In ‘Situated Knowledges’, feminist science studies scholar – and, as will be argued in this chapter, critical new materialisms scene-setter – Donna Haraway (1988) reveals her own politicised ‘electroshock’ (578) therapeutic take on epistemology and what it means to create knowledge from the ground up. She builds her argument upon Marxist, historical and feminist materialisms, the rich tradition of feminist epistemology and, above all, Sandra Harding’s (1986, 1987, 1991) standpoint theory. Connecting the foregoing philosophies to the Foucauldian idea of power/knowledge (...) (Foucault 1990 [1976], 1995 [1975]) and a critique of disembodied, objectifying vision, Haraway conceptualises her materialist project along four criss-crossing axes, namely: ontology (theorising what the world is); epistemology (theorising about how to see the world as it is); ethics (theorising why the world is as it is and how it ought to be); and politics (theorising how to effectively change the world). It is in the thought-provoking assemblage of these four philosophical domains that Haraway’s eco-philosophy sets the framework for what this chapter describes as critical new materialist philosophies. (shrink)

In the present condition of planetary environmental crises, violence, and war, entire ecosystems are annihilated, habitats turn into unliveable spaces, and shared “more-than-human” vulnerabilities get amplified. Here and now, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns, while the Anthropocene-induced anxiety, anger, and grief are manifested in popular-scientific narratives, art, culture, and activism. Grounded in the theoretical framework of queer death studies, this article explores present grief imaginaries and engagements with more-than-human death, dying, and extinction, as they are interwoven through contemporary (...) art. It is there where an ecological ontology of death is being exposed and ethical territories of eco-grief unfold. (shrink)

Rosi Braidotti's contribution to the Deleuze Studies Conference 2016 held in Rome, later transcribed and then revised by the author, points firmly to the current need for an affirmative thinking approach, actively standing to the present, while assessing its becoming and imagining new configurations. Saying yes to the world, being worthy of it, does not entail passive acceptance but rather the activation of transformative and critical thinking. To this aim, Braidotti looks at Deleuze as well as at feminist theory. The (...) ontology of immanence turns into a materialist, collective, vital, embodied and relational ethics. (shrink)

Makerspaces and hacklabs are believed to encourage a positive attitude towards gaining computer skills. Within these communities for peer production, citizens can apply cutting-edge technologies in DIY projects. In recent decades, mushrooming makerspaces and hacklabs were embraced by the tech industry and governments alike. Feminist makerspaces and hacklabs, however, as they are centred around a queer feminist agenda, have raised eyebrows. In order to foster diversity in tech development, they create safer spaces for self-expression. Here, feminist laymen*, makers, designers, artists (...) and tinkerers experiment with open-source hardware and software. Art and design projects emerging from feminist hacklabs focus on issues of representation and democratic participation in digital media, as well as on ways of reclaiming one’s own body. This article tries to unpack how, after an exhibition on sexual health norms, a feminist hacklab was attacked by local right-wing and conservative politicians. The attack resulted in the defunding of the feminist hacklab. But it also started a transformation process within the collective, as members became aware of critical interferences of diffracting marginalisations. The crisis triggered a discussion on how each member was threatened to very different degrees; for example, there was more at stake for members depending on their legal status in the country. The right-wing and conservative campaign against the feminist hacklab damaged the initiative, but at the same time it pushed the collective to generate increased vehemence and resilience. (shrink)

Images share a common feature with all phenomena of imagination, since they make us aware of what is not present or what is fictional and not existent at all. From this perspective, the philosophical approach of Kendall Lewis Walton—born in 1939 and active since the 1960s at the University of Michigan—is perhaps one of the most notable contributions to image theory. Walton is an authoritative figure within the tradition of analytical aesthetics. His contributions have had a considerable influence on a (...) broad range of topics, such as the role of categories in the understanding of the arts (Walton, “Categories of Art”. Philosophical Review, 79(3): 334–367, 1970), the ambiguous nature of emotions in the experience of fictional stories (Walton, “Fearing Fictions”. The Journal of Philosophy, 75(1): 5–25, 1978), the transparency of photographic images compared to other depictions (Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism”. Noûs, 18(1): 67–72, 1984) and, above all, the development of a general theory of fiction as imaginative activity. His 1990 book Mimesis as Make-believe: On the Foundations of the Representational Arts collects and re-elaborates articles Walton published on the subject since the 1970s. Though he does not attempt to give a definitive answer for what imagination is, Walton thoroughly investigates its role in all cases of representational works, describing depictions as a specific case of “make-believe” activity: images, in short, are specific props of a visual and perceptual “make-believe” game. (shrink)

This is part 1 of 6 of the dossier What Do We Talk about when We Talk about Queer Death?, edited by M. Petricola. The contributions collected in this article sit at the crossroads between thanatology and queer theory and tackle questions such as: how can we define queer death studies as a research field? How can queer death studies problematize and rethink the life-death binary? Which notions and hermeneutic tools could be borrowed from other disciplines in order to better (...) define queer death studies? The present article includes the following contributions: – MacCormack P., What does queer death studies mean?; – Radomska M., On queering death studies; – Lykke N., Death as vibrancy; – Hillerup Hansen I., What concreteness will do to resolve the uncertain; – Olson P., Queer objectivity as a response to denials of death; – Manganas N., The queer lack of a chthonic instinct. (shrink)

Book review of Rozmarin's Vulnerable Futures, Transformative Pasts (2017).

This intra-view explores a number of productive junctions between contemporary Deleuzoguattarian and new materialist praxes via a series of questions and provocations. Productive tensions are explored via questions of epistemological, ontological, ethical, and political intra-sections as well as notions of difference, transversal contamination, ecosophical practices, diffraction, and, lastly, schizoanalysis. Various irruptions around biophilosophy, transduction, becomology, cartography, power relations, hyperobjects as events, individuation, as well as dyschronia and disorientation, take the discussion further into the wild pedagogical spaces that both praxes have (...) in common. -/- . (shrink)

Whether we are said to be living in the Anthropocene, the Capitalocene, or are witnessing the start of the Chthulucene, as feminist science studies scholar Donna J. Haraway (2016) would describe the current post-anthropocentric era, there is a demonstratable need for affective, entangled, transversal forms of thinking-doing today. Writing this editorial almost a year after the COVID-19 pandemic erupted, and that as inhabitants of Belgium and South Africa—countries with complex ongoing capitalist-colonial legacies, socio-political presents, and heavily but also differently hit (...) by said pandemic—we more than ever feel that these are times of entwined crisis, chaos, and hardship, overflowing with cravings for pedagogical-philosophical responses that are affirmative, productive, and future-oriented. Reactions that are moreover part theory, part praxis, counter the nihilistic, and are future-focused while still grounded in the present, as to not defer responsibilities to future times (see Geerts & Carstens, 2019). (shrink)

In this chapter we argue for biophilosophy as a queerfeminist and posthumanities methodology that attends to the question of life by focusing on multiple differences and transformations, materiality and processuality, as well as relations, intra-actions, and disconnections. By combining both the ontological and ethical concerns that go beyond what is conventionally seen as “life”, biophilosophy offers a critical and innovative approach to the issues of death, extinction, (un) liveability, terminality, and toxicity, among others, which all form the backbone of the (...) environmental crises and changing conditions of life on Earth, often framed as the Anthropocene. In what follows, we first discuss select theorisations and implications of the “life/death” coupling as an ethico-political question; subsequently we elaborate the concept of biophilosophy as a methodology; and finally, we propose two examples where we test biophilosophy as a framework that allows us: (1) to engage with the enmeshment of life and death through the concept of the non/living, and (2) to explore the concept of toxic embodiment as an onto-ethical condition we all (human and non-human) are differentially immersed in. (shrink)

Bioart is a form of hybrid artistico-scientific practices in contemporary art that involve the use of bio-materials (such as living cells, tissues, organisms) and scientific techniques, protocols, and tools. Bioart-works embody vulnerability (intrinsic to all beings) and depend on (bio)technologies that allow these creations to come into being, endure and flourish but also discipline them. This article focuses on ‘semi-living’ sculptures by The Tissue Culture and Art Project (TC&A). TC&A’s artworks consist of bioengineered mammal tissues grown over biopolymer scaffoldings of (...) different shapes and require sterile conditions of a bioreactor and constant care in order to survive. The article explores how bioart-works are always already intertwined with multiple (bio)technologies and techniques of care and labour, forming specific feminist technoecologies that challenge conventional bioscientific and cultural imaginaries of embodiment and the relation between physis and techné. TC&A’s sculptures expose life as the non/living: the processual enmeshment of the organic and inorganic, living and non-living, and growth and decay. The article argues that thinking with and through the feminist technoecologies of bioart mobilises philosophical inventiveness: not only does it problematise the entwinement of technology and biomatter and of culture and nature, but it also prompts us to rethink the ontology of life. (shrink)

Queer Death Studies (QDS) refers to an emerging transdisciplinary field of research that critically and (self) reflexively investigates and challenges conventional normativities, assumptions, expectations, and regimes of truths that are brought to life and made evident by death, dying, and mourning. Since its establishment as a research field in the 1970s, Death Studies has drawn attention to the questions of death, dying, and mourning as complex and multifaceted phenomena that require inter- or multi-disciplinary approaches and perspectives. Yet, the engagements with (...) death, dying and mourning, constitutive of conventional Death Studies’ investigations, tend to remain insufficient and reductive. They are often governed by the normative notions of: the subject; bonds between humans, as well as between humans and (their) animals; family relations and communities; rituals; and finally, experiences of grief, mourning, and bereavement. Moreover, these engagements are frequently embedded in constraining beliefs in life/death divides, constructed along the lines of conventional religious and/or scientific mind/body dualisms, characteristic of the Western cultural imaginaries. Against this background, QDS offers a site for ‘queering’ traditional ways of approaching death both as a subject of study and philosophical reflection, and as a phenomenon to articulate in artistic work or practices of mourning. Here, the notion of ‘queer’ conveys many meanings. It refers to researching and narrating death, dying, and mourning in the context of queer bonds and communities, where the subjects involved/studied/interviewed and the relations they are involved in are recognised as ‘queer’. Simultaneously, the term ‘queer’ can also function as an adverb and a verb, referring thus to the processes of going beyond and unsettling (subverting, exceeding) binaries and given norms, normativities, and constraining conventions. In other words, ‘queer’ becomes both a process and a methodology that is applicable and exceeds the focus on gender and sexuality as its exclusive concerns. (shrink)

The virtual has become the latest rostrum for ideological heteronormativity; it increasingly plays host to an insidious rhetoric of unjustifiably fixed and oppositional gender binaries that exhort heterosexuality as a norm. Conservative political and religious groups, as well as consumerist advertising, utilise digital technology to reinforce cast-in-stone and adversarial social perspectives for manipulative and exploitative ends. Contrastingly, the virtual may be mobilised to support and facilitate queering in contemporary societies and may positively counter such fixed ideological heteronormative categories of social (...) life. Crucial in this transformative account of the virtual is the body, which is for Merleau-Ponty the horizon of engagement with the world as a condition for perception and performativity. Queer perspectives may, in turn, overcome the oversight of Merleau-Ponty (as critically suggested by Judith Butler and Iris Marion Young) regarding the specific gendered characteristics of the body itself, and allows for an expanded embodied and queer conceptualisation of the virtual. A transformative vision of the virtual entails therefore a rethinking of our understanding of digital technology through (a) the phenomenology of the body-subject and (b) queer theory. I argue that the idea of the body as entirely discursive or performative (per queer theory) needs to be adjusted by explicating the foundational ontological characteristics of the body-subject’s encounter of the virtual. (shrink)

This article seeks to intervene in what I perceive to be a problematic opposition in feminist theory between ontological and epistemological accounts of existence and politics, by proposing an approach that weaves together Elspeth Probyn’s conceptualisation of ‘feminist reflexivity’ with a re-reading of feminist standpoint through affect. In so doing, I develop the concept of affective solidarity as necessary for sustainable feminist politics of transformation. This approach is proposed as a way of moving away from rooting feminist transformation in the (...) politics of identity and towards modes of engagement that start from the affective dissonance experience can produce. Moving beyond empathy as a privileged way of connecting with others, I argue that the difference between ‘womanhood’ and ‘feminism’ is critical for a universal yet non-essential understanding of what motivates gendered change. (shrink)

‘Sexualisation’ has been dismissed by some as no more than yet another moral panic about youth and sex. However, it is striking that the term appears to have helped galvanise feminist activism, speaking in some way to the experiences of young people. Building from a history and analysis of the term, I propose that ‘sexualisation’ has served as an interpretive theory of contradictory gender norms, using the figure of the ‘girl’ to gesture towards an intensifying contradiction between the demands that (...) young women display both desirability and innocence. In addressing sexist dimensions of gender norms through the figure of the ‘girl’, a minor, discourses on sexualisation can help circumvent liberal objections about free choice. However, I also express concern that the term has facilitated a focus in media and policy texts which attends less to gender inequity than to sexuality as a contaminant of young femininity. (shrink)

This article considers Jussi Parikka’s Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology and its place within the broader context of neomaterialist philosophy. The question of Insect Media, and indeed of neomaterialism more generally, can be summarized as follows: how might one open oneself to radically alien durations, while remaining politically sensitive to the concomitant risk of technocapitalist capture? Moving through the wide range of subjects engaged with by Parikka, from entomology and cinema to the most advanced forms of programming (...) ecologies, I focus on Parikka’s organizing notion of insects as figuring the molecular disruption of the phantasmatic molar body. For Parikka, it is the swarm that serves as his privileged example, which he locates at the intersection of animal studies, posthumanism and media theory. After outlining Parikka’s important reworking of Bergson’s conception of instinct, understood as ‘intensities’, which functions equally well within the domain of new media, and some of its implications for neo-Darwinism, I then consider Parikka’s ‘melodic’ conception of both nature and technology. Such a conception, I suggest, is problematic in its conflation of nonhuman animals with, for example, software, technologies, viruses and parasites. This in turn puts into question Parikka’s ‘use’ of insects in relation to the claim, common to neomaterialism in general, to have moved beyond an anthropocentric viewpoint. Rather, I argue, such a conception rebuilds a humanist enclosure, albeit one in which, following Guattari, subjectivity can no longer be identified with the individual. Insofar as Parikka designates every nonhuman animal and every machine as beings prior to language and thus prior to intelligence, the non-unitary subject is as a result restricted to the experiencing human subject. This, as Eugene Thacker points out, has serious political implications as regards the attribution of value, or not, to this or that life. However, insofar as Parikka considers instinct as habitual rather than as predetermined and, moreover, extends it to technical beings, I suggest that such a placing of instinct as ‘prelinguistic’ cannot be maintained. By way of conclusion, I appeal for the opening of a dialogue between neomaterialism and deconstruction, with its focus upon language understood in a much broader sense. (shrink)

In this paper, we give a flavour of how, against the odds, Reggio-Emilia-inspired pedagogical documentation can work in reconceptualizing environmental education, reconfiguring child subjectivity and provoking an ontological shift from autopoiesis to sympoiesis in teacher education. Working posthuman(e)ly and transdisciplinarily across three foundation phase teacher education courses at a university in South Africa, we situate our teaching within current environmental precarities. We show how we stirred up trouble in and outside our university classroom and provoked our students to “make kin” (...) with children, each other, other animals, and the more-than-human, but also to stay with the trouble, that is, to learn to be truly present in colonized spaces. (shrink)

Elizabeth Grosz's interpretation of Darwinian evolutionary theory to ground a feminist ontology of biology has been particularly controversial. Most critics have understood Grosz as supporting her theory with empirical evidence, and they criticize her for being either inaccurate or uncritical of and overly dependent on science. I argue that Grosz reads Darwin as a philosopher in a Deleuzian and Irigarayan sense, and that Grosz's project is therefore better understood in terms of its ethical and political goals rather than in terms (...) of empirical adequacy. Employing this evaluative framework leads to a novel route for critique of Grosz's ontology in terms of its reliance on the Darwinian distinction between organism and environment. I conclude that Grosz's work is valuable for the way it maintains ethical and political considerations in feminist ontological debates, and that introducing a more sensitive understanding of the organism–environment relation will lead us closer to a truly feminist ontology of biology. (shrink)

Starting from the famous statement by Deleuze and Guattari in What Is Philosophy? that ‘[i]mmanence can be said to be the burning issue of all philosophy’, this article explores their claim of an ontology of immanence and/as relational ontology in quantum terms. The theme of this special issue allows for a rereading of the terminology of different/ciation, which Deleuze developed in ‘The Method of Dramatization’ and Difference and Repetition, and I here relate it to the question of consistency of the (...) plane of immanence, such as it is emphasised in the later work of Deleuze and Guattari. The article exemplifies the significance that the early issue of ‘dramatization’ as different/ciating passage has on an adequate understanding of both ‘immanence’ and ‘becoming’, and it shows their in/seperability for a relational ontology as onto-ethology. By making the Deleuze-Guattarian immanence resonate with Barad's agential realism, the article zooms in on the specific quality of the ‘passage’ in order to do justice to the claim of a ‘mature’ philosophy that thinks immanence as immanent only to itself. (shrink)

Traditionally, kairos has been seen as a “timely” concept, and so invention is said to emerge fromthe timeliness of a cultural and historical situation. But what if invention was thought of as thepotential to shift historical courses through the injection of something new or alien into a situation?This essay argues that kairos has not been able to free itself from its historical constraints becauseit has been bound to a human sense of temporality. By evolving along patterns different from print,the apparatus (...) of the cinema developed in a way where it was not bound to illustrating movement ortimeas it occurs in human-centered experience. Following the work of Gilles Deleuze on cinema,this article argues that the outside of a human sense of time is an untapped source of invention,already present yet dormant within kairos. (shrink)

Feminist theorists have crafted diverse accounts of implicit knowing that exceed the purview of epistemology conventionally understood. I characterize this field as through examining thematic clusters of feminist work on implicit knowledge: phenomenological and foucauldian theories of embodiment; theories of affect and emotion; other forms of implicit knowledge. Within these areas, the umbrella concept of implicit knowledge (or understanding, depending on how it's framed) names either contingently unspoken or fundamentally nonpropositional but epistemically salient content in our experience. I make a (...) case for distinguishing implicit knowledge from lively conversations about ‘implicit bias’, as well as from the ‘know-how/know-that’ debates, and I explore key ways the notion of implicit knowledge is currently formulated in feminist philosophy. (shrink)

The topic of the self has long been salient in feminist philosophy, for it is pivotal to questions about personhood, identity, the body, and agency that feminism must address. In some respects, Simone de Beauvoir's trenchant observation, "He is the Subject, he is the Absolute — she is the Other," sums up why the self is such an important issue for feminism. To be the Other is to be the non-subject, the non-person, the non-agent — in short, the mere body. (...) In law, in customary practice, and in cultural stereotypes, women's selfhood has been systematically subordinated, diminished, and belittled, when it has not been outright denied. Since women have been cast as lesser forms of the masculine individual, the paradigm of the self that has gained ascendancy in U.S. popular culture and in Western philosophy is derived from the experience of the predominantly white and heterosexual, mostly economically advantaged men who have wielded social, economic, and political power and who have dominated the arts, literature, the media, and scholarship. Responding to this state of affairs, feminist philosophical work on the self has taken three main tacks: (1) critique of established views of the self, (2) reclamation of women's selfhood, and (3) reconceptualization of the self to incorporate women's experience. This entry will survey feminist perspectives on the self from all three of these angles. (shrink)

Disentangling Privacy and Intimacy: Intimate Citizenship, Private Boundaries and Public Transgressions Recent theorisations of transformations of intimacy—like Ken Plummer's (2003) Intimate Citizenship project—concentrate on social and cultural transformations that erode the containment of intimacy within the private sphere. They have less to say about the character of and oppositions to that erosion, and specifically how far the idea of the private stands in opposition to intimacy transgressing into the public. In this essay, the private is explored through its constitutive features—liberal (...) codifications of rights, liberty and property, medico-moral discourses and conservative values and legal and political regulation—to give a more political and critical reading. This reading suggests that an explicit disentangling of the private and the intimate is necessary if tendencies toward public and emancipated intimacies are to become meaningful transformations, and this involves a dissembling of and critical engagement with the powerful historically entrenched idea of privacy in western societies. (shrink)

All markets are embedded in ethical relations and moral discourses. This is often forgotten or ignored in alternative agrofood studies, where there has been a frequent assumption that ‘ethics’ can be inserted into markets (Trentmann, 2007), or are only acknowledged in products certified as ‘ethical’ and suchlike (Barnett, Cloke, Clarke, & Malpass, 2005). This paper takes a different approach, choosing to explore how a mainstream commodity, widely associated with the development of capitalist agriculture (Mintz, 1985), is unavoidably embedded in both (...) a set of moral discourses and a web of ethical relations (Goodman, Maye, & Holloway, 2010). Specifically, I offer a critical reading of the moral discourses that circulated between the Caribbean Sugar Protocol signatories and the European Union in the context of the 2006–2009 European Union Sugar Reform. The paper looks at how both Caribbean and European actors negotiated ‘fairness’ and in doing so, reconfigured their historical relationship. I discuss how a relational—or ethical—approach to fairness was evoked in certain instances, disrupting the European Union's (EU) neoliberal rhetoric. Contributing to the literature around ‘moral geographies’ (Jackson & Ward, 2008; Proctor et al., 1999; Smith, 1999) and also to agrofood studies, I conclude by affirming the significance of a relational approach to how the ‘fairness’ of the EU Sugar Reform might be comprehended and to how the ethics of neoliberal market reform can be more generally understood and critiqued. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the possibility of adopting a representational approach for technoscience, in which representation is considered as a situated process of dynamic “intra-action” (Barad 2007 ). Re-elaborating the recent critiques of representationalism (Thrift 2008 ), my analysis begins by analysing Hayles’s situated model of representation from an early essay where she explains her definition of constrained constructivism (Hayles [ 1991 ] 1997). The essay then discusses the notions of figuration and diffraction and the way they are employed by (...) Haraway in many of her writings for her critique of technoscience (Haraway 1991 , 1997 ). Finally, after considering diffraction through Barad’s reading of this practice in the context of her theory of agential realism ( 2007 ), it shows the links that relate constrained constructivism, situated knowledge and agential realism, and the way all of them work at “diffract[ing] the rays of technoscience” (Haraway 1997 : 16) through an alternative representational practice. (shrink)

This book is an invitation to academic administrators, at every level, to engage in reflection on the ethical dimensions of their working lives.

The Politics of Orientation provides the first substantial exploration of a surprising theoretical kinship and its rich political implications, between Gilles Deleuze's philosophy and the sociological systems theory of Niklas Luhmann. Through their shared theories of sense, Hannah Richter draws out how the works of Luhmann and Deleuze complement each other in creating worlds where chaos is the norm and order the unlikely and yet remarkably stable exception. From the encounter between Deleuze and Luhmann, Richter develops a novel take on (...) postfoundational ontology where subjects and societies unfold in self-productive relations of sense against a background of complexity. The Politics of Orientation breaks and rebuilds theoretical alliances by reading core concepts and thinkers of Continental Philosophy, from Leibniz to Whitehead and Marx, through this encounter. Most importantly, the book puts Luhmann and Deleuze to work to offer urgently needed insight into the rise of post-truth populism. In our complex democratic societies, Richter argues, orientation against complexity has become the ground of political power, privileging the simplistic narratives of the populist right. (shrink)

This paper introduces the Thinking at the Edge (TAE) method, developed by Eugene Gendlin with Mary Hendricks and Kye Nelson. In the context of the international research project and training initiative Embodied Critical Thinking (ECT), TAE is understood as a political and critical practice. Our objective is to move beyond a criticism of reductionism, into a practice of thinking that can complement empirical, conceptual and logical implications with what is implied by the vibrant complexity of one’s lived experience in one’s (...) place and time. The second person helps the first to explore, elaborate and clarify very carefully felt dimensions of thinking, which hold intricate structures, contexts, perplexities and intuitions that prove relevant for one’s research. The second person also supports the first to become sensitive to the effects of the language and concepts she uses. A non-imposing, tentative use of language that touches the intricate texture of lived experience is at the core of this method, allowing to widen one’s conceptual structure. In this paper, the cluster of TAE moves are characterized with examples of accounts of TAE processes. The description of the TAE phases includes concepts of Gendlin’s embodied theory of meaning that explain the efficacy of the moves (“direct reference,” “explication,” “crossing”). (shrink)

In the contemporary context of environmental crises and the degradation of resources, certain habitats become unliveable, leading to the death of individuals and species extinction. Whilst bioscience emphasises interdependency and relationality as crucial characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between humans and nonhumans, particularly evident in the context of death. On the one hand, death appears as a process common to all forms of life; on the other, as an (...) event that distinguishes human from other organisms. Against this background, this article explores how contemporary art—in particular, the series of works The Absence of Alice by Australian new-media and bioartist Svenja Kratz—challenges the normative and human-exceptionalist concept of death. By employing queerfeminist biophilosophy as a strategy that focuses on relations, processes and transformations instead of ‘essences’, the article examines the ways Kratz’s works deterritorialise the conventional concept of death. In this way, it hopes to attend to the intimacies between materialities of a human and nonhuman kind that form part of the processes of death and dying, and what follows, to reframe ethico-ontology of death as material and processual ecologies of the non/living. (shrink)

The always vexed relationships between philosophy, theory, methodology, empirical work and their representations and legitimations have been thrown into chaos with the belated acknowledgement of the Anthropocene. Unsurprisingly, traditional Western thought may have been complicit, given its underlying anthropocentric assumptions and humanist commitments in education philosophy, theory and practice. The postcritical knowledge ecology developed here is applied to both a modest and responsible form of methodological inquiry in an ethnographic study of nature experience. Our contextualised experiment adds to the nascent (...) literature of an environmentally oriented education now demanded in the Anthropocene. (shrink)

This paper proposes an alternative approach towards ethical leadership. Recent research tells us that socioeconomic and cultural differences affect moral intuition, making it difficult to locate a guiding organizational principle. Nevertheless, in this paper I attempt to open an alternative path towards an ethics that might serve as a guide for leaders – especially leaders who are leading a highly professionalized workforce. Using the Chilean writer Roberto Bolaño and the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze as points of reference, I develop an (...) ethical form of leadership that is based on a continuous ‘poetic’ dialogue between creation and affirmation. The nature of this dialogue requires a leadership approach that plays both a courageous and imaginative role in liberating its workforce. Last, I develop a frame which provides the constituent principles of leading in the direction of an ethical organization. (shrink)

We contemplate Deleuze and Guattari's discussion of in/compossibility through engagement with practices of spatial planning and development at the urban fringe in Australia. In such sites of ecosystem transformation, the presence of wildlife, such as mosquitoes, is often deemed incompossible with felicitous human habitation. We suggest that regarding worlds like those of mosquitoes and humans as divergent, rather than incompossible, opens up opportunities for inclusive disjunctive syntheses which affirm the disjoined terms without excluding one from the other. Relating inclusive disjunction (...) to intensive milieu, we call for development of a more milieu-based approach to planning to facilitate more-than-human coexistence differently. (shrink)

Bodily methodologies that engage with the affective, rhythmic, and temporal dimensions of movement have altered the landscape of social science and humanities research. Walking is one such methodology by which scholars have examined vital, sensory, material, and ephemeral intensities beyond the logics of representation. Extending this rich field, this article invokes the concept trans to reconceptualize walking research through theories that attend to the vitality and agency of matter, the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans, the importance of mediation and bodily (...) affect, and the necessity of acknowledging ethico-political responsibility. While theoretical and empirical research about embodied, emplaced, and sensorial relations between moving bodies and space are well developed in the field of walking studies, their entanglements become profoundly altered by theories of trans – transcorporeality, transspecies, and transmaterialities. Taking up trans theories we experiment in thinking-with a sonic art performance, Walking to the Laundromat, which probes bodily, affective, and gendered labour. (shrink)

This article compares notes on different and new concepts of ‘the Human’, developed both within disciplinary and interdisciplinary academic scientific research and in broader social practices. The main focus is on the shifting relationship between the ‘two cultures’ of the humanities and science in the light of contemporary developments, such as the sophisticated forms of interdisciplinary research that have emerged in the fields of biotechnologies, neural sciences, environmental and climate change research and Information and Communication technologies. These rapid changes affect (...) the very definitions of the human and of human evolution. The question is how and to what extent they have an impact on both the practice of the humanities and on their self-representation. Is humanism challenged or strengthened by these developments? To what extent is anthropocentrism called to task by what is becoming known as posthuman theory? (shrink)

This article draws attention to the importance of enchantment in business ethics research. Starting from a Weberian understanding of disenchantment, as a force that arises through modernity and scientific rationality, we show how rationalist business ethics research has become disenchanted as a consequence of the normalization of positivist, quantitative methods of inquiry. Such methods absent the relational and lively nature of business ethics research and detract from the ethical meaning that can be generated through research encounters. To address this issue, (...) we draw on the work of political theorist and philosopher, Jane Bennett, using this to show how interpretive qualitative research creates possibilities for enchantment. We identify three opportunities for reenchanting business ethics research related to: moments of novelty or disruption; deep, meaningful attachments to things studied; and possibilities for embodied, affective encounters. In conclusion, we suggest that business ethics research needs to recognize and reorient scholarship towards an appreciation of the ethical value of interpretive, qualitative research as a source of potential enchantment. (shrink)

This paper proposes a philosophy of STEAM education in the current moment, the Anthropocene. Whereas many proponents of STEAM focus on outcomes related to cultivating a more creative and competitiv...

In the first part of this paper we introduce some of the main ideas of two great philosophers of democracy – Richard Rorty and Luce Irigaray. We show that in a similar manner both deal with an ethical ideal of community to be imagined, and achieved in the future. In the second part of this paper we present two ideas about democracy as an ethical and spiritual community – i.e., democracy as it relates to the idea of the »child« and (...) democracy as shared atmosphere of »breath«. Finally, in the third part of this paper, we elaborate on the future of democracy in an eschatological sense, and argue, as Roberto Mangabeira Unger and Luce Irigaray would claim, that if democracy is related to the process of our own divinization, then it is precisely within this process that with our creativity, imagination, and love we indeed can become unlimited and infinite. (shrink)

This paper presents a phenomenology of affect and discusses its relevance for organizational life-worlds. With Merleau-Ponty, affects are interpreted as bodily and embodied inter-relational phenomena, which have specific pathic, ecstatic and emotional qualities. Relationally, they will be situated as “inter-affection” that are part of the inter-corporeality of the “Flesh” of wild be(com)ing. Affect and inter-affectivity are then related to organizational life-worlds, through a critical exploration of different phenomena and effects generated by positive, negative and ambiguous dimensions. Finally, the potentials of (...) affects and affection as part of the nexus of an embodied responsive responsibility and sustainability are discussed and critical perspectives on affective becoming outlined. (shrink)

European Enlightenment thought was the privileged model upon which intellectuals built a Chinese modernity since the decline of the Qing dynasty in the late nineteenth century. Aesthetically, a turn towards literary realism was successfully implemented. These Western legacies dominated the literary field until they lost their persuasive power in the 1990s. Beyond cultural production, the entanglements of a nation in transition with Eurocentric ideological paradigms influenced statecraft and nationalistic thought to our days. In his novel Frogs Mo Yan revisits the (...) heritage of May Fourth modernism to expose its transmogrification into the dehumanizing reality effects accompanying birth control from Mao to the Deng regime and thereafter. Employing images that suggest recent, science-based governance to have triggered local regimes of cosmic un-creation, the novel focuses on a global modernization that is perceived as socially as well as environmentally destructive. (shrink)

In recent decades, Spanish feminist praxis has diversified its theoretical proposals and objectives, presenting the use of the new virtual communities from perspectives that bring it closer both to cyberfeminism and to technofeminism. The purpose of this article is to consider and explore in depth the construction and the use of the new technologies and internet in the new spaces for relationships in this feminist praxis. The article analyses the theoretical and agency proposals presented by two of the founders of (...) the most significant portals in recent years in Spain: E-leusis, founded by María Angustias Bertomeu, and Mujeres en Red, founded by Montserrat Boix. From a position closer to the essential utopia defended by Bertomeu, Spanish feminist praxis has advanced towards a kind of technofeminism that Montserrat Boix herself has transformed into what she has denominated social cyberfeminism. (shrink)