Final booklet by Ana M. González Ramos

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

CONFERENCE VENUE Building MediaTic Carrer de Roc Boronat, 117 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; 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

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 William Mitchell Room (7th FLOOR) 11.00 – 11.30 WILIAM ROOM 705 ROOM 8A ROOM 6A MITCHELL (7th FLOOR) (8th FLOOR) (6th FLOOR) th ROOM (7 Subject(s) of Smelling, Gaming, Putting concepts FLOOR) techno-artistic Connecting: DIY to work Demonstrating practices Gender and media - Linnea Bodén - Miguel Penas - Karin Gunnarsson Demonstration and the Digital - Iris van der Tuin - Pedro Jacobetty, - Riika Hohti Materiality of & Maaike Bleeker Débora Lanzeni & Politics - Sofie Sauzet - Cathrine Hasse Maxigas - Megan Boler Chair: María del - Barbara Bolt - Valentina - Jen Jerson & Mar Alonso- Cecilia Åsberg Montero & Lucía Suzanne de Castell Almeida Chair: Milla Engaña - Melanie McBride Tiainen - Heidi Fast - Jason Nolan Chair: Jelena Chair: Nevena Djuric Dakovic LUNCH BREAK OPEN SOURCE (7th FLOOR) 13.30 – 14.00 WILLIAM ROOM 705 (7th MITCHELL FLOOR) ROOM (7th Methodological FLOOR) workshop** Networking workshop* COFFEE BREAK William Mitchell Room (7th FLOOR) 16.00 – 16.30 Diffractive Intra-acting the Embodying ecologies artistic/media questions - Corinna Bath - Bettina space - Dagmar Lorenz- Vappu Jalonen Papenburg Meyer - Martta Heikkila - Tereza Virtová - Marie-Pier - Gregory J. - Zuzana Stefkova Boucher Seigworth - Mónica Cano - Alanna Thain - Arnette Arlander Chair: Hannah Chair: Iris van der Chair: Maaike Meissner Tuin Bleeker COFFEE BREAK

11.30 – 13.30

14.00 – 16.00

16.30-18.30

TERRACE ROOM (6th FLOOR) Bodies in art/digital theory - Jules Sturm - Waltraud Ernst - Amparo Lasén &Antonio Agustín García - Christian Mieves Chair: Ana Mouraz

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

11.30 – 13.30

COFFEE BREAK 11.00 – 11.30 Towards New Tracing bodies Materialist and selves - Boka En & Agnes Politics of Fülöp Musicking - Taru Leppanen - Teresa Samper - Pirkko Moisala - Katarzyna - Milla Tiainen Wolanik Boström - Hanna Vääitäinen - Michael Jonik Chair: Illona Chair: Doris Hongisto Allhutter LUNCH BREAK

14.00 – 15.30

15.30-17.30

18.00 – 19.00

20.30

William Mitchell Room 7th FLOOR Becoming political Education and the - David Chandler matter of - Bjorn information Thorsteinsson - Nikki Rotas - Katja Cicigoj & - Ana Mouraz Franciska Aigner - Marc Kosciejew - Signe Leth - Helga Sadowski Gammelgaard Chair: José Chair: Kathrin Carmelo Gomes Thiele

Practicing politics - Josef Barla - Doris Leibetseder - Sigrid Schmitz - Valeria Morabito Chair: Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer

OPEN SOURCE (7th FLOOR) 13.30 – 14.00

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 (Micro)politics of Methodologies@di Doing Art 2.0 Engaging - Dorota Golanska matter(s) sex & gender gital - Monika - Débora Lanzeni - Pau Alsina - Olga Cielemecka Rogowska- Rumen Rachev - Eliza Steinbock - Jelena Djuric & Stangret - Vera Bühlmann - Audrey Samson Ljiljana Rogac- Lotta Kahkonen - Eva Zekany & Winnie Soon Mijatovic - Rene Kaiser Chair: Waltraud Chair: Catherine - Tanja Traxler - Whitney Stark Ernst Hasse - Erin K Stapleton Chair: Malou Chair: Hillevi Juelskjaer Lenz Taguchi 17.30 – 18.00 William Mitchell Room (7th floor) COFFEE BREAK

Relational agencies - Doris Allhutter - Agnes Kovacs - Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir - Hanna Meissner Chair: Felicity Colman

Closing roundtable: Where are we going? Futuring New materialisms Participants: Milágros Sainz Ibañez, Barbara Bolt, Beatriz Revelles Benavente and Krizia Nardini.

GALA DINNER: Resourant HORIGINAL Carrer de Ferlandina, 29, 08001 Barcelona

* 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.

LIST OF PARTICIPANTS Franziska Aigner……………………… Artemis Alexiou……………………… Sylvie Allendyke…………………….. Doris Allhutter……………………….. María del Mar Alonso-Almeida……… Pau Alsina……………………………. Annette Arlander…………………….. Elisenda Ardèvol Piera ………………. Cecilia Åsberg …………………… Marta Aymerich ....................................... Josef Barla…………………………… Corinna Bath…………………………. Arantza Begueria ...................................... Veronica Black………………………. Maaike Bleeker………………………. Linnea Bodén…………………………. Dieuwke Boersma…………………….. Megan Boler…………………………… Barbara Bolt ........................................... Marie Pier Bouchen ............................... Vera Buhman ......................................... Blanca Callen ............................................. Vanessa Cameron-Lewis……………… Mónica Cano Abadía…………………. José Caramelo Gomes………………… Cecilia Castaño ……………………… Suzanne de Castell ................................ David Chandler…………………….. Masaya Chiba………………………….. Katja Čičigoj…………………………. Olga Cielemecka……………………… Felicity Colman……………………….. Nevena Dakovic………………………. Jelena Djuric…………………………… Lucía Egaña Rojas…………………….. Boka En……………………………….. Begonya Enguix Grau…………………. Martina Erlemann …………………… Waltraud Ernst…………………………. Jose Luis Esteban Casero . ..................... Helene Falkenberg……………………… Heidi Fast………………………………. Ágnes E. Fülöp…………………………. Signe Gammelgaard…………………… Itziar Gandarias Goikoetxea……………… Antonio Agustín García…………………. Esmeralda Garcia Morales Andrea García-Santesmases………… Dorota Golanska…………………….. Ana M. González Ramos…………………. Karin Gunnarsson………………….. ….. Trine Krigsvoll Haagensen…………. Lonni Hall……………………………. Ines Handler.................................................. Cathrine Hasse……………………….. Liv Hausken…………………………….. Martta Heikkilä………………………….

franziskaaigner@hotmail.com a.alexiou@mmu.ac.uk S.allendyke@mmu.ac.uk dallhutt@oeaw.ac.at mar.alonso@uam.es palsinag@uoc.edu annette.arlander@uniarts.fi eardevol@uoc.edu cecilia.asberg@liu.se marta.aymerich@uoc.edu josef.barla@univie.ac.at c.bath@tu-bs.de arantza@begueria.net veronica.c.black@gmail.com m.a.bleeker@uu.nl linnea.boden@comhem.se d.boersma@khm.de megan.boler@utoronto.ca bbolt@unimelb.edu.au boucher.mariep@gmail.com buehlmann@arch.ethz.ch cachao00@yahoo.es spadarkle@hotmail.com m.c.abadia@gmail.com caramelo.gomes@upt.pt cecilia.castano@gmail.com Suzanne.deCastell@uoit.ca d.chandler@wmin.ac.uk masayachiba@gmail.com katja.cicigoj@gmail.com olga.cielemecka@gmail.com felicity.colman@gmail.com danev@orion.rs jelena.el@gmail.com lucysombra@gmail.com outsidetheinbox@bokaen.com benguix@uoc.edu martina.erlemann@fu-berlin.de waltraud.ernst@jku.at estebancasero7@yahoo.es hfal@edu.au.dk heidi.fast@aalto.fi a0803677@unet.univie.ac.at signe.l.g@gmail.com itzi.gandarias@gmail.com aagarcia@ucm.es andrea.gsantesmases@gmail.com dorg@uni.lodz.pl agonzalezram@uoc.edu karin.gunnarsson@cehum.su.se trine.haagensen@media.uio.no loha@ucc.dk ines.handler@univie.ac.at caha@dpu.dk liv.hausken@media.uio.no martta.heikkila@helsinki.fi

Peta Hinton ……………………………… p.hinton@unsw.edu.au Aud Sissel Hoel………………………. aud.sissel.hoel@ntnu.no Vanina Hofman ........................................... vhofman@uoc.edu Riikka Hohti……………………………… Riikka.hohti@helsinki.fi Ilona Hongisto…………………………. ilona.hongisto@utu.fi Vincenzo Ienuso .......................................... vincenzo.ienuso2@studio.unibo.it Pedro Jacobetty……………………… pedro.jacobetty@gmail.com Vappu Jalonen……………………… vappu.jalonen@gmail.com Jen Jerson.................................................. jjenson@edu.yorku.ca Guðbjörg Rannveig Jóhannesdóttir …… grj5@hi.is Pirkko Moisala........................................... pirkko.moisala@helsinki.fi Malou Juelskjaer……………………….. maju@dpu.dk Maxigas ...................................................... maxigas@anargeek.net Melanie McBride ....................................... mcbride.melanie@gmail.com Lotta Kähkönen………………………… lotkah@utu.fi Rene Kaiser…………………………… rene.bewerbung@gmail.com Tomas Karger………………………. tomkarger@gmail.com Katve-Kaisa Kaisa Kontturi…………………….. katkon@utu.fi Marc Kosciejew ......................................... mkosciej@gmail.com Agnes Kovacs………………………… kovacs_agnes@phd.ceu.hu Amparo Lasén…………………………. alasen@ucm.es Doris Leibetseder………………… . doris.leibet@berkeley.edu Debora Lanzeni ........................................ dlanzeni@gmail.com Hillevi Lenz Taguchi………………….. hillevi.lenz-taguchi@buv.su.se Taru Leppänen……………………… talepp@utu.fi Endla Lõhkivi………………………….. endla.lohkivi@ut.ee Daniel Lopez ........................................... dlopezgo@uoc.edu Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer………………… Meyer………………… d.lorenz-meyer@fhs.cuni.cz Rosella Magli ......................................... Rossella.magli@cost.eu Hanna Meissner……………………. hanna.meissner@tu-berlin.de Julia Mendes …………………………… juliamendes@gmail.com Christian Mieves……………………….. Christian.Mieves@wlv.ac.uk Cristina Miranda de Almeida.................. Almeida cristmiranda@telefonica.net Valentina Montero …………………… valentina.montero@gmail.com Matthias Moosburger…………………… matthias.moosburger@gmail.com Valeria Morabito……………………. valeria.morabito@studio.unibo.it Monica Moreno ............................................ ma202mmd@gold.ac.uk Ana Mouraz……………………………… anamouraz@fpce.up.pt Krizia Nardini…………………………… krizia.nardini@live.it Basia Nikiforova…………………... bnikiforova@hotmail.com Jason Nolan………………………… jnolan@ryerson.ca Libora Oates-Indruchova ........................... ibora@juniperus.at Niina Oisalo………………………. niina.oisalo@utu.fi Bettina Papenburg………………………. bettina.papenburg@hhu.de Jussi Parikka ……………………………. jussi.parikka1976@gmail.com Miguel Penas López………………… dionisopl@gmail.com Josefin Persdotter………………………. josefin.persdotter@gu.se Rumen Rachev……………………… rachev89@gmail.com Beatriz Revelles…………………….. brevelles@uoc.edu Ana Rodera………………………… arodera@uoc.edu Ana Rodriguez ....................................... arodriguezgrane@uoc.edu Ljiljana Rogac Mijatovic…………….. ljrogac@gmail.com Monika Rogowska-Stangret………….. Stangret………….. monika.rogowska@gmail.com Nikki Rotas……………………………. nikki.rotas@mail.utoronto.ca Helga Sadowski………………………… helga.sadowski@liu.se Milágros Sáinz Ibáñez ………………… msainzi@uoc.edu Teresa Samper………………………… m.teresa.samper@uv.es Audrey Samson ......................................... mail@ideacritik.com Adelina Sánchez Espinosa ………………. adelina@ugr.es Sofie Sauzet……………………………… sosa@edu.au.dk

Sigrid Schmitz……………………… Gregory Seigworth…………………….. Aggeliki Sifaki……………………… Clare Stanhope ………………………. Erin Stapleton …..……………………… Whitney Stark………………………. Zuzana Stefkova…………………..…. Eliza Steinbock……………………… Vlasta Stulíková……………………… Jules Sturm………………………………. Winnie Soon ……………………………… Katarzyna Szopa………………………. Alanna Thain……………………………. Kathrin Thiele…………………………… Björn Thorsteinsson…………………… Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir ........................... Milla Tiainen…………………………….. Tanja Traxler……………………………… Hanna Väätäinen………………………… Iris van der Tuin………………………… Natalie van Gaalen……………………… Andrea de Pilar Vargas Londoño ............ Núria Vergés…………………………….. Irma Vila ................................................... Tereza Virtová………………………. Pau Walder ............................................ Katarzyna Wolanik Bostrom…………….. Eva Zekany………………………………

sigrid.schmitz@univie.ac.at gregory.seigworth@millersville.edu A.S.Sifaki@uu.nl ed607cs@gold.ac.uk e.stapleton@kingston.ac.uk stark.whitney@gmail.com z.stefkova@gmail.com eliza.steinbock@maastrichtuniversity.nl vlasta.stulikova@gmail.com j.v.sturm@uva.nl siusoon@gmail.com szopa.katarzyna2@gmail.com alanna.thain@mcgill.ca k.thiele@uu.nl bjorntho@hi.is sigrthor@hi.is milla.tiainen@gmail.com tanja.traxler@univie.ac.at vaatainen.hanna@gmail.com I.vanderTuin@uu.nl nvangaalen@hotmail.co.uk andreadelpilar.varlon@hotmail.com nu.verges@gmail.com ivilao@uoc.edu virtova@gmail.com pau@pauwaelder.com katarzyna@kultmed.umu.se Zekany_Eva@ceu-budapest.edu

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.

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.

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.

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 sociomaterial 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 societytechnology 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 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 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 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 horizontallystructured 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, 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 representing 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.

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 causeand-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 ontoepistemology 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 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 symbolic/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 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, selfmonitoring and self-disciplining subject and the internalised importance of efficiency and performance. Selftracking 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 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 ontoepistemology. 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.

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 cismale. 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 postdeconstruction/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 within a theoretical stance of feminist post-constructionism. When thinking with theories within feminist postconstructionism diffraction becomes a vital methodological strategy (Barad 2007). Herein, knowledgeproduction 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, 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 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 antiessentialism 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 NorthAmerican 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 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 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 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 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 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 onesize-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.

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 selforganization, 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 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 Antigender 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 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 digitalmaterial 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 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-sociocultural 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 selftechnologies 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 broadlyconstrued 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 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 antioppression 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 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 nonanthropomorphic, 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 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 MerleauPonty'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 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, coattuning 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). 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 intraactions.

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 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 humanmedia relationships.

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 decisionmaking. 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.

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 theoreticalmethodological 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:

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 The dissertation thesis aims to capture and theoretically render processes of knowledge production in opensource 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 transdisciplinary 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, 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 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 selfformation 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.

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 rearticulation 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 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 wānanga (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 Māori teachings and philosophies as taught by Hohepa Delamere. Through this process of learning about te ao Maori (the Maori 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.

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) 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). KatveKaisa'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: knardini@uoc.edu

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 Finlandfunded project ‘Deleuzian Music Research’. Her key interests include the voice in performing 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 COSTfunded New Materialism network.

ADVISORY BOARD Adelina Sánchez Espinosa, Coordinator of GEMMA: Erasmus Mundus Master in Women’s and Gender studies Adelina Sánchez Espinosa (adelina@ugr.es) 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 (benguix@uoc.ed), 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 (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 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 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).