Conference: Matter, Life and Resistance, 1-2 July 2013, Canterbury

The Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent in Canterbury has announced a two-day conference entitled Matter, Life and Resistance, taking place in Canterbury on 1-2 July 2013. Located within the general field of political theory, the event seeks to explore the crossover, feedback and influence (both historically and in current trends) of theories of materialism, vitalism and resistance within the discipline. The lineup of keynote speakers features Samantha Frost, whose work engages with the body, biology, feminism and new materialisms; and Sjoerd van Tuinen, prolific scholar specialising on Deleuze and Sloterdijk.

 

Proposals are still wanted, with suggested areas for contributions including, inter alia: reinterpreting the history of political thought, particularly the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century materialists; connecting a poststructuralist conceptualisation of of life, matter and resistance with biology and the neurosciences (ontogenesis, transductive relations, plasticity, synaptogenesis); and the consequences of speculative materialism in political theory. The deadline for abstracts is set for 5 May 2013. More details can be found on the Matter, Life and Resistance conference blog.

Recorded Lecture: William Connolly, "Freedom, Creativity and Teleodynamism"

Over 30 November to 1 December of 2012, the "Between Deleuze and Foucault" project at Purdue University held a conference which brought together project collaborators to discuss the implications of Deleuze's reading of Foucault. Fortunately, for those unable to attend the conference, video recordings have been made of nearly all the contributions are are currently available to watch from the project website.

Within the conference program, William Connolly features as plenary speaker with his paper, "Freedom, Creativity and Teleodynamism", which he describes as an experiement "between Foucault and Deleuze ... and not only Neitzche but Whitehead". Connolly ambitiously explores the complexities of "creativity" by way of Whitehead as well as biologist and neurologist Terrence Deacon, attending particularly to Deacon's concept of "teleodynamic activity" - a kind of ends-directed and consequence-oriented organisational creativity based on a reciprocal relation to environmental changes and proximities. Within such teleodynamic processes, he argues that new and unplanned formations sometimes emerge from encounters between and within organisms in periodic, positive creativity.

By carefully interlacing this concept of teledynamic process within a reading of Nietzsche's drives of the self (with close attention to the text Daybreak) and Foucault's tactics of the self, Connolly takes an experiemental bite into a vast feld of meaty topics, including but certainly not limited to those of incipience, powers of the false and (briefly) the dangers of creativity and moves towards its quarantine.

"Incompleteness and time-out-of-joint now lose their melancholy standing as mere lacks or losses. They regain them as both dangerous and as uncertain conditions of possibility for positive creativity..."

The Bodies in Movement Seminar Series presents Catherine Malabou, 21 January 2013, Edinburgh, 10:30am - 5:30pm

The Bodies in Movement Seminar organisers together with Michael O'Rourke (Independent Colleges, Dublin) and the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities (Edinburgh) are pleased to announce that we will be holding an intimate, one-day seminar with Catherine Malabou at the University of Edinburgh on Monday, 21 January 2013.
 

Malabou is currently tenured at Kingston University, London and also teaches at the European Graduate School. She is renowned for moving across the fields of neuroscience, anthropology, biology, feminism, politics, literature, psychoanalysis and philosophy, as well as bringing medical and biological science and philosophy into conversation. Her philosophy has created the foundation for a wide range of current research which focuses on the intersections between medicine, (neuro- and biological) science and the humanities.

Held at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square, Edinburgh EH8 9NW. For further information, see the Bodies in Movement Seminar Series page. If you have any queries or wish to register your interest in attending, please contact the organisers.
 

Kamillea Aghtan (kamillea@hotmail.com)
Karin Sellberg (k.j.k.sellberg@gmail.com)
Lena Wånggren (l.e.wanggren@sms.ed.ac.uk)
Michael O'Rourke (tranquilised_icon@yahoo.com)

Conference: Feminism, Science & Materialism Conference, 14-15 February 2013, New York

The Center for the Study of Women and Society at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York has banded together with the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies to organise the Feminism, Science & Materialism Conference, set to take place on 14-15 February 2013. Featuring Karen Barad as a keynote speaker and focussing on "feminist perspectives on the onto-epistemological questions raised by he materialist turn", this event has positioned itself perfectly for platforming the newest developments in material feminism and other current research that cuts across the fields of science and feminism.

With the mounting interest in Barad's work, this conference will no doubt feature not only Barad's own most curent work but will also spotlight some of the ways in which her contributions (particularly on agential realism) have been taken up within other fields and areas. The organisers are currently seeking extended 1000 word abstracts, due by 1 November 2012. Topics range from reflections on the turn towards materialism to reflections on the political implications of neo-materialism for feminism and the relation of matter to the social, with a range of other issues in-between.

CUNY appears ready and willing to provide a space for new academic research in materialism, with the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies having for the last year busied itself with a fascinating series of seminars and events revolving around the theme of "embodiment" in interdisciplinary science-humanities engagements (more details of which can be found at their website). Bodies in Movement will be looking out for recordings that might be produced from this event for those of us not fortunate enough to be able to attend.

Workshop: Scent & Sensibility: The Neuroscience of Fragrance, London, 1 June

Open registration is currently available for the workshop "Scent and Sensibility: The Neuroscience of Fragrance", which takes place on 1 June in London. Held by the Institute of Philosophy Centre for Study of the Senses at the School of Advanced Studies (University of London), the day-long event begins with a program of lectures on olfaction from various science and cross-disciplinary research bases, followed by a somewhat mysterious Perfume event. Attendees can probably expect a fairly rigorous crash-course in the science of smell, along with exploration of its various crossmodal possibilities. Standard registration costs £30, with a discounted cost of £10 for "staff and students of all philosophy".

This offering by the Centre for Study of the Senses is part of a fairly extensive list of events, which includes a series of seminars entitled the "Perception, Senses and Action Forum" (taking place in London throughout May and June).

Recorded Lecture: Catherine Malabou, "Continental Philosophy and the Brain: Towards a Critical Neuroscience"

In this inaugural lecture presented by the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy on 2 February 2012 in London, Catherine Malabou asks whether it is possible to constitute the brain as an object for non-cognitivist, "continental" strands of study. Malabou cleverly revives Michel Foucault's often superficially read essay "What is Enlightenment?" (or "What is Critique?") in order to argue that critique may allow us to bridge the often discordant discourses of neuroscience and continental philosophy.

This is a dialogue which Malabou quite literally realises in a staged conversation between Foucault-the-continental-philosopher and Thomas-Metzinger-the-German-cognititian, in which both carefully interrogate the statement: "You are your synapses". While elements of their discussion would appear to spill into an argumentational "battlefield", Malabou suggests that neurobiology, philosophy and critique can be repositioned creatively (rather than combatitively) through the concept of neuroplasticity. The consonance that can be found here, she argues, transgresses both the neurobiological and the continental traditions; rather, it requires us to invent a new experimental and challenging form of philosophical enquiry.

"The term 'plasticity' ... is what allows us to mediate (according to me) the conflict between cognitivism and philosophy. We see paradoxically that if neurotransparency causes the illusion of subjectivity and reveals that we are no one, neuroplasticity - which is intimately linked with neurotransparency - on the contrary situates the brain as the core of our individual experiences and identity. We may be no one, but this impersonality is plastic, which means that this absence of subjectivity is paradoxically malleable, fashionable, so that each of us is each no one in our own way."

Conference: NeuroCultures – NeuroGenderings II, Vienna, 13-15 September 2012

The Gender Research Office at the University of Vienna together with the NeuroCultures Network are providinng a veritable feast of interdisciplinary scholarship in the fusion of the brain and critical gender theory.

Currently calling for abstracts for 20 minute panel or poster presentations, the three-day "NeuroCultures - NeuroGenderings II" conference held at the University of Vienna divides itself into seven loose thematic strands, from empirical research and methodological queries to the tantalising fields of neurogovermentality and epistemological discussions on feminist materialism(s) and queer technoscience.

"With the expansion of the domains of neuroscientific knowledge, today we are witnessing an abundance of emerging neurocultures (such as neuropedagogy, neuroeconomics, neuromarketing, neurotheology, neuroaesthetics, among others) in which bio-socio-cultural relations are (re-) negotiated within research, neuro-(technological)applications, and public discourses. ... The cerebral subject is a specific kind of subject; the brain vocabulary produces a culturally and historically specific version of the human and, as such, impacts individual, social, cultural and political spheres."

The deadline for submission of proposals is set at 25 March 2012. For more information on the conference aims and further detail on the thematic strands of the conference, visit the conference website.