New
Materialism

The conference addresses as an area of debate the nexus of:

– Politics and activism
– The economy and law
– Philosophy and the power of knowledge
– Genealogy and information
– The role of creativity in political economies through public engagement and pedagogy.

What is the new materialist impetus to make situated analyses of the im/material processes in these areas?

Scientific Committee: Dr. Cecilia Åsberg, Dr. Barbara Bolt, Dr. Rick Dolphijn, Dr. Ana González Ramos, Dr. Ilona Hongisto, Dr. Katve-Kaisa Kontturi, Ms Krizia Nardini, Prof. Jussi Parikka, Dr. Beatriz Revelles-Benavente, Dr. Milla Tiainen.

Organising Committee: Prof. Jose Caramelo Gomes, Dr. Felicity Colman, Prof. Tomaž Keresteš, Prof. Borut Holcman, Mr. Mitja Pukšič, Dr. Iris van der Tuin.

PROGRAMME — Friday October 2nd

9.00 – 10.00
Registrations for WG/MC meetings (only for COST IS1307 participants)

10.00 – 11.00
MC meeting (only for COST IS1307 participants)

11.00 – 13.00
WG meetings (only for COST IS1307 participants)

13.00 – 14.00
Lunch

14.00 – 16.00
WG meetings (only for COST IS1307 participants)

16.00 – 17.00
Coffee break & Registrations for all other participants

17.00 – 17.15
Conference opening for all other participants with opening speeches

17.15 – 18.45
Keynote: Katerina Kolozova: Philosophical and speculative economies: The eschatology of the vanishing body and the exploited organic, Respondant: Gregg Lambert, Chair: Felicity Colman

18.45 – 20.00
Opening panel: A Philosophy of the Materialist Sciences
Chair: Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer

1 Matthew Jamison: L’étranger, Grief, and Henrietta: A Non-Philosophical Approach to the HeLa Cell Line
2 Stanimir Panayotov: The View from Nowhere and the View from Somewhere: Embodiment in New Realism and New Materialism
3 Waltraud Ernst: Economies of Knowledge and New Materialisms of Gender

20.00 –
Opening ceremony

PROGRAMME — Saturday October 3rd
10.00 – 11.30
Keynote: Diana Coole: Dirt Matters, But How Does it Matter? A New Materialist Perspective, Respondant: Beatriz Revelles-Benavente, Chair: Whitney Stark
11.30 – 13.00
Parallel Panel Sessions ONE:
1 Political Intervention, Writing Materiality, and Creativity
Chair: Liv Hausken
1 Vidya Ravi: On Ordinary Matter: Vernacular Materiality in Contemporary Realist Literature
2 Signe Leth Gammelgaad: Representation Revisited: Madame Bovary’s Lesson and the Politics of Fiction
3 Maria Tamboukou: Œuvre à Faire: Materialising Feminist Utopias

New Materialist Subjectivities
Chair: Marja Vehviläinen
1 Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir: Feeling like shit in the job-interview
2 Eva Zekany: Producing the non(human): reading ‘productivity apps’ through new materialist media theory
3 Anja Koletnik: Meat Non-consumption as Agency: Matter of Transgender Individuals’ Doing Within Feminist Politics
4 Whitney Stark: A New Materialist Approach to Alternative Historicizing

Information Coming to Matter
Chair: Michele Rapoport
1 Marc Kosciejew: Document Materialism: Documentation and the Materialization of Information
2 Lai Ma: Materiality of Information
3 Rumen Iliev Rachev: Information Overload: The Flow of InHuman Materials

Ecologies that Matter
Chair: Maris Sõrmus
1 Aislinn O’Donnell: Experimental Philosophy
2 Mary A. Jackson: How Matter Comes to Matter in the Earthquake-Prone Nepal/Himalayas
3 Nathalie Blanc and Barbara Benish: Art, Ecology And Change

Round table and discussion “Materiality-Critique-Transformation”
Convenors: Doris Allhutter, Brigitte Bargetz, Hanna Meißner
13.00 – 14.00 Lunch
14.00 – 15.30 Keynote Anna Hickey-Moody: Slow Life and Ecologies of Sensation, Respondant: Basia Nikiforova, Chair: Nevena Dakovic
15.30 – 16.00 Break
16.00 – 17.30 Parallel Panel Sessions TWO:
1) Toward a New Materialist Theory of Socioeconomic Justice
Chair: Emilia Salvanou

1. Allaine Cerwonka: Does Posthuman + Postgender = Social Justice?
2. María del Mar Alonso-Almeida: New Materialism and Economics: A Preliminary Approach
3. Benedicta Ideho Omokaro – From Informal to Formal: How e-waste is changing the World of e-scrappers in Informal Recycling Sector
   2) Between No Longer and Not Yet
   Chair: Gregg Lambert
4. Ljiljana Rogač Mijatović: Knowledge Production and Policy Making: How the Humanities Matter?
5. David Gauthier: Deceit: 800 % slower
6. Felicity Colman: The Duration of Matter
   3) New Materialist Spatiotemporalities
   Chair: Beatriz Revelles-Benavente
7. Mateusz Janik: (In)Visibility, Historical Existence and Positional Resemblance
8. Helen Palmer: De-familiarisation, Re-invigoration and Creative/Critical Distance in New Materialist Times
9. Iris van der Tuin: Practicing ‘Genealogies of New Materialisms’: The Case of Susanne K. Langer
   4) New Media, New Activism
   Chair: Dorota Golanska
10. Divna Vuksanović: Philosophy of Media and New Materialism: Relations and Comparisons
11. Žilvinė Gaižutytė-Filipavičienė: Visibility as a Capital in Mediated Culture: The Case of Lithuanian Actor and TV-Host Vytautas Šapranauskas
12. Sanja Kuveljić Bandić: Silver Stories
13. Lucie Zekova: (Non)productivity in Czech organic milk production
    5) Im/possible Arrivals, Im/possible Survivals: Abandonment in/as New Materialist Perspective(s)Peta Hinton and Kathrin Thiele
14. Kathrin Thiele: Post/human Conundrums: Abandoning (to) Human Exceptionalism Without Giving Up Specificity
15. Peta Hinton and Xin Liu: Demonic Abandonment and the Im/possible Arrival of New Materialism’s “White Optics”: Rethinking the Moral Economy of Critique
16. Hanna Meiβner: Materialism Without Substance: Social (Trans)Formations and Inaccessible Heterogeneity

Sunday October 4th
10.00 – 11.30 Conference with keynote Vera Bühlmann – Incandescent materialism, literacy in quantum writing, Respondants: Olga Cielemecka and Monika Rogowska, Chair: Aislinn O’Donnell
11.30 Break
11.30 – 13.00 Parallel Panel Session THREE:
1) Techno-Ecologies, Environmental Concerns and Feminist Materialisms: Ethics and Epistemologies
Chair: Ljiljana Rogac Mijatovic

1. Cecilia Åsberg: Human Nature at the Edge of Time: New Materialisms within Feminist Environmental Posthumanities
2. Dagmar Lorenz-Meyer: Interferences in ‘mirror land’?
3. Pat Treusch: Robotic Companionship in the Kitchen – Discussing the Socio-techno Ecologies of Contemporary Configurations of Humans and Robots
   2) Bodies Redistributed and Reconceptualized
   Chair: Maria Tamboukou
4. Elif Madakbaş Gülener and İştar Gözaydin: Human Milk Bank Discussions in Turkey: An Analysis in the Framework of Epistemic Authority and Epistemic Trust
5. Zuzana Štefková: Enemies of Good Art: Maternal Activism
6. Basia Nikiforova and Kestutis Sapoka: The Body Reconceptualization as Challenge for New Materialism: the Cases of S & P Stanikas and Evaldas Jansas
7. Marja Vehviläinen: Self, Eating, and Gendered Politics of Nature
   3) New Materialist Pedagogies
   Chair: Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir
8. Olga Cielemęcka and Monika Rogowska-Stangret: Vulnerable academic performances
9. Jane Durie – Disrupting epistemic and embodied violence in the context of the “Aboriginal woman”
10. Corinna Bath: Diffracting Car Body Development and Gender Studies
11. Jelena Djurić: Knowledge Economy and Sustainable Education
    4) Information and Political Agency
    Chair: Lai Ma
12. Nico Carpentier: Enriching Laclau and Mouffe’s Discourse Theory. A Plea for Discursive material Analyses
13. Tobias Matzner: Knowledges and the struggle for agency
14. Michele Rapoport: Choosing and Acting Freely in Smart, Persuasive Environments
15. Paulo Jesus – Utopia, heterotopia, and polytopias: On utopianism as the material poetics of political imagination
    5) Art in a New Materialist Key
    Chair: Kathrin Thiele
16. Vlatko Ilić: Knowledge and the Experience of Performing Arts
17. Mariana Pérez Bobadilla: The Children of unquiet: Unleashing New Materialist possibilities of Knowledge through Art
18. Mirko Nikolić: A Flat Ecology “Must Be Made”: Situated Performance as a Critical-Speculative Posthumanist Practice
19. Dorota Golańska: Vibrating Flows, Sonic Becomings: Towards a New-Materialist Concept of Art as Energy
    13.00 – 14.00 Lunch
    14.00 – 15.15 Closing Roundtable (Chair: Sigrid Schmitz): Tomaž Keresteš, Doris Allhutter, Diana Coole, Katerina Kolozova, Anna Hickey-Moody, Vera Bühlmann, N.N.
    15.15 – 16.00 Closing Remarks (Iris van der Tuin): Announcement of the 2016 Conference
    16.00 – 19.30 City sightseeing and attractions tour
    19.30 – Closing dinner with drinks

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS

Dr. Vera Bühlmann
Dr. Vera Bühlmann is a media theorist and philosopher. She teaches at the Architectural Department of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology ETH in Zurich, where she is co-founder and head of the applied virtuality theory lab at the Chair for Computer Aided Architectural Design CAAD. The vectors of her recent work revolve around mathesis as the art of thinking, computability as literacy and cryptography as algebraic script. She is author of Die Nachricht, ein Medium. Generische Medialität, Städtische Architektonik (ambra, Vienna 2014), and co-editor of Pre-specifics (jrp|ringier, Zurich 2009), Printed Physics (springer, Vienna 2012), Sheaves–When Things Are Whatever Can Be The Case (ambra, Vienna 2013), EigenArchitecture (ambra, Vienna 2013), Domesticating Symbols (ambra, Vienna 2014), A Quantum City (forthcoming: Birkhäuser 2015).

Prof. Diana Coole
Diana Coole is Professor of Political and Social Theory in the Department of Politics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her publications include Negativity and Politics. Dionysus and Dialectics from Kant to Poststructuralism (Routledge, 2000), Merleau-Ponty and Modern Politics after Anti-Humanism (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) and, edited with Samantha Frost, The New Materialisms. Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Duke, 2010). She is also the author of numerous articles that reflect her research interests in existential phenomenology, critical theory, feminism and gender politics, biopolitics, the body and the new materialism. Recent publications relevant to the new materialism are Agentic Capacities and Capacious Historical Materialism: Thinking with New Materialisms in the Political Sciences’, Millennium vol. 41.3 (2013) andDer neue Materialismus: Die Ontologie und Politik der Materialisierung’ in Susanne Witzgall and Kerstin Stakemeier eds, Macht des Materials/Politik der Materialitat (Zurich-Berlin: Diaphanes 2014). Diana recently held a 3-year major research fellowship awarded by the Leverhulme Trust, which has allowed her to pursue critical interests in the population question, demographic change and the environment.

Prof. Katerina Kolozova
Prof. Katerina Kolozova is the director and a professor at the Institute in Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje. She is also a visiting professor at several universities in Former Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. In 2009, Kolozova was a visiting scholar at the Department of Rhetoric (Program of Critical Theory) at the University of California-Berkeley. She is is the author of “The Cut of the Real: Subjectivity in Poststucturalist Philosophy,” NY: Columbia University Press: 2014. Her forthcoming publication is “Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism: Marx and Laruelle” (Brooklyn NY: Summer 2015).

Dr. Anna Hickey-Moody
Dr. Anna Hickey-Moody is the Co-Director of the Disability Research Centre [https://www.gold.ac.uk/disability-research/] and Head of the Centre for The Arts and Learning, at Goldsmiths. Her work focusses on the politics of disability, youth arts practices, gender and cultural geography. She is interested in generating new stories about disadvantaged and disabled youth in ways that do not re-inscribe marginalization. Recently she has been developing a concept of little public spheres, which theorises disadvantaged young people’s creative practices as forms of civic participation. Anna also researches and publishes on masculinity and is interested in the politics and aesthetics of masculinity as embodied critique of institutionalized patterns of hegemony. She has edited a number of collected works, most recently an anthology on new materialism, arts practice and cultural resistance out with Rowman and Littlefield later this year. She is currently completing a book on the politics of educational imaginaries, place and affect with Valerie Harwood and Samantha McMahon.

KEYNOTE RESPONDENTS
Dr. Beatriz Revelles Benavente
Dr. Beatriz Revelles-Benavente is researcher at the research group GENTIC, at the University Oberta de Catalunya (UOC). She has received her doctorate on December, 2014 with a thesis titled: “Gender, Politics and Communication in the making: Understanding Toni Morrison’s work in the Information Society.” In 2014, she was a visiting scholar at the Department of Feminist Studies at the University of Santa Cruz, California. Revelles-Benavente was the head of the organizing committee of the V New Materialist Conference held in 2014 in Barcelona and contemporarily a board member of the Association Atgender. Her publications include chapters in books (as the recently published volume on “Teaching with Feminist Materialisms” and articles and book reviews in journals such as the European Journal of Women’s Studies.

Prof. Gregg Lambert
Prof. Gregg Lambert is Dean’s Professor of the Humanities at Syracuse University and Principal Investigator of the Central New York Humanities Corridor, an Andrew W. Mellon funded research network among Cornell University, University of Rochester, Syracuse University and the Liberal Arts Colleges of the New York Six Consortium. Professor Lambert has published several books: In Search of a New Image of Thought: Gilles Deleuze and Philosophical Expressionism (2012); On the New Baroque (2008); Who’s Afraid of Deleuze and Guattari? (2008); The Return of the Baroque in Modern Culture (2005); The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze (2003), and Report to the Academy (re: The New Conflict of the Faculties) (2001). Forthcoming are: Return Statements: A Critique of Post-Secular Reason , Philosophy After Friendship, and To Have Done with the State of Exception: 3 Essays on Sovereignty Today.

Dr. Basia Nikiforova
Dr. Basia Nikiforova is Associate Professor and Senior Research Fellow at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute in Vilnius, Lithuania. Her areas of specialization are Sociology and Philosophy of Religion. She is a widely published scholar who is currently Deputy Editor-in-Chief of the journal Creativity Studies and MC substitute in the COST Action IS1307 New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on “How Matter Comes to Matter”.

Dr. Olga Cielemecka
Dr. Olga Cielemecka received her PhD from the University of Warsaw, Poland, where she also lectured on history of philosophy, ethics, and feminist theory. In 2013/2014 she was a research assistant at Wirth Institute for Austrian and Central European Studies at University of Alberta in Canada. She is a member of a European network ‘New Materialism: Networking the European Scholarship on “How Matter Comes to Matter”’. She brings together research within the domains of contemporary philosophy, feminist theory and posthumanism in order to rethink the concepts of the subject, community, and collaboration.

Dr. Monika Rogowska-Stangret
Dr. Monika Rogowska-Stangret is a theorist and researcher in the fields of philosophy, gender studies and animal studies. She collaborates with the Institute of Philosophy, University of Warsaw, where she currently teaches at the Institute of Philosophy and at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences. She defended her PhD thesis entitled “The Body – Beyond Otherness and Sameness. Three Figures of the Body in Contemporary Philosophy” at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (October 2013). She is a Member of Management Committee of European network: “New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’”, European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), Action IS 1307. In 2010/2011 Monika received fellowship from The Kosciuszko Foundation and she was a fellow at Rutgers. The State University of New Jersey.