards both producing and navigating in mess;
Mess where both ‘it’ and ‘I’ have engaged in co-constitutive practices of hunting and haunting. For following a
concept as phenomenon, is rather like hunting ghosts. Sometimes you see it, sometimes you don’t. Mostly,
you’re the only one that feels its presence, and sometimes you haven’t noticed it until somebody screams its
name. Following a concept is researching presences, absences, and the unheeded mundane material-discursive
practices of educational organizations. It’s assembling the unassimilable and allowing research to emerge in
mess (Law 2004; Kofoed 2007).In my paper I will discuss: How can we work with methodological research
criteria (Khawaja 2010), whilst hunting ghost-like, messy and emergent concepts as phenomena?
Prof Sigrid Schmitz
University of Vienna, Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology, Faculty of Social Sciences
On Use and Misuse of Feminist Materialism Debates: The Case of BCI
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I am fascinated by the possibilities of concurrent cyborgian becomings. I imagine wearing Google glasses,
speaking with my computer in dragon dictate without typing, maybe even without talking, getting my poor hips
and knees running with a prosthetic helper. That wouldn’t be too bad, right? However, I also feel ambiguous:
Who decides on the possibilities, the constraints and controls under which I should become hybridized and
enhanced? Oscillating between potentials of imploding binary orders and horrors of control and exploitation, I
elaborate on the dynamic becomings of Brain-Computer-Interfaces. How can we grasp the bio-techno-socio-
cultural entanglements of BCI; interconnecting brains, bodies, EEG-caps, brain implants, computers and
technical devices, concepts, meanings, and codes; all continuously in mutual exchange; all embedded in
scientific and medical research and therapy, in markets, in the military field, in governmental and self-
technologies of enhancement, as well as in societal power relations?
This work touches profoundly the question of adequate politics of Feminist Materialism. To my opinion, “we”
(whoever that “we” may be) should not create some meta-theory, but concretize and evaluate our
epistemological concepts with case studies, which enable debates regarding their potentials and limits for
political acting and maybe even more for assessment of their outcomes (we are responsible and accountable);
and conversely, the empirical work, in which we engage, inspires and gives form to our epistemological
debates. Following this approach, I take the case study of neuro-humanities to discuss the use and misuse of
“our” de-constructive concepts on the inseparability of nature/culture/technology, on the malleability of bodies
and brains, embodied with meanings, practices, and technologies. How do these concepts feed new
developments or legitimize existing or new relations of power, in- and exclusions, violations, and
vulnerabilities? I follow Butler in that agency and vulnerability are principally, closely, and inseparably linked.
Instead of following one meta-theoretical approach, I prefer to build up collages out of fragments and splitters
(and already known phrases) but these collages give a new picture – diffraction not reflection. Haraway plays
the cat’s cradle, I am trying to build up collages and play with splitters of Alice’s mirror.
Gregory J. Seigworth
Millersville University, USA
Ambient Debt, Augmented Bodies
In M. T. Anderson’s young adult sci-fi novel Feed, the teenage protagonist Titus wakes up somewhere on the
moon -- after his brain-feed was hacked at a dance-club -- to find out that something even more disturbing has
occurred.
The first thing I felt was no credit.
I tried to touch my credit, but there was nothing there.
I felt like I was in a little room.
My body – I was in a bed, on top of my arm, which was asleep, but I didn’t know where. I couldn’t find the
Lunar GPS to tell me. (2002, p.35)
Two moments here will be instructive for my paper. One: the ‘first thing’ that Titus notices upon regaining
consciousness is his inability to access (‘to touch’) his credit and, two, Anderson’s ambiguity of reference
surrounding Titus’ missing limb and his now-shrunken locale. What is it precisely that Titus wants the Lunar
GPS to tell him: where he is or where his arm is? And why does rather pertinent question (where am I? where is
the rest of me?) follow and not precede his credit inquiry? This paper will explore the ‘new materialisms’ of
digitized debt/credit practices, focusing on how these practices are embodied or otherwise incorporated as part
of the virtual reality of everyday technological immersion and interface. I will work across three broadly-
construed research areas: 1) affect theories, philosophies of sensation and embodiment, feminist epistemologies,
phenomenology/post-phenomenology, as well as debates in neurosciences over the extended/enactive-mind 2)
analyses of the present role played by debt in the financialization of daily life and in the machinations of global
capital, especially in light of Deleuze’s ‘control society’ thesis (where it is no longer ‘man confined’ but ‘man
in debt’), and 3) critical approaches to the emergence and orientations of new apps and digital interfaces, from
handheld/mobile to ubiquitous/pervasive. Particular attention will be given to understanding the ethological
implications of new media and their/our ambient ecologies.
Audrey Samson & Winnie Soon
City University of Hong Kong and Aarhus University
Speedshow 2.0 Hong Kong
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A ‘cloud of Internet’ permeates our world. How do the layers of computational code, wires, servers, cables, and
providers, frame our experience and understanding of this mystical cloud? In this paper we write about the
experience of organising a speedshow in Hong Kong. We discuss how the ‘materialities’ of the city, the cafe
where it took place, the network, the works themselves, and the visitors, interact and conflate both notions of
time and space. A speedshow is an exhibition format originated by Aram Bartholl to present network art on the
fly in internet cafes. For the purpose of this paper we understand network art as using the internet as medium.
The network artist is concerned with the materialities of the network: protocols, infrastructure, network speed,
servers, browsers, data, computer code and algorithms.
We discuss the different works included in the speedshow; their relationship to the material sub-strate of media
(Galloway, 2006), the performativity of the code (Mackenzie, 2005; Cox, 2013), the dynamic translation of
hybrid assemblages (Latour, 1991, 1993, 1994, 2005) across the relations of network, browser, data and code,
the granularity of the works and fragility of the network (Hagen, 2006), and the “intra-actions” between these
mingling actors (Barad, 2007). Ultimately we propose that the Speedshow 2.0 Hong Kong turned the space into
a temporary 'playground' for the user, where machines also performed with network, Internet data and
software/code in real time, and that this form of artistic play is a very useful tool to begin understanding the
materiality of otherwise seamless and ubiquitous technologies.
Erin K Stapleton
The London Graduate School & Kingston University, London. #ESR (PhD final year student)
Bataille’s Base Materialism and theorising “Dark Matter” as a function of Resistant Heterogeneity
Common to a number of descriptions new materialist theory relates to the reconceptualization of matter away
from the “inertia” of Newtonian physics, and toward an energetic and dynamic theory of material itself
(Bennett, Cheah, Coole & Frost, Coole, 2010). The theoretical understanding of material as “an active
principle” (Bataille, 1930/1985; Bennett, 2010) is largely attributed to a nexus of thought around Quantum
physics, which demonstrates that matter is energetic and infected with both space and the mysterious “dark
matter” that exceeds every constitutional theory (Coole & Frost, 2010). As the dual reference above indicates,
Georges Bataille proposed a theory of active materialism that he insisted should precede ontologies as a process
by which theory might exceed both Idealism and Dialectical Materialism, instead conceiving of “matter as the
thing in itself” (Bataille, 1930/1985). Bataille argues for the inclusion of what he designates as “base material”
in the development of materialist thought. While Bataille conceived of base material as socially and politically
unacceptable or unpleasant matter encountered and produced by bodies, his idea could be reconceived of in
reference to contemporary theoretical Physics, in which base matter, persists as “dark matter” (Coole & Frost,
2010). In theorising “dark matter” (which, as Coole and Frost report) constitutes a large percentage of the
material we encounter as base material, this matter can be considered in relation to Bataille’s sovereign
heterogeneity, where the heterogeneous or outcast position cannot be reconstituted by structures of language or
known forms. It is also this dark matter that reserves and produces the energy that allows matter, in general, to
be active. In this paper, I will argue that base materialism, reconstituted as the mysterious “dark matter” and
“dark energy” of the physical universe, resists the structuration of ontological theories and as such, is a strain of
matter resistant to structural hierarchy and known form. This theory of base materialism as “dark matter”
underpins a resistance to the restriction of social and physical homogeneity that we encounter as constituted
bodies in the world.
Whitney Stark
GEMMA/Central European University/Utrecht University
Assembled Bodies: Reconfiguring Quantum Identities
What do Baradian quantum understandings and ideas of queer time have in common with intersectional identity
politics, safer space and non-central leadership practices? What does this have to do with what feminist and
queer projects get validated and which ones do not?
In this paper I discuss how understandings of quantum physics and cyborgian bodies ally with feminist anti-
oppression practices long in use. The idea of the body (whether biological, social, of work) is not stagnant, and
new materialist feminisms help to recognize how multiple phenomena work together to behave in what can
become legible at any given moment as a body. By utilizing the materiality of conceptions about connectivity
often thought to be merely theoretical, by taking a critical look at the non-centralized and multiple movements
of quantum physics, and by de-hierarchizing the necessity of linear bodies through time, it becomes possible to
reconfigure structures of value, longevity and subjectivity. A combination of Intersectionality and quantum
physics can provide for a new perspective on organizing practices long used by marginalized people, for
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enabling apparatuses which allow for new possibilities of safer spaces, for practices of accountability, and for a
fresh look at some reasons why certain practices are the ones often recorded in ‘our’ Histories.
Zuzana Štefková Ph.D.
Charles University, Prague
Bodies of Labour: Artist as a Mother
The paper explores the role of mothering and the maternal body in contemporary art. It seeks to analyse the
meaning making creative process informed by maternal bodies while simultaneously assessing political
implications of the maternal embodied selves of/in art. By doing so the paper strives to demonstrate the ways in
which these embodied creative strategies help to traverse of sex/gender distinction on the personal, social and
symbolic level.
Drawing on Julia Kristeva, this paper shows how the specific properties of maternal body become the bases of
her indeterminate subjectivity. This process cannot be generalized any more than its artistic reflection, yet by
means of the analysis of selected artworks dealing with the topic of mothering and personal testimonies of the
artists, the paper seeks to demonstrate how the carnal physicality and signification conjoined within art practice
of the individual artists challenges duality of the essentialist / constructivist divide.
Dr. Eliza Steinbock
Center for Gender and Diversity, Amsterdam
Photographic Flashes: Materializing (Trans)Gender Violence in Heather Cassils’ Durational Art
This paper examines the aesthetic strategy of flash photography, live performance, and durational art to
engender a semblance of everyday violence against trans people in the artistic practice of Heather Cassils
(2011-2014). Durational art like Cassils practices places the component of time and its restriction at the core of
the work, making the artist’s and/or the spectator’s bodily endurance the focus. In addition to using
photographic flashes to blind audiences, these works reference (trans)gender violence on multiple levels:
institutional discrimination through the location in an empty archive room, killings through martial arts
choreographies, and microaggressions in aesthetics of defacement. However, the rigorous physical training
undergone for his body art also suggests a productive mode of violence in that muscles must fail in order to
grow. Spasms, which Cassils describes as a way of being trans, are of course products of the nervous system as
it becomes overloaded. I trace the recurrence of the spasm across these different forms of embodied violence to
show its generative as well as destructive property. With the spasm Cassils introduces a radical crisis with
language that demands an accounting through new materialist methods of studying the “occurrent” (Massumi)
dimension of arts.
I first refer to Gilles Deleuze’s study of Francis Bacon, in which he qualifies the very special violence of Bacon
paintings as not simply depicting the violence of sensation, rather, he paints “to make the spasm visible,” in
which materials and forces can become visible in their effects on the flesh (2005: xii). Spasms mark out the
“timespace of indeterminancy” with resistances, those obstacles that lime a differential as felt by the subject in
the “something-doing” of an event (Massumi 2011: 3-11). These semblances register felt time and pass on
potential; therein lays the politicality of process. The question becomes in what way arts orient the passing on of
potential so that another novel occurrence might take place. Similarly to the occurrences within durational art,
one can ask about the ways in which the indeterminacy of trans(gender) orients differential becoming towards
novel occurrences. I argue that the inarticulateness of the spasm that Cassils qualifies as trans shares an interest
in challenging the privileged ability to “voice” demands. In this sense, durational art works such as Cassils’ that
challenge an identitarian concept of gender belong in a coalition, such as Jasbir Puar proposes, for “a non-
anthropomorphic, interspecies vision of affective politics” (2011: 156). From within new materialism, a
transgender perspective can demonstrate renewed relevance for gender studies as an affirmative politics of
emergent bodies.
Jules Sturm
ASCA – Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis University of Amsterdam
Sensory Ontologies and the Methodological Use of Rudimentary Bodies
I want to write about the body, not as a metaphor, symbol, or representation, but simply as the body. (Eli Clare)
In a drawing by digital photographer Antony Crossfield (Lanugo, 2013), the viewer is confronted with the
peculiar aliveness of magnified strands of hair growing out of the back of a kneeling body. Despite the
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undeniably human form of the presented figure, this body refutes categorization through its prominent
bodiliness, which is provoked by the blurring of physical markers of age, sex, and gender. The figure is
experienced foremost as a body. Lanugo portrays rudimentary body parts in such a way that they expose
corporeal categorizations of gender, race, and ability as mere “phantom materialities” (Snyder & Mitchell,
374). Instead, hair, skin, wrinkles, and folds of flesh are here perceived as the only meaningful materialities of
the body. The body’s rudimentariness envelops its viewer in a rare sensibility of perception; it thereby
demystifies bodily norms as guiding principles for making sense of bodies.
Crossfield’s drawing helps me to question standard ways of seeing bodies as meaningful only through
categorizations of gender, age, or (dis-)ability. The artist’s digital visual language further allows me to explore
the potential of the digital distortion of body images as a way of learning how to see beyond bodily norms and
to gain access to the rudimentary significance of all bodies.
My aim for this paper is to productively reclaim the body for a new materialist methodology that moves from
a critique of immaterial bodies to a radical transformation of the relationship between embodied materiality and
meaning. To face human bodies’ “defining elasticity,” I will employ queer and feminist theories of disability
that engage in the body’s flesh, blood, bone, hair, and skin. Digital visualization will be explored as opening up
new insights into the meaning of our bodies’ sensibilities and material realities.
Björn Thorsteinsson
Assistant professor, philosophy, University of Iceland
Mattering, writing, flesh: Sketching the onto-politics of new materialismo
'PLURALISM = MONISM' – this slogan, advanced by Deleuze and Guattari in A thousand plateaus, in many
ways captures a recurring thread, if not a core element, of the emerging new materialist ontologies. But what
does the slogan mean and how should it be understood? And where does it leave us? This paper sets out to
address such questions, taking its cue from Karen Barad's agential realism and its depiction of 'the lively dance
of matter' with the aim of elucidating the deep ontology of Barad's materialism through interconnections with
Derrida's key (non-)concepts such as différance and writing, leading, ultimately, to an interlacing with Merleau-
Ponty's conception of flesh. This, then, will lead into a discussion of immanentist onto-politics that call for a
different participation in being – a being-together that entails sensitivity and care.
Alanna Thain
McGill University
Bullet to the Heart: Ambiguous Embodiments and Intermedial Dance
Dance has been a favourite subject of moving image media since Loïe Fuller’s Danse Serpentine (1896), and
within film studies, an emphasis on the gendered spectacle of the dancing female body has been a key
methodological concern for thinking dance through the opposing parameters of narrative versus spectacle. As
screendance--dance made specifically for recording media and not for the stage--has increasingly emerged as its
own field, the idea of “recorporealizations” has been proposed as a way to think about how human bodies are
rematerialized in their encounters with recording media. However, this emphasis on a pre-given human body
diminishes the radical potential for rethinking the concept of the body itself as a relational and ecological entity,
a key potential of new materialism. How else might we think relations between gender, embodiment, materiality
and movement? Rather than the dynamic of loss or preservation that remains within the idea of
recorporealizations, I have suggested that x-corporation is a way to think transversal relations of ecology,
material, production conditions, bodies and the unpredictable potential (the x-factor) of the “enactive event”
(Massumi 2011) of digital screendance. With its recent resurgent popularity in post-digital cinema, dance is a
key way that contemporary moving image media negotiates relations between bodies, digital technologies,
performance and the “event” of cinema and screendance. Cinematic outbursts of dancing bodies combine
“recording machines” (training, choreography, embodied memory and technology) and the spontaneity of the
unexpected. How does cinema’s ability to make bodies move “otherwise” (via slow motion, editing, desynced
sound and image, animation, etc.) expand our sense of what bodies are and can do in terms that account for our
affective and ambivalent response to the paradigm shift of post-digital cinema? These questions will be
focalized through the specific force of gravity in recent screendance and intermedial performance. For example,
how does bullet time technology, now a visual cliché of post-digital embodiment and spatio-temporal
stretching, trace the immaterial and material histories of a key synthetic movements of digital cinema, from its
development by BUF laboratories in Paris and the technique of digital photogrammetry, through its early
adoption in a 1998 dance-themed Gap commercial, its popularization in The Matrix foregrounding the tension
between digital movements and the falliable all too human body, to its incorporation in works of screendance
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such as Edouard Lock’s Amélia (2002), and finally in a recent live performance by lung transplant recipient
and choreographer Dave St-Pierre (2011’s What’s Next?)?
Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir
University of Iceland/Helsinki Collegium of Advanced Studies
Indebted Subjects
The current state of capitalism is a significant factor in producing subjects insofar they are situated in exchange
relations of debt and credit. In contrast to atomistic notions of the subject, relational notions of the subject as
advanced within feminist ethics are a better point of departure for capturing the interdependence of subjects
within a debt-economy. Yet feminist, ethical concepts of relational subjects need to be extended to
accommodate for the financial and material realities of a corrupting debt-economy. Posthuman, feminist
approaches emphasize the interconnectedness and embeddedness of living beings in organic, technological and
capitalist networks and they offer a means to get a rich conceptual grasp of contemporary subjects in terms of
their main conditioning and enabling features.
Milla Tiainen
Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Helsinki, Finland / Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, Anglia Ruskin
University, Cambridge (UK)
Singing, Microperception, and New Materialist Politics of the Voice
This paper explores the voice-centered artistic and musicking practice of Finnish performance artist Heidi Fast.
With the help of new materialist theorizations, I seek to rethink the kinds of politics that the voice might be
involved in. Fast’s recent activities have focused on what she calls the co-attuning voice. This interest has led to
various site-specific and participatory projects, where Fast encourages the partakers to join along with her in
emergent processes of co-singing.
Fast’s art has conceptual and political underpinnings. She advocates vocal expressions that relate immanently to
the shifting states of the human participants and their evolving togetherness while potentially extending their
resonance into wider material, social and mental ecologies (cf. Félix Guattari’s work). In Fast’s view, co-
attuning productions of voice might offer temporary yet significant counter-forces to those changes in our
sensitivity (capacities to sense) and sensibility (capacities to relate and experience) that result from the
imperatives of communication and connectedness to information technologies characteristic of cognitive
capitalism.
Fast’s projects do not just illustrate the uses of voice in contemporary performance art or artists’ negotiations of
the social, even therapeutic tasks assigned to the arts. I argue that they challenge the previous models of
language and the body, identity, and performativity that scholars in interdisciplinary voice studies have
deployed to grasp the political powers of the voice (e.g. Potter 1998; Cusick 1999; Cavarero 2005; Neumark et
al. 2010). Whilst concentrating on Fast’s latest project at the psychiatric clinic of Helsinki University Central
Hospital, I claim that her art inspires a new understanding of the politics of voice premised on the notion of
microperception. This is a conception of reality – including our bodies-minds – as ongoing multiplicities of
tendency, reactivated capacity; affective re-beginnings (see Massumi 2009). This notion, which relates to
several philosophical approaches central to new materialist theorizing, can importantly retune our
understandings of what voices can do – in terms of individual and collective becomings and social,
environmental change.
Tanja Traxler
PhD-student at the University of Vienna/Faculty of Physics and Faculty of Philosophy and part of the research
project ‘Thinking Space’ (Austrian Academy of Sciences)
Virtual agency and the come-back of materiality
In the age of Web 1.0 the digital was mainly considered as a movement of demassification, where actions and
actors seemed to move to a virtual and matter-free space. With the rise of Web 2.0 a fundamental change has
started and materiality seems to befall the regime of the digital. This come- back of matter becomes extremely
prevalent in technological paradigms arising since the late 199ies such as the Internet of Things, Pervasive
Computing or Ambient Intelligence, where the implementation of sensors and assignment of IP-addresses to
material objects creates a technological environment intending to surpass the boarders of virtual and material
space. These developments bring to the foreground that the digital flows of data do not exist detached from
objects (Ashton 2009).
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This paper aims at reconsidering the come-back of materiality in the context of ambient technologies. Even
though Karen Barad didn’t consider the agency of these new technologies in detail, her methodological
framework of agential realism derived from quantum mechanics becomes extremely helpful in that respect. Her
agential realist account offers to study human and non-human agents on the same sphere without erasing
differences between them. This allows for retheorizing the social, the natural and the technological together,
acknowledging that virtual agency is not detached from material objects and exploring their inter- and intra-
actions.
Hanna Väätäinen
Postdoctoral Researcher, University of Helsinki, Finland
Forming Common Notions in Collaborative Music and Dance Research
In this presentation I describe a way of using bodily movement as an analytical tool in music and dance research
inspired by the philosophies Baruch Spinoza and Gilles Deleuze, especially their understandings of the common
notion. In 2013 I embarked on collaboration with Linnea Kissamäki, a female movement improvisation
enthusiast born with a visual disability in 1955, in her home town Joensuu, situated in Northern Karelia in
Finland. In our encounters we have co-created physical movements and ways of moving I call kinecepts (a term
created originally by Eleanor Metheny and elaborated in this presentation). These movements and ways of
moving can be used in Deleuzian and new materialist music and dance research which problematizes the very
notions of an analytical concept, music and dance.
In my analysis, I approach the co-creation of kinecepts as a method of forming common notions in music and
dance research. I describe my collaboration with Kissamäki by asking how the engendering of kinecepts makes
the idea of common notion accessible and how it transforms it. Managing to form common notions means
managing to increase the capacities of a concept, a physical movement, a researcher and a participant. It is in
the processes of adapting oneself to another as well as in adapting the use of verbal and philosophical discourses
to the creation of dance movements typical for movement improvisation where common notions in this research
project are found.
Tereza Virtová
Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University (Czech Republic)
Workers of the New Era: ethnography of young migrant workers, labor market and changes in manual
occupations
In my recently initiated doctoral research, I focus on young workers from Eastern Europe, who are moving
around European Union in order to find more convenient temporal and seasonal jobs, escape poverty of their
home towns or travel and experience adventure. At least at first sight, these workers seem to be accommodated
to the growing dominance of capital over labor, with their life trajectories and style shaped by instability,
flexibility and more or less regular migration moves.
Drawing both on actor-network theory (Latour 1987, Law 1999) and multi-sited configuration (Marcus 1995, as
a global ethnography in Burawoy et al. 2000), I will follow these new age economic nomads or transnational
proletariat, on their quests for jobs, when returning home and in between jobs. Apart from tracing individual
migrants and their trajectories, I want to follow things circulating among places and workers, flows of money,
commodities, job opportunities, and as suggests Marcus (1995) also metaphors, conflicts or biographies.
I believe that connecting these unconnected and seemingly incommensurables sites and worlds will enable
better understanding of forming infrastructures among jobs, places and workers, but also of European labor
market and processes in which subjectivity and rationality of young migrant workers are being formed. Thus,
my research aims at ethnographic account of phenomenon of young migrant manual labor, beyond current
country of residency or single country of origin.
Katarzyna, Wolanik Boström
PhD, senior lecturer, Dept. of Culture and Media Studies/Ethnology, Umea university, Sweden
Materialising suffering, medical help and humanitarianism on Swedish Médecins sans Frontières/Doctors
without Borders’ web site
In my presentation, I want to discuss the dynamics of materialisation with the example of how the all-pervading
materiality of suffering, death and medical help is portrayed – i.e. materialised – in the Swedish web site of
Medecins sans Frontiers /Doctors without Borders, Läkare utan Gränser. The site is presenting the
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organisation’s work as heavily anchored in material circumstances on many levels. There are the brutish forces
of natural catastrophes and human-induced conflicts, wars, extreme poverty, malnourishment, epidemics, all
shattering human lives, causing suffering and foreboding death. These conditions together with the climate,
distances and myriads of other material circumstances limit also the MsF teams’ labour and the help that is
possible to give – the help that is vital and desperately needed, though always too scarce. The depicted efforts to
bring relief and assistance may also be regarded as the constant process of materialisation of the ideology of
humanitarianism. There is the materiality of the gendered human body, of those who need help and those who
provide it. The gendered, embodied humans are the subjects who suffer and make sense of suffering; they are
also the objects of treatments that the teams (i.e. also gendered, embodied humans) may offer. The MsF-site is
trying to portrait - materialise once more through digital means - the all-pervading materiality of suffering and
humanitarian, medical help, using texts and images, reports, blogs, digital newsletters and journals and also
linking to other web-sides on Facebook and Instagram, to radio and TV programs.
Eva Zekany
PhD Candidate, Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary
“How to defeat digital media addiction in twelve simple steps”: A neomaterialist take on the
human/medium relationship
Whether or not one agrees that there is a medical condition that can be loosely described as 'media addition',
both popular opinion and numerous medical studies seem to take the issue quite seriously. Historically,
technical media have been a source of both apprehension and delight, and both in a practical and a philosophical
sense, media’s importance cannot be understated. As Lisa Gitelman argues, media have always “emerged and
existed in ways that both challenge and regulate notions of what it means to be human” (Gitelman and Pingree,
2003, p. xix).
But instead of asking what is it about digital media that can take hold of human behaviour, or what within
human cognition and biology makes it possible for such a condition to emerge, perhaps it could be more useful
to look not simply at the actors involved, but at the processes unfolding between them. Taking a cue from new
materialist scholarship, a growing number of media scholars are exploring questions of mediation, the mutual
interconnection and co-emergence of the human and the technical/digital medium.
Neomaterialist frameworks could allow media addiction an open-ended process of relating, of ‘becoming with’
media. This paper proposes to further the claim that that “nature is agentic, that it “punches back” at humans
and the machines they construct to explore it in ways we cannot predict”, in order to explore the way in which
the intra-action of digital media and humans allows room for the discursive construction of ‘problematic’
human-machine relations such as Internet Addiction. While the nonhumanity of media has been explored by
various media scholars from Parikka to Kittler, feminist neomaterialist theories can do much to clarify the
conditions of emergence of such social anxieties like media addiction, and their stakes in formulating human-
media relationships.
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Abstracts of papers presented in Workshops
Networking Workshop:
Milágros Sáinz Ibáñez, Ana María González Ramos y Cecilia Castaño
Research group GENTIC & Universidad Complutense de Madrid
GENTIC is a research group focused on gender and ICT (information and communication technologies)
relationships in the knowledge society. In 2007, GENTIC conducted a project focuses on the descriptive
analysis of women’s presence in the studies and the labour market and (R&D public and private centres and
innovative enterprises). This area of expertise was in line with international studies on gender and STE (science,
technology and engineering). Nowadays, research lines of GENTIC Are: the analysis of gender stereotypes
with regards to STE, women’s vocational choices, women’s professional careers in research and business
through their life-course, the impact of the equality policies in organisations, the influence of the international
mobility in the professional paths, and the influence of the ICT in their daily lives, among other topics. Thus,
we situate women in different contexts paying special attention to their agential capacities (reproducing or
resisting traditional roles as women) within the knowledge society.
Adelina Sánchez Espinosa
Coordinator of GEMMA: Erasmus Mundus Master in Women’s and Gender studies
Feminist alliances in action: GEMMA "Erasmus Mundus Master's Degree in
Women's Studies and Gender
I will talk about the experience of coordinating the GEMMA project. GEMMA is the only Erasmus Mundus
Master's Degree in Women’s Studies and Gender and it is taught simultaneously at seven universities in Europe
with the collaboration of 18 other institutions worldwide. I would like to focus on the gradual construction of
feminist alliances throughout all these years, on the challenges we have shared and the unique experiences we
have all lived through since we decided to come together over a decade ago.
Guðbjörg R. Jóhannesdóttir PhD student, Department of History and Philosophy, School of Humanities University of Iceland
I have recently finished my PhD thesis on the aesthetics of Icelandic landscapes. The aim of the thesis,
Icelandic Landscapes: Beauty and the Aesthetic in Environmental Decision-Making, is to gain a deeper
understanding of the meaning of landscape and the values which are derived from the aesthetic experience of
Icelandic landscapes, and to think of ways of integrating that meaning and value into environmental decision-
making. Icelandic landscapes are often praised for their unique beauty; they are seen as Iceland’s most
important national symbol and as a core aspect of the Icelandic national identity. However, there has been a lack
of a proper language to describe the aesthetic experience of Icelandic landscapes and the meanings and values
associated with them. In order to find this language and its proper place in the political systems of planning and
decision-making this thesis first explores the concepts of beauty, landscape, and the aesthetic from a
phenomenological point of view. The phenomenological approach provides the possibility of getting beyond the
narrow dualistic understanding of the concepts of beauty and landscape that has led to the exclusion of aesthetic
values in decision-making on the grounds that they are too subjective and difficult to measure. Secondly, the
thesis examines the actual aesthetic experiences of two Icelandic landscape types (glaciers and geothermal
landscapes) through phenomenological and qualitative research methods, and reflects philosophically on the
meaning and value derived from these experiences. The way we understand the meaning and value of landscape
directly affects the methods and approaches we use to deal with it in decision-making, and hence the last part of
the thesis consists in an elaboration of how the understanding of landscape, beauty and aesthetic value provided
in this thesis can be made productive in our approach to these issues in decision-making.
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Monika Rogowska-Stangret
Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw
In the last years I developed individual research project during PhD studies in the Institute of Philosophy and
Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences. The project was devoted to the concepts of the body in contemporary
philosophy as a category that on the one hand establish the opposition between the self and the other and on the
other hand might help to overcome it. I worked closely with my advisor professor Magdalena Środa. Our
collaboration resulted not only in my PhD thesis (planned to be published) but also in publishing the special
issue of “Philosophical-Literary Review” devoted to the category of the body, organizing section “Feminist
philosophy and gender studies” during the 9th
Polish Congress of Philosophy among others joint activities. As a
fellow in Rutgers, NJ, USA, I collaborated with professor Elizabeth Grosz, who advised me on my PhD
proposal and helped me to develop it. My recent research activities aim at establishing research groups.
Together with professor Środa and Olga Cielemęcka, I coauthored a research plan devoted to new materialism:
“New Materialism from the Feminist Perspective: Roots, Contexts, and Horizons”. We are now trying to find
funding possibilities to realize the project. Together with Olga Cielemęcka we have obtained funding to conduct
seminar “Feminist New Materialism – a political perspective in the context of Polish post-transition gender
politics” as a part of “PATTERNS Lectures”, funded by ERSTE Stiftung and WUS Austria in the academic
year 2014/2015. We would like to pose questions concerning politics of new materialism and apply new
materialist politics (methodologies, tools, strategies, and concepts) to the context of Polish gender politics in the
post-transition period. My collaboration with Olga Cielemęcka develops into different dimensions. We are now
working on a text, where we develop the concept of “stigmergic politics” as combining different motives
important from new materialist perspective such as the material-discoursive understanding of political reality,
questioning of anthropocentric paradigm, life itself as a political concept, and biological-technological models
of politics.
Andrea García-Santesmases and Núria Vergés Bosch
Universitat de Barcelona
Questioning gender identity from disability
Feminist research has not sufficiently taken into account disability as a key variable to analyse the configuration
of gender identity. This research aims to determine how a transformation of the body, as a result of the
acquisition of a physical disability, affects gender identity. When conducting this work an array of questions
and dilemmas about the development of the fieldwork from a critical feminist perspective appear. One of the
challenges we encounter as feminists is to conjugate a theoretical framework of poststructuralist feminism with
a methodological design in which gender difference is a key articulator. However, this theoretical-
methodological contradiction can become a useful strategic decision for current research. While the theoretical
production of queer feminism is extremely rich and diverse, its translation to the fieldwork is so poorly
developed that we find a theoretical and practical gap in this regard, especially when taking disability into
account. We still need the male / female categories to explain and analyze the experiences of our subjects and
make our own research objectives understandable. At the same time, this remains the most effective way to
visualize the gender discrimination, especially the one suffered by people socialized as women. Consequently,
using gender categories strategically does not inevitably entail its naturalisation, but can be a disabling
mechanism, to find cases that shake the structures of the current sex-gender system.
Methodological Workshop:
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Katarzyna Szopa
PhD student, University of Silesia in Katowice (Poland)
Somantics. The New-Materialist Poetics of Relations
Nostalgia blocks the treshold of the ethical world.
Luce Irigaray
The introductory neologism is a contamination of two Greek words: sôma and sema, alongside referring to two
different paths of critical theory: semantics and somatic discourse of knowledge. In other words, somantics is an
equivalence of language and matter itself.
The goal of this project is to discuss the broad concept of relations in the literary theory, based upon
the poetics of birth which is developed by contemporary Polish female poetesses. The figure of birth, in contrast
to the poetics of death, melancholy and nostalgia, is an alternative strategy of affirmative reading, which leads
to the practice of dialogue between the one and the world, and creates new strategies of intercommunication. I
want to discuss to what extend is literature affected by the new materialist turn. How can we use its theoretical
tools and concepts within the literary theory? What is the impact of new materialist theory upon reading and
writing process?
Using the figure of rebirth together with methodological tools developed by Luce Irigaray, Rosi
Braidotti, and new materialist thinkers such as Vicki Kirby and Karen Barad, I would like to stress the
importance of relational ethics, which can be seen as a micropolitics of our reading practice. The new
materialist perspective, based upon an ethics of sexual difference (Irigaray, Braidotti) and monistic philosophy
(Deleuze), becomes a fruitful politics of transformation within literary studies. It not only challenges the
concept of representation, but offers a new strategy of reading, which is no longer a process focused on
discovering the meaning, but rather a development of critical consciousness which lays the foundation for
constituting new research and intellectual approaches. That is why, the most important category that will be
analyzed in this work will not be the language as such, but the new understanding of language, which cuts its
ties with the dualistic concept of sign. I want to suggest that text becomes the mediator which transforms the
relations between the mind, the body and the environment. Such perspective allows to create new terms on
microscale, which will have effects on the macroscale; it is also a type of comparative perspective and practical
methodology (as Braidotti would say – ethics as praxis), having a realistic influence on changing the reading
habits and, in turn, thought patterns.
Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir
PhD-candidate in philosophy at the University of Iceland
Due to the competitive nature of exchange relations in contemporary advanced capitalism, people are becoming
ever more vulnerable in relations to others. The aim of this project is to examine the production of a specific,
historical vulnerability of social need in connection with processes of (neo)liberal subjectivation in the 21st
century. The research will focus on the micro-level and the subjective experience of relations. This research is
vital in order to understand the effects of present economic conditions on our own identities and our
relationships with others.
By looking at (neo)liberal subjectivation along with Karl Marx's analysis of exchange relations the aim is to
research whether people increasingly objectify/commodify their own sense of self/identity; the result being that
interpersonal relations start to resemble exchange relations. The philosophical basis of the project will be the
continental tradition that focuses on subjectivity, the feminist critique of political liberal theory as well as
Marxist analysis of exchange relations and commodification.
If it is seen as an act of vulnerability to expose the need that one has for others, it may degrade one's
(social)commodity value. Thus, there is a social risk involved in asking for the company of the other. If
interpersonal relations are increasingly strenuous due to this specific vulnerability, social norms as well as
social anxiety could be enhanced and people could become more isolated. In order to protect ourselves from too
much social risk, mastering a social role, such as gender role becomes a way to navigate the exposure and
acquire the other's company.
Tomáš Karger
Department of Sociology, Andragogy and Cultural Anthropology
Palacký University, Olomouc
Knowledge Production in Open-Source Software Development
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The dissertation thesis aims to capture and theoretically render processes of knowledge production in open-
source software development. This means that the aim is twofold: first, an authentic description of the process
of open-source software development is attempted and discussed within the existing body of literature on the
subject. Second, the description is related to a theoretical framework that has not been previously applied to the
subject at hand. This brings original findings both to the area of open-source studies and to the sociological
theory of knowledge.
Methodologically, the work revolves around two reference points: multi-sited ethnography and constructivist
grounded theory. The ethnographic approach is used in the area of data gathering, making use of observation,
document analysis and interviewing as data gathering techniques. The peculiar spatial characteristics of
cyberspace require multi-sited ethnography to be employed at conceptualization of the field. Constructivist
grounded theory is employed in data analysis to facilitate theory building – one of the aims of this research
project. Theoretical sampling – one of the defining characteristics of grounded theory is also necessary for
effective data gathering.
The work is also based on several branches of theoretical thought. First, it draws on approaches that
conceptualize computer programming as theory building and design which can be seen as two instances of
knowledge production oriented either on the developed software itself or the environment in which the software
is supposed to work. In this context, knowledge is understood as a model of reality, both in the sense of what is
known about the present (software environment) and what is anticipated in the future (software design). Second,
production is seen as a cultural practice from the perspective of technography, providing theoretical rendering
of the process to be observed. These two reference points refine the subject of research theoretically and make it
empirically graspable. Third, the theories of collective intelligence and collective memory are discussed to lay
ground for the main theoretical framework: the theory of distributed cognition. The concept of collective
intelligence plays vital role in describing collective problem solving and its conditions. The concept of
collective memory is important for describing the role of material objects and cultural entities in the process of
coordination. The concept of distributed cognition then makes the theoretical approach complete with its grasp
of learning and development of the system as a whole. This theoretical construction is developed and utilized in
dialogue with Bruno Latour's Actor-Network Theory.
In the analytical sections of this work, previous research on open-source software development is used
to elaborate on topics such as common norms, contributor characteristics, or the common patterns in structure of
open-source software development. This lays ground for a further analysis, drawing together theoretical
concepts clustered around the theories of distributed cognition and Actor-Network Theory with my own
research findings. Cultural entities and material objects are seen as parts of the network, in which the cognitive
components are distributed. By coordinating these non-humans together with human actors, the network
evolves and keeps performing its main task: software development (seen as knowledge production). However,
this coordination is not arbitrary and takes place in the conditions of cyberspace. In this regard, open-source
software development differs from other forms of knowledge production such as science in that it is online
constituted (instead of being only online facilitated). In the transparent environment of the cyberspace, attention
can be postulated as a differentiating resource that keeps the network together. However, attention flows cannot
be hold to explain every aspect of the open-source software development process. For that, it needs to be related
to other resources such as pre-existing knowledge, available material objects or enforced norms. This
conceptual configuration forms the basis for theoretical rendering of what I found out about the research
subject.
Artemis Alexiou
PhD student at Manchester University
The [Not]Text and Gender Ideology in Feminist Periodicals [England c. 1888- 1920]: Design, Gender,
Class Politics and Factual, Material, Iconic Not-Textual Mechanisms
‘As is the case in the history of publishing, textual and paratextual change often involve technological and
cultural developments’ (Brake et al., 2009) and so in this vein, I wish to develop a close relationship with earlier
research within periodical studies, while still maintaining an originality of approach, influenced by the
theoretical framework of the not-text1 through a graphic design historical approach and for the attention of the
gendered not-text found in the feminist periodical of the late nineteenth century England. As such, I propose the
delivery of a trans- disciplinary methodology to the deliberation of gender representation by interpreting the
not-text as a provision of styles, aesthetics, political and material decisions - while at the same time reflecting
and evaluating whether or not visual communication practices effectively act as promotional mechanisms of
gendered constructions. Therefore, this thesis hopes to initiate a further interest on the nineteenth century
periodical from within graphic design history, and intends to further enquire on the not-text in feminist
periodicals of the period. The originality of this thesis lays in its focus of the late nineteenth century and early
twentieth century feminist periodical in England and its trans-disciplinary feminist methodology of the not-text,
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stimulated by new materialist concepts; by pursuing an examination of the not-textual elements of this
particular type of print media to their publishers, editors, audience and the gender constructions, technological
advances and socio-historical developments of the period.
Pedro Jacobetty
PhD Student at IN3-UOC
Online Gestures and Traces: Towards an Internet Archaeology
Online interaction must be conceived as material-discursive practices in order to grasp the interdependence
between meaning and medium. In the case of Anonymous, hatched within the context of internet anonymity,
media objects are the sole visible material substratum behind the formation of an intersubjective, we relation.
Performance has the ability of transforming people, objects and spaces: the production of the objects and
discourses that are attributed to Anonymous is thus a performative act or gesture. This methodology is being put
forth in order to identify and analyze the processes of self-referential performative acts which constitutes the
enactment of Anonymous, from its origins in an obscure hub of a particular internet subculture to the highly
politicized subject it is today. Using the Internet as an excavation site, it is based on the retrieval and analysis of
neglected or defunct online material (recuperated through specialized archives and tools such as the Internet
Archive’s Wayback Machine) where some of the traces left by the formation of Anonymous may be found. It is
informed by the materialist approach to media archaeology which ties the Foucauldian notion of the archive
with the technical media available, pointing to the importance of taking into account the materiality of discourse
in research.
Vlasta Stulíková
Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Humanities
From Gardens to Bins: Food Waste through the Lens of Symmetrical Anthropology
Despite of indisputable social, economic, ethical and environmental urgency, food waste has been a topic of
marginal interest within social sciences. For those few researchers who paid special attention to food waste
issue new materialism raises a question of agency of various technologies deployed in food waste management
(and the agency of food waste). Various artefacts, such as use- by date tags, chemical preserving agents,
biodegradable plastic bags, food waste caddies etc., play an active part in socio-material food networks. “Do
those technologies just manage food waste or do they also generate it?” ask Alexander, Gregson, Gille
(Handbook of food research). To put it differently, do the technologies of food waste management create a
demand for wastage in order to sustain and legitimize their own existence? The other set of questions concern
correlation among technologies of food waste management with the particular socio-economic setting: In which
way, if ever, are the technologies compatible with the capitalist trade system?
Drawing on STS, ANT and new materialism way of thinking, I explore in my ongoing research on food waste
in Central European context the production of food waste, its commodification and re- use technologies. Food
waste is collected by recycling companies which use it as feedstock for energy. In that case, food waste is not a
dead mater but a raw material for industry which may possibly create a demand for it and, consequently, inhibit
attempts to reduce the overall amount of wastage. I conduct a multi-sited ethnographic fieldwork (Marcus)
among the subjects involved in edibility standard production and among those who try to resist this food
production machinery (several groups of anti-food waste activists) in order to observe their work more closely.
Dieuwke Boersma
Academic staff at Academy of Media Arts, Cologne
Dancing disabled futures
The aim of the new-materialist, feminist and artistic PhD project Dancing Disabled Futures is to engage with
the materiality and metaphorical movements of a physical “disabled body” as a practical and political way for a
subject to put metaphysics into motion. I will use Spinoza’s philosophy and artistic research to think, experience
and perceive the materiality of all human bodies as agential and unstable. I will attain this objective by going
deeper into the way
human bodies explore their bodily limits and potentials and thereby developing the concept of “dis-ability”. In
this concept, the material instability of all human bodies is taken as an empirico-theoretical starting point in
order to break open the potentiality and expressions of the human body. By the use of different study-cases I
zoom into the imbrication within matter that constitutes
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two forms of imagined and all too real embodiments: the ‘abled’ and ‘disabled body’. Imagined because the
division in categories is constituted by the idea of what the body should be able to do to function “normal”. Real
because the purported disabled body experiences real limits that excludes one from the participation in daily
life. Moreover, I understand limits thus not as the opposite of the actual, having no reality, but I understand
them the virtual having a reality. Consequently I move beyond an essentialist or social-constructivist
understanding of disability as the negative affirmation of an abled body or as effect of negation. Instead
physical limits are taken as situated corporeal locations in time through which the disabled body is a trace of
“entailed exclusion” that follows an always already affecting relationship between bodies, space and time.
Veronica Black
Student at Parsons the New School for Design
The skin as methaphor and the implications on the body
My project is an examination of skin as metaphor and the implication on the body. This project looks to explain
how a series of materials, made from leftover food, can be an interpretation of distorted body image and eating
disorders. It will accomplish this by exploring ways of healing from eating disorders by developing these
materials, which will cover the body as a second skin, through a combination of research on wearable
technology, sustainability material, and distorted body image from my master’s thesis project, “Perishable.”
This paper seeks to examine technologies that can be worn on our skin and how they affect changes to the
image of our body. I am studying the skin as a metaphor because I want to better understand aesthetics and
functionality of how we treat our body in order to start a conversation about distorted perceptions of body image
and eating disorders. The concept of skin as metaphor for the project Perishable is meant to look at what we put
into our body, how we treat it, nurture it or not by: experimenting with textiles, recycled fibers, and food waste
to create new material that can then be sewn into new clothing that covers the skin; fabricating a new garment
with distorted aesthetical functions, something beautiful on the outside that may be really ugly on the inside for
the wearer; exploring the distorted image of the body through the food we put in and the skin that encases it.
Based on personal experience with distorted body image, these wearable pieces will provide an insight into how
people and media deal with the body by making others aware of how serious these distorted images can be.
Aggeliki Sifaki
PhD Candidate and Researcher in Gender Studies, ICON, Utrecht University, The Netherlands
“I Am the Teacher Who Dares (Not) to Tell Her Name”: ‘Silent Sexualities in the Greek School
Environment
The proposed research project aims to fill the lacuna between research and practice, examining the current
situation of teachers who self-identify as lesbians in the context of the Greek educational system. The aim of
this project is to find and describe creative alternatives for subject formations, providing imaginaries that lead to
dis-identify the lesbian teacher with the victimized subject position, i.e. the “monster”, the “Other”, or the
sexual deviant. This study draws on scholarship that allows for self-formations, in this plural sense, in order to
fill the noticeable gap between how manifold lesbian teachers live their lives and how this lived, everyday
existence is represented in theoretical terms and discourses. The here-pursued project is the first one in the case
of Greece that addresses the self-forming, everyday practices of lesbian educators in the school context by
investigating their self-narratives.
More specifically, my research project aims to contribute to the enrichment of a modicum of research in
feminist studies by thoroughly examining and challenging an array of dominant western representations and
discourses concerning the school as an institution, comprising a set of gendered biases and compulsory
heterosexual rules, and lesbians as professionals. The proposed project aims to explore the processes of self-
formation and embodied gendered everyday practices of these teachers within the current challenging political
and financial turmoil in Greece, a turmoil that is accompanied also by a concomitant rise in nationalist fervor.
The research project pursues its focus via an in-depth qualitative research.
Tereza Virtová
Department of Anthropology, Faculty of Humanities, Charles University (Czech Republic)
Workers of the New Era: ethnography of young migrant workers, labor market and changes in manual
occupations
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In my recently initiated doctoral research, I focus on young workers from Eastern Europe, who are moving
around European Union in order to find more convenient temporal and seasonal jobs, escape poverty of their
home towns or travel and experience adventure. At least at first sight, these workers seem to be accommodated
to the growing dominance of capital over labor, with their life trajectories and style shaped by instability,
flexibility and more or less regular migration moves.
Drawing both on actor-network theory (Latour 1987, Law 1999) and multi-sited configuration (Marcus 1995, as
a global ethnography in Burawoy et al. 2000), I will follow these new age economic nomads or transnational
proletariat, on their quests for jobs, when returning home and in between jobs. Apart from tracing individual
migrants and their trajectories, I want to follow things circulating among places and workers, flows of money,
commodities, job opportunities, and as suggests Marcus (1995) also metaphors, conflicts or biographies.
I believe that connecting these unconnected and seemingly incommensurables sites and worlds will enable
better understanding of forming infrastructures among jobs, places and workers, but also of European labor
market and processes in which subjectivity and rationality of young migrant workers are being formed. Thus,
my research aims at ethnographic account of phenomenon of young migrant manual labor, beyond current
country of residency or single country of origin.
Abelardo Gil-Fournier
Lecturer at the Faculty of Arts, Universidad Europea de Madrid
Color erosion. Inks and dyes in the pixel era
In his first color film, Red Desert, Michelangelo Antonioni showed the effects of Chemicals pollution over an
industrial landscape through the experience of the main character, a woman affected by a nervous syndrome
that altered her senses. Visually, the film is characterized by the continual appearance of elements with striking
colors that introduce in the image the synthetic and toxic substances present in the atmosphere of the industrial
plant. Colors, visible on painted surfaces, clothes or gas emissions, appear as active agents that leave the surface
of objects to invade the space and characterize the mental state, health and relationships of people within it.
This is an art research on color as an agent that materializes the action of another industry, the IT one. From the
point of view of the digitalization processes of objects and images, every color surface can be addressed as an
information surface, susceptible of being recodified in real time through a large number of techniques, and its
colors changed consequently. In my last works I have explored the use of projections and overprints of grids of
benday dots to digitally modify the perceived colors on objects. These works Vividness, Chromogeny and
L’image est une machine maladeare contextualized in relation to the theoretical work of Esther Leslie, historian
of art, around the history of the production of synthetic colors.
Janice McNab
Monster Making.
As I get older, I have become more attentive to the situation of ‘the older woman’ in society, and more
conscious of social tensions around the ways older women present themselves and are re-presented within
Western culture. My practice-based PhD research is formulated around my wish to make an informed response
to this situation, as a painter. New Materialism offers me ways to think about painting as a form of knowledge
that can enfold my art historical/theoretical research on representations of older women, with my lived
experience of this, in my material negotiations with the matter of painting.
My academic research nodes are: the exhibition Witches and Wicked Bodies, an exploration of artists'
representations of unacceptable womanhood in Western Europe from the Renaissance to the present day; the
later 'body-awareness' paintings of Maria Lassnig (95), with which the artist has developed a new figurative
language in order to depict her sensate experience of her living, aging self; and my own painting, a re-
articulation of these researched semiotics of ‘the older woman’ in a series of playful still-life images of
monstrous figurines. My painting harvests imagery from my academic research, but is also a thinking tool for
the two key concepts I will work with academically, ‘monstrosity’ and ‘play’.
My research outcomes will be a text that shines light on a history of embedded prejudicial image making, and a
series of paintings that plays with the tropes and signs of that research, in ways that hopefully reveal locked in
prejudices and affectively rework those prejudices as creative possibilities.
Trine Kringsvoll Haagensen
PhD student at the University of Bergen
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My current research project, the Ph.D. project Images of knowledge is a critical discussion of images and
meaning making. The project starts from The Planck all sky image, a picture constructed by the European Space
Agency (ESA). The picture displays the Cosmic Microwave Background in the universe, and combines the the
“to far away to be seen” and the prosthetic aspects of visualization.
The overall question of my thesis is how the Planck all sky image mean and make sense. A premise for my
analysis is that the medium technology of the image takes part and makes a difference in the process of meaning
making. A central part of the project is thus to discuss how expectations to, and experience of other media,
technology and mediation takes part in the notions and understandings of the picture. This project seeks to make
visible some presupposition in thinking concerning images and the formation of meaning and knowledge.
The overall perspective in my thesis is Media Aesthetic, as described by Liv Hausken (2013). Media Aesthetics
engages critically in aesthetic discourses and mediation as technological and mediated phenomena. The concept
of aesthetics is regarded as a theory of culturally and historically embedded sensation and perception. The
concept of medium and mediation is seen and treated as complex and processual. Furthermore, the project takes
part in The Pictorial Turn as described by WJT Mitchell (1994). This implies a re-orientation towards a visual
the visual as paradigmatic.
Niina Oisalo
PhD Candidate, M.A., YTM (MSocSc) Niina Oisalo, University of Turku, Finland
Transcultural Experience in the New Nordic Cinema
In this research, the ethical and affective consequences of transcultural flows are put into Nordic perspective
through its cinema, where ideas of multicultural life are sketched and tried out. I will look at 15 transcultural
Nordic films1 produced after year 2000 as a sphere of shared experience. The objective is to map the
transcultural experiences in the films, and to see what kind of futures for the increasingly multicultural
communities these experiences point at.
Much of the research on transnational cinema has in fact concentrated on the point of view of difference,
confirming the imagined border between ‘us and them’, juxtaposing the Self and the Other, North and South,
Black and White, or the citizen and non-citizen. While there is definitely political potential in the act of
recognising the power relations between centre and periphery, I pursue a more multifaceted approach to the
experience of living in the transcultural world, considering the experience felt in the body as something that
connects the ‘inside and outside’ worlds, not only physically but also mentally. Transcultural is understood here
as a dynamic force moving through the constantly changing cultural regimes of knowledge and experience;
cultures as they are lived.
Transnational cinema in Nordic countries is a rising topic, and my work will contribute to this still largely
understudied field, relying on Vivian Sobchack’s and Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work on (film) phenomenology
and to a new materialist attitude, believing in the performative and political powers of materiality. The
transcultural experiences in the Nordic films are considered as an arena where cognitive and bodily felt
knowledge of ‘multiculturalisms’ is produced.
Vanessa Cameron-Lewis
University of Auckland, Faculty of Education
As we softly and continually chant karakia: A new materialist reading of Te Ao Maori healing
We softly and continually chant karakia (prayer) as we press our elbows, forearms and palms into the body of
the man lying on the massage table beneath us. The pressure we apply is strong and steady. I am working with
my teacher Ruatau and as we massage the body, it groans, swears, and yells out in pain. The body convulses
and writhes on the table like a large snake. I can feel a pushing back against me through the flesh. We are
pushing a force up through this body towards the head. This force is fighting to stay in the body. We move the
force away from the feet and the legs they relax while the chest and head become tense. The rest of the body
begins to flail as it is forced to contain all of the energy. Finally there is stillness except for a soft sobbing from
the man. After we clean ourselves and say our final karakia the man rises from the table. He looks like a
different person, almost unrecognisably so. He thanks us generously before leaving.
My current research extends new materialist theory through my learning from Te Maurea. The above
passage describes one of my experiences of ‘performing’ (Barad, 2007) traditional Maori massage (Mirimiri)
with my teacher Ruatau at Te Maurea weekly clinic. Te Maurea is a wa nanga (house of learning) and clinic
based in Auckland, New Zealand where I have been a student for the last two years. The purpose of Te Maurea
is to awaken and affect spiritual consciousness and awareness using ancient traditional Ma ori teachings and
philosophies as taught by Hohepa Delamere. Through this process of learning about te ao Maori (the Maori
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world) I have come to understand everything in the universe as always already interconnected. My work as a
healer at Te Maurea has led me to experience this as I transgress the boundaries of the bodies of the people who
lie on the massage table beneath me. This work and learning engenders a material feminist (Alaimo & Hekman,
2008) view of the body as fluid and non-bounded matter.
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Biographical Notes - Organizing committee
SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE
Ana María González Ramos, Senior researcher at Gender and ICT research program, IN3 (UOC)
Ana Maria Gonzalez Ramos received her sociology degree in 1994 at University of Granada and her PhD
degree in 2004 at the Department of Statistics and Operations Research of the University of Cádiz. She has been
visiting scholar in PREST, Institute of innovation research in Manchester in 2007, the Institut för Horere
Studien of Vienna in 2005, the Escola de Serviço Social of Pelotas (Brasil) in 2001 and the Sociology
Department of La Habana (Cuba) in 2000. Her main lines of research are gender and participation of women in
the knowledge society. This involves the study of scientific careers in Science and Technology from a gender
perspective. This topic entails the evaluation of the meritocratic system based on neutrality criteria of merits and
excellence. It includes the study of key issues as such international mobility which affects the life course and
the families of men and women scientists and managers. Ana has conducted some competitive projects from the
Ministry of Education, Ministry of Science and Innovation (R&D Research and Innovation Plan) and Spanish
Women Institute and she also participated in some international projects financed by European institutions.
These researches address international mobility, women careers, and the science and technology system. In
February 2013 Ana organised the International Conference: Challenges of the International Mobility of Highly
Skilled in the XXI Century – Women in Movement.
CHAIR OF THE SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE: Beatriz Revelles-Benavente, PhD student at Gender and
ICT research program, IN3 (UOC)
Beatriz is is a PhD candidate at the IN3 (UOC) in the research group "Gender & ICT". Her doctoral thesis (to be
defended at the end of this year) is on Women’s Literature and Social Networking Sites, focusing especially on
the contemporary author Toni Morrison and her official Facebook page. The objective of the thesis is to explore
the shifts produced in the communication between readers and authors from a feminist perspective tackling on
issues concerning gender, politics and language, while performing a diffractive methodology. She has presented
several communications at the Central European University in Budapest, Technische Universität Berlin,
University of Victoria, Estambul, and Utrecht University, among others. The most important one is a seminar in
València about the diffractive methodology as a way to produce feminist academic research. At the moment she
is part of the management committee of the ISCH Cost Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European
Scholarship on ‘How Matter comes to Matter’ and management committee of the European Association for
Gender Research, Education and Documentation "Atgender".
Cecilia Åsberg, Associate Professor, Head of Gender Studies, Linköping University, Sweden. Director of The
Posthumanities Hub, and Co-Director of GEXcel International Collegium for Transdiciplinary Gender Studies
Cecilia Åsberg works at "Tema Genus", the unit for Gender Studies at the large cross-disciplinary Department
of TEMA, as teacher, supervisor and tenured researcher. She is the head of the research group The
Posthumanities Hub (2008-), and co-director of the three-university centre for gender excellence, GEXcel
International Collegium. The Posthumanities Hub functions also a platform for projects, collaborations and a
host for visiting scholars. Cecilia’s transdisciplinary research in gender studies connects feminist materialist
theory, anti-colonial cultural studies, science and technology studies (science and literature studies),
Environmental Humanities, human animal studies, media studies, body studies and posthuman ethics into forms
of posthumanities that enliven, question and flesh out the human of the humanities.
Ilona Hongisto, Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Turku (Finland) and
Honorary Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (Australia)
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Dr Ilona Hongisto is an Academy of Finland Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Turku (Finland)
and an Honorary Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (Australia). Her research
cuts across philosophies of fabulation, political history and documentary storytelling, most recently in a project
on post-Soviet Eastern European documentary cinema. Her first monograph, Soul of the Documentary:
Expression and the Capture of the Real is forthcoming from Amsterdam UP in 2015.
Iris van der Tuin, Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Philosophy of Science at Utrecht University
Dr. Iris van der Tuin is an Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Philosophy of Science at Utrecht
University. She is chair of the COST Action 'New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on 'How
Matter Comes to Matter''. Recent publications are a journal special issue on 'Feminist Matters: The Politics of
New Materialism’ edited with Peta Hinton (Women: A Cultural Review, 2014) and a book on 'The Subject of
Rosi Braidotti: Politics and Concepts’ edited with Bolette Blaagaard (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014). Her
monograph is titled 'Generational Feminism: New Materialist Introduction to a Generative Approach'
(Rowman&Littlefield, Lexington Books, 2014). https://uu.academia.edu/IrisvanderTuin
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Postdoctoral fellow, School of History, Culture and Arts Studies, University of Turku /
The School of Art, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne
After having served over 12 years in faculty positions (research) in Art History at the University of Turku, Dr.
Katve-Kaisa Kontturi has relocated to Melbourne, where she continues her postdoctoral research at the
Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne (McKenzie Fellowship 30.6.2014-30.6. 2017). Katve-
Kaisa's research interests spread across new materialism, contemporary art, fashion & clothing, material
feminisms, Deleuze & Guattari and radical empiricism. Her current research project titled "Affective Fabrics of
Contemporary Art: Stitching Global Relations". Katve-Kaisa is also writing a book based on her PhD
dissertation Following the Flows of Process: A New Materialist Account of Contemporary Art (2012) that
suggests research practices and concepts for a 'more material' art history. Her latest article concerning the work
of painting opens the new book Carnal Knowledge: Towards A New Materialism through the Arts (eds Barbara
Bolt & Estelle Barrett, I.B Tauris, London 2013). During the term 2013–2014 Katve-Kaisa worked in the
project Ethics of Storytelling in the Contemporary Arts directed by Professor Hanna Meretoja (Emil Aaltonen
Foundation) and was based at the SenseLab, Concordia University Canada (7.10.2013 –24.6.2014). She has
also spent several other research periods abroad (University of Sydney, UC Berkeley and Finnish African
Cultural Centre Villa Karo in Benin) and regularly presents at national and international conferences.
Krizia Nardini, PhD candidate at UOC and member of the Research Programme on Body,
Gender and Sexualities in Digital Media (UOC)
Krizia Nardini (COST Action New Materialisms) is working on her PhD research Networking Masculinities
ethnographically investigating profeminist men’s mobilizations in Italy and Spain and their relations to feminist
theories/activisms. She holds a BA in Philosophy (University of Siena) and a Research Master in Gender
Studies (Utrecht University). While starting her PhD project in the Netherlands, Krizia collaborated with the
Graduate Gender Programme as a teaching assistant. Krizia is currently carrying out her PhD research at the
Open University of Catalonia (Barcelona), and her research interests concern feminist philosophy (feminist
materialisms especially), onto-epistemology, critical masculinities and anthropology of the body. Krizia’s
academic publications include a chapter in Proceedings from GEXcel Theme 9: Gendered Sexualed
Transnationalisations, Deconstructing the Dominant: Transforming Men, “Centres” and
Knowledge/Policy/Practice (Ed. Alp Biricik and Jeff Hearn, 2011) and the article ‘Men’s Antiviolence
Activism: Two Cases from Contemporary Italy and Spain’ in Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies (vol. 16, 2013, nr.
4). Contact: [email protected]
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Milla Tiainen, Senior Lecturer in Media Studies, Anglia Ruskin University / Postdoctoral Fellow, University of
Helsinki
Dr. Milla Tiainen trained as a musicologist, and is Course Leader for Media Studies at Anglia Ruskin
University. During 2013–14, she has been working as a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Academy of Finland-
funded project ‘Deleuzian Music Research’. Her key interests include the voice in per- forming arts and media
cultures, affect, rhythm and bodies-as- movement, and new materialist and posthumanist developments in
feminist, music and sound studies. Her research has recently appeared in e.g. NECSUS – European Journal of
Media Studies and Carnal Knowledge: Towards a ‘New Materialism’ through the Arts (I.B. Tauris, 2013). She
is working on a book about a Deleuzian new materialist approach to musical performance (contracted with
University of Minnesota Press). Milla is co-founder and management committee member (UK) of the COST-
funded New Materialism network.
ADVISORY BOARD
Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Coordinator of GEMMA: Erasmus Mundus Master in Women’s and Gender
studies
Adelina Sánchez Espinosa ([email protected]) is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of
Granada, Spain. She is General Scientific Coordinator of GEMMA: Erasmus Mundus Master’s Degree and
Consortium in Women’s and Gender Studies (a joint project that brings together 25 institutions worldwide). She
has been/is PI for several research projects and is a member of the board of experts on Gender Studies for the
ESF. Past positions include Director of the University of Granada “Feminae” Book Series; Vice-President of
AOIFE (Association of Institutions for Feminist Reseach in Europe) and Head of International Relations for the
University of Granada. Among her most recent publications outstand “The Film Text as Palimpsest: Translating
Women’s Gaze from Page to Screen”; “FeministApproaches to Close Reading” (co-authored with Jasmina
Lukic); “Bodies in Siege: Thomas Hardy and Victorian Fin-De-Siècle Sexual Politics” and “Reading Between
the Lines in Late Victorian Fiction: The Case of Thomas Hardy”
Barbara Bolt, Associate Director of Research and Research Training VCA and PhD Coordinator for the School
of Art Faculty of the Victorian College of the Arts and Melbourne Conservatorium of Music, University of
Melbourne. She is a practising artist and visual theorist. Here website is http://www.barbbolt.com
Barbara Bolt is Associate Director of Research and Research Training at the Victorian College of the Arts at the
University of Melbourne, Australia. She is a practising artist and art theorist who has also written extensively on
the visual arts and its relationship to the new materialisms. Her painting and drawing practice investigates the
entanglement of entanglement of matter and meaning and how a new materialist framework shifts the focus
from signification to force and a/effect. It allows us to consider not what a figurative work represents, but what
are the conditions through which it works. She has two monographs Art Beyond Representation: The
Performative Power of the Image (I.B. Tauris, 2004) and Heidegger Reframed: Interpreting Key Thinkers for
the Arts (I.B. Tauris, 2011) and four co-edited books, Material Inventions: Applying Creative Arts
Research (I.B. Tauris, 2014) Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts (I.B. Tauris,
2013), Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry (I.B. Tauris, 2007) and Sensorium:
Aesthetics, Art, Life (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007). Her publications exhibit a strong dialogue between
practice and theory.
Begonya Enguix Grau, Associate Professor of Social Anthropology and Gender Studies at UOC, member of
the Research Programme on Body, gender and sexualities in Digital Media (UOC)
Begonya Enguix ([email protected]), holds a degree in American Anthropology (Universidad Complutense
University de Madrid), a degree in Advertising (UCM-UOC) and a PhD in Social Anthropology (Universitat
Rovira i Virgili University, Tarragona). She has participated in research projects on migration, anthropology of
the body, and masculinities, among others. She is a member of the Research Group on Social Anthropology
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(URV), of the Research Group Mediaccions Cultura Digital (IN-3) and of the Group of Anthropology of the
Body of the Catalan Institute of Anthropology. She also collaborates with the Research Group AHCISP
(Antropologia i Història de la Construcció de les Identitats Socials i Polítiques, UAB). She is currently an
Associate Professor in the Arts and Humanities Department of the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya where she
lectures and conducts research on genders, bodies, sexualities, urban anthropology and media anthropology.
Cecilia Castaño Collado, Chair of Sociology in Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Cecilia is Advisor for the Gender and ICT Program (IN3, Open University of Catalonia) and university
professor of Economics and researcher in social science. She also works as Director of a Masters program on
Gender Equality at the Complutense University of Madrid. Cecilia has held the position of Director of the
Gender and ICT Program (2006-2011)
Juliet Webster, Director of the Gender & ICT Research Program, IN3 (UOC)
Juliet Webster is a social scientist with a research background in the gender equality issues involved in the
development and use of information and communication technologies, particularly in the workplace. Her
current research addresses European Union measures to advance women in science and technology, including in
these professions. Juliet’s past work has examined gender equality policy issues in the development of the
knowledge society, the implementation of equality strategies by employers, and workplace measures to achieve
pay. She has held positions at the universities of Edinburgh, East London, Vienna, and at Trinity College in
Dublin; she has worked as a gender expert in the European Commission DG Employment in Brussels, and as a
Director of the Involvement and Participation Association (IPA) in the UK. Juliet regularly provides research
and consulting advice to the European Commission and European Parliament.
Marta Aymerich, Vice President for Strategic Planning and Research (UOC)
Marta Aymerich is currently the Vice President for Strategic Planning and Research at the Open University of
Catalonia (UOC). She holds a PhD in Medicine (2002; MD degree in 1993) from the Autonomous University of
Barcelona, and a Master in Public Health (MPH) from Harvard University (1999). Previously she has been the
Head of Health Research and Innovation at the Ministry of Health of the Government of Catalonia (2011-2013)
and earlier the Director of the Catalan Agency for Health Technology Assessment and Research (2006-2008),
where she developed her professional career as a researcher since 1995. Since 2008 Marta is an assistant
professor at the School of Medicine of the University of Girona (UdG) and member of the research group
'Translational Medicine and Decision Science Lab (TransLab)'. From 2004 to 2006 Marta was appointed
Director of the Interministerial Council for Research and Technological Innovation by the Government of
Catalonia. Marta has been the Vice Secretary of the Academy of Medical Sciences of Catalonia and the Balearic
Islands (1997-2002), she has also worked as a general practitioner (1994-1995).
Milagros Sainz-Ibañez, Senior reseacher at the Gender & ICT Reresearch Program, IN3 (UOC)
Dr Milagros Sáinz is graduated in Psychology and PhD in Social Psychology (European Doctorate Mention).
She is currently working as a senior researcher of the Gender and ICT research group at the Internet
Interdisciplinary Institute (Universitat Oberta de Catalunya) in Barcelona. In 2007 her doctoral work entitled
“Psychosocial aspects of gender differences in adolescents' attitudes towards new technologies” was
awarded by the former Ministry of Health, Equality, and Social Issues with the First Prize INJUVE for Doctoral
Dissertations. Her research interests are related to family and school influences on study choices; the
socialization of gender roles; the learning of stereotypes about studies and occupations in adolescence; and
career guidance and labour opportunities of high versus low achieving students. She has lead several research
grants related to these research topics. She has been a visiting research fellow at Stanford University (United
States), the Technical University in Berlin (Germany), and the Institute for Social Research of the University of
Michigan (United States). She is currently a member the editorial board of several international journals and
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belongs to outstanding international research networks on gender and education, such as the Gender and STEM
Network. Educational and Occupational Pathways and Participation; and the Consortium for Cross-cultural
Research on Education. She is author of several international publications and has taken part in several different
international conferences.
Rick Dolphijn, Senior Fellow Centre for the Humanities. Assistant Professor Media and Culture Studies,
Utrecht University
Rick Dolphijn is Senior Fellow at Centre for the Humanities, Utrecht University, and Assistant Professor in
Media and Culture Studies, Utrecht University. He has published two books, Foodscapes: towards a Deleuzian
Ethics of Consumption (Eburon/University of Chicago Press 2004) and New Materialism: Interviews and
Cartographies with Iris van der Tuin (Open Humanities Press 2012). His newest book is named This Deleuzian
Century: Art, Activism, Life (edited with Rosi Braidotti) and will be published with Rodopi Publishers soon.
SPEAKERS
Peta Hinton (Affiliated Fellow, ICI Berlin (2014/15)
Peta Hinton completed a postdoctoral fellowship with the ICI Berlin (2013/14) and is currently Affiliated
Fellow for the 2014-15 academic year. Her project investigates the way death and nothing(ness) may figure for
a new (feminist) materialist politics and ethics.
Kathrin Thiele (Assistant professor at the department of Media and Culture Studies and the Gender Studies at
Utrecht University)
Kathrin Thiele is faculty member at the Graduate Gender Programme, Utrecht University, NL. She has
published The Thought of Becoming. Gilles Deleuze’s Poetics of Life (2008), and co-edited HAPPY DAYS:
Lebenswissen nach Cavell (with Katrin Trüstedt 2009), and Biopolitische Konstellationen (ed. with Maria
Muhle 2011). Her current research explores feminist cosmopolitics from a posthuman(ist) perspective and her
work is published in academic journals such as Parallax, Women: A Cultural Review, Deleuze Studies, and
rhizomes. A special issue for Parallax on “Diffracted Worlds - Diffractive Readings: Onto-Epistemologies and
the Critical Humanities”, guest edited with B. Kaiser, has just appeared (July 2014).
Felicity Colman (Reader in Screen Media, Manchester Metropolitan University)
Dr Felicity Colman is a Reader in Screen Media and a Principle Lecturer in Research at the Manchester School
of Art, Manchester Metropolitan University, United Kingdom. Dr Colman is the author of Film Theory:
Creating a Cinematic Grammar (2014), Deleuze and Cinema (2011) and editor of Film, Theory and Philosophy:
The Key Thinkers (2009), co-editor of Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life (2007).
Ana Maria González Ramos (Senior researcher at Gender and ICT research programe, IN3, UOC)
Ana Maria Gonzalez Ramos received her sociology degree in 1994 at University of Granada and her PhD
degree in 2004 at the Department of Statistics and Operations Research of the University of Cádiz. She has been
visiting scholar in PREST, Institute of innovation research in Manchester in 2007, the Institut för Horere
Studien of Vienna in 2005, the Escola de Serviço Social of Pelotas (Brasil) in 2001 and the Sociology
Department of La Habana (Cuba) in 2000. Her main lines of research are gender and participation of women in
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the knowledge society. This involves the study of scientific careers in Science and Technology from a gender
perspective. This topic entails the evaluation of the meritocratic system based on neutrality criteria of merits and
excellence. It includes the study of key issues as such international mobility which affects the life course and
the families of men and women scientists and managers. Ana has conducted some competitive projects from the
Ministry of Education, Ministry of Science and Innovation (R&D Research and Innovation Plan) and Spanish
Women Institute and she also participated in some international projects financed by European institutions.
These researches address international mobility, women careers, and the science and technology system. In
February 2013 Ana organised the International Conference: Challenges of the International Mobility of Highly
Skilled in the XXI Century – Women in Movement.
Jussi Parikka (Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics, Winchester School of Art (University of
Southampton)
Dr Jussi Parikka is Professor in Technological Culture & Aesthetics at the Winchester School of Art, part of
University of Southampton. He is the author of numerous books, including Digital Contagions (2007), Insect
Media (2010), What is Media Archaeology? (2012) and the forthcoming A Geology of Media (2015). Parikka's
work has addressed media archaeology, media theory, network culture and various cultural theoretical topics
related to new materialism. Http://jussiparikka.net
Elisenda Ardevol (Professor at the Mediaccions research program, IN3, UOC)
Elisenda Ardévol is Associate Professor at the Department of Arts and Humanities, Open University of
Catalonia. Her main research lines are related with digital culture, visuality and media. Her publications include
"Virtual/Visual Ethnography: Methodological Crossroads at the Intersection of Visual and Internet Research" in
Pink, S. Advances in Visual Methodology (2012); Playful practices; Theorising new media cultural production
in Brauchler and Postill, Theorising Media and Practice (2010); editor of Researching Media through Practices
(2009) and the books (in Spanish) A Gaze's Quest (2006) and Representation and Audiovisual Culture in
Contemporary Societies (2004). Currently, she is coordinator of the Digital Culture Research Group
mediaccions (UOC-IN·3), member of the Media Anthropology Network of the EASA (European Association of
Social Anthropologists) and Chair of the Section of Digital Culture and Communication ECREA (European
Communication Research and Education Association).