Posthumanism in Practice (CfP)

Readers of this blog are warmly encouraged to consider submitting an abstract to this edited collection, which is seeking chapters by artists and makers, as well as scholars of all backgrounds. I have worked with both the collection editors (Matthew Hayler and Christine Daigle) and the series editors (Matthew Hayler and Danielle Sands) in relation to my work with the Critical Posthumanism Network, and highly recommend the experience!

“It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas.” This claim by Marilyn Strathem is quoted and given many variations in Donna Haraway’s Staying With the Trouble (2016). Ideas are assemblages that emerge from the various entanglements in which we exist and that constantly shape what we are and can be. Ideas spring from the dynamic material engagments humans have with one another and with the other beings and objects in our worlds. Therefore, our manner of engaging, the very practices we adopt to think, feel, experience, and theorise our entanglements, matter a great deal. As Karen Barad famously posited, “knowing does not come from standing at a distance and representing but rather from a direct material engagement with the world” (2007, 49): the ways in which we engage determine our knowing.

Critical posthumanism seeks to challenge contemporary anthropocentric and Humanist worldviews, and to establish new ways to conceive of ourselves and the environments and relationships in which we arc enmeshed. It has become clear that new thoughts and actions are needed as posthumanism demonstrates its usefulness. For this to be possible, we need to engage in thinking differently, shaking off old habits, embracing new methodologies, and rediscovering, or listening for the first time, to what has come before, or is going on right now, in other disciplines, cultures, and the actions of humans and non-humans. Putting posthumanism into practice, in short, demands exploratory, attentive, and speculative ventures that may, as yet, be unconventional in an academic setting, but generate new ideas and ways of acting. Posthumanism in practice also seeks to create ways and objects of knowing co-produced across the arts, humanities, and sciences, across sectors, disciplines, practitioners, and species. It asks: how is your practice, whatever your field of activity, transformed when enlivened by posthumanist ideas?

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Mobilities: MA in Global Media Management Annual Symposium

Today marks the sixth annual GMM symposium, an attempt to foster critical exchange between students, staff and external speakers and attendants at Winchester School of Art. This year’s symposium is taking place entirely online, through a series of Microsoft Teams webcasts and breakout groups. Fittingly our theme is ‘Mobilities’, looking at the ways technology, location, embodiment, and … Read more

(CfP) We are all Monsters/We are all Saints: Haunted Migrations and LatIndigenous Ghost Story

You still have two weeks to send in an abstract for this fantastic-looking edited collection, under contract with the new University Press of Mississippi’s Horror and Monstrosity Studies Series. The collection is edited by Dr Shantel Martinez.

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Artist Talk with David Blandy (16 June 2020)

How to Fly (2020)

On Tuesday, 16 June 2020 I’ll be talking with British artist David Blandy about his newest work, two specially commissioned videos (How to Fly and How to Live). This online event is hosted by Southampton’s John Hansard Gallery, and I’ll be joined by Jussi Parikka, who is leading and moderating the discussion.

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Testimonials from Online Teaching

Over the next few weeks the teaching team for the MA in Global Media Management will be sharing short testimonials on our blog, with some loose impressions and images of what it’s been like to teach online during the COVID-19 lockdown. These will appear every Wednesday and Friday—you can find mine below: “The last few … Read more

Call for Proposals: Neo-Victorian Decadence (Brill’s Neo-Victorian Series)

A new CfP has just come out, for a new entry in Brill’s Neo-Victorian book series. Details below: Contributions are invited for a collection of essays on the theme of Neo-Victorian Decadence planned to appear in Brill’s Neo-Victorian Series in 2022 (www.brill.com/nvic). The volume’s contents will be partly based on papers delivered at an international conference … Read more

‘Mobilities’ Study Visit to Somerset House

Every year the MA in Global Media Management that I teach on sponsors a series of events and talks around a chosen theme. This includes an annual study visit.

This year’s theme was ‘Mobilities’—in the broad sense, but specifically looking at the ways technology, location, embodiment, and identity inform people’s access to and relationship with the wider world. And shortly before the pandemic closures began we took a study visit to London.

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Unbound: Visionary Women Collecting Textiles

Over the last few weeks we’ve all had to come to terms with cancelled trips, gatherings, and celebrations. Many more plans will likely be cancelled over the coming weeks and months. For me the hardest thing hasn’t been the confinement. I’m a homebody anyway, and have grown comfortable with quiet and isolation. For me the hardest thing has been a lack of new stimulus and input. My way of coping with and processing the world involves a lot of wandering and observation, of looking at new things in new spaces, and using them to think about old things in new ways. Now that I live near London, the ever-changing parade of exhibitions and events on offer has been a welcome distraction and balm against the stresses of work and life.

Today I’m the feeling loss of this distraction acutely. As excellent as the internet and my home media library have been, entertainment you have to curate for yourself is never quite the same as entertainment curated for you by others! And it doesn’t offer the same magical feeling a ‘day out’ can grant you. Tate Britain’s Aubrey Beardsley exhibition, for instance, was something I’d been looking forward to for months. Another exhibition I’d been looking forward to was Two Temple Place’s Unbound: Visionary Women Collecting Textiles, which I had planned to visit at the end of March.

Happily, the latter has now started exploring various ways to take women’s textile collections online. The original exhibition set out to celebrate ‘seven pioneering women who saw beyond the purely functional, to reveal the extraordinary artistic, social and cultural importance of textiles’.

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‘The Carrier Bag of Feminist Pedagogy: Zine-Making as Training in the Neoliberal University’

A few months back I wrote about a zine-related workshop I was involved in organising. Since that workshop, I have done more work on (and research into) zine practice. Today, that work has resulted in an academic article and Creative Practice piece, published together with Dr Mihaela Brebenel on the Open Access journal MAI: Feminism and Visual Culture. I’m very pleased to have our work up on this journal, and even more excited to be part of an excellent new special issue on ‘Feminist Pedagogies’. Check out the other pieces at this link!

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Discussing Deviance at Winchester School of Art

Photos from the Winchester School of Art launch of Gothic Remixed are now available in this event report on the MA Global Media Management blog. Thank you to everyone who could join us! It was wonderful to celebrate with you, and to hear more about the other book presented at the launch, Fashion Crimes: Dressing for Deviance (ed. Jo Turney)

Image © Dr Estrella Sendra

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