Thursday February 14, 2013

Friday February 15, 2013

Agential Realism I: Applications

Anna Stetsenko: Transformative Activist Stance and Agential Realism

Marsha Rosengarten: What Barad’s Brittlestars can tell us about ethics, research practice and the disagreeable findings of randomised controlled trials OR why the claim ‘brainless’ is ok.

Natasha Mauthner: Agential realism: A new philosophical starting place for qualitative research

Claudia Castañeda: Feminist Materialism and the Transgendered Child-Body

Moderator: Benjamin Haber

Agential Realism II: Science & Technology

Josef Barla: Rethinking agency and power with/in technology-body entanglements. Towards an agential realist philosophy of technology and apparatuses of bodily production

Doris Allhutter: The re-enactment of difference and sociality in information systems design

Emily York: An Agential Realist Approach to the Emergence and Institutionalization of Nanoengineering

Lisa Weasel: Embodying Intersectionality: The Promise and Peril of the Post-Genomic Era for Feminist Science Studies

Moderator: Joshua Scannell, joshua.scannell@gmail.com

Bodies I: Sex, Capital, and Biopolitics

Sahar Sadjadi: Suppressing Puberty: The Child, the Brain and the Underwear

Kirk Fiereck: De/Materlializing Bodies: Sexual Ideologies, Capital and Personhood in the Rainbow Nation

Sigrid Vertommen: Property, labor and productivity in the bio-economy: a feminist materialist approach

Matthew Nesvet: Frozen in Time: The Cryopolitics of Human Egg Preservation

Moderator: Carole Vance

Bodies II: Embodiment and Power

Magdalena Gorska: Corporeal politics: Rethinking Intersectionality through Breathing

Kathryn Goldfarb: What the body remembers: Japanese child welfare and the feminist politics of care

Andrea Doucet: New Materialism and Embodied Fathering

Grit Hoppner: “Beautiful” Materialization Embodying the Phenomenon “Being Beautiful” using the Example of Viennese Retirees

Moderator: Terri Gordon

Toxic Worlds

Ali Kennar: Asthmatic Matters, Agential Realism, and Emerging Modes of Environmental Health-Care

Teena Gabrielson: The Normalized Toxic Body: Agency and Responsibility from the Perspectives of Risk and New Materialism

Bharat Venkat: Necrotic Tissue and Stagnant Air: Life, Action and Efficacy in the New Materialism

Peter Hobbs and Kelly Ladd: The Understories of Toronto’s Don Valley: Mapping the Toxic Commons

Moderator: Helena Hansen

Theorizing the Ontological Turn

Jami Weinstein: Wild Life: Toward a Posthumous In/Difference Ethics

Hanna Meissner: Material/ist Feminisms – a Diffractive Reading of Two (Ostensibly) Unrelated Traditions

Janet Wirth-Cauchon: Difference, Relationality and Change in New Materialist Feminism

Stephanie Clare: Fanon, Life, and Land: Finding the Politics of New Feminist Materialisms

Moderator: Linda Alcoff

Queering Neuroscience

Anelis Kaiser: Gender Matters and Gender Materialities in the Brain

Rebecca Jordan-Young: Fifty Shades of G(r)ay Matter

Victoria Pitts-Taylor: Queer Kinship and Neuro-Affection

Katarina Hamberg: Understanding sex/gender differences in neuroscience – stressing the context and focusing plasticity and embodiment

Moderator: Rayna Rapp, Rayna.Rapp@nyu.edu

Cognition, Affect, Consciousness

Rachel Weitzenkorn: The ontological boundaries reified and blurred through an analysis of cognitive neurosciences turn to “Resting State” activation

John Protevi: Plato, Political Affect and Lullabies

Julian Gill-Peterson: Problems of Attention:
Bioregularization, Digital Habituation, and New Childhood Pathologies

Moderator: Jesse Prinz (jesse@subcortex.com)

Multi-Species Entanglements

Dehlia Hannah, Lisa Jean Moore, Charlie Nichols & Eben Kirksey: The Xenopus Pregnancy Test: Multispecies Choreography

Kasi Jackson: Companion Species as an Alternative to Model Systems: Sheldon/Tiptree’s ‘The Psychologist Who Wouldn’t Do Awful Things to Rats’

Lisa Jean Moore & Mary Kosut: Honeybees Pollinating New York City: On the Material Cultures of an Insect

Moderator: Christina Nadler

(Epi)Genetics, Molecular Biology & Physics

Susan Oyama: The Lure of Immateriality in Accounts of Development and Evolution

Deboleena Roy and Banu Subramaniam: Situated Molecular Materialism: Feminist New Materialism and the Practices of Colonialism

Noela Davis: The Sociality of Biology: Epigenetics and the Molecularisation of the Social

Jeffrey Bussolini: Bodies as Matter: The Conceptualization and Treatment of Bodies in Nuclear Physics

Moderator: Rebecca Jordan-Young, ryoung@barnard.edu

Technobodies and the Virtual

Pat Treusch: Re-Debating Technobodies: On the Mattering of Humanoid Technologies

Sigrid Schmitz: How to grasp materiality’s agency? An attempt to follow communication in the landscapes of technologized brainbodies

Louise Horvath, Julia Grillmayr, Tanja Traxler: The Materialization of the Virtual

Rebekah Sheldon and Jamie Skye Bianco: #somethings

Moderator: Patricia Clough

Keynote: Karen Barad

Chair: Victoria Pitts-Taylor

Visiting New York

To learn about some of New York’s many attractions, please visit:www.nycgo.com.

Graduate Center, City University of New York

February 14-15, 2013

Keynote Speaker: Karen Barad

In the past decade, feminist theory has elaborated new materialist perspectives to re-imagine nature, biology, and matter more generally and to critically address new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience and other scientific disciplines. This scholarship revisits the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human and non-human and nature and culture, and elaborates on their mutual entanglements. New feminist theories address materialization as a complex and open process and matter as lively and productive.

This conference, organized jointly by the Center for the Study of Women and Society and the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the Graduate Center, will engage with feminist perspectives on the onto-epistemological questions raised by the materialist turn. We invite papers from various disciplines that address a wide range of issues, including, but not limited to:

- The intellectual and scientific context of the new turn toward materialism

- The relation of matter — including the biological body — to the social.

- The relation between new materialism and previous materialisms (such as Marxism and phenomenology) and particularly their feminist elaborations. What are the continuities and discontinuities between feminist materialisms from the 1970s thru the current moment?

- The insights, knowledge and methodologies offered by the new materialist studies of science.  What new frontiers have they opened? What can the “new sciences” offer for feminist theory?

- The political implications of neo-materialism for feminism as a project, theory and a movement for social justice. How can we account for durable hierarchies and the normative production of gender, race, class and sexuality within new materialist frameworks?

- Critical applications of “agential realism,” as elaborated by Karen Barad, and other theoretical innovations for addressing material-discursive relations and the epistemological questions they raise

- Empirical research using materialist feminist frameworks

Space for paper presentations is limited. To apply, please send an extended abstract of 1000 words and a short bio to feminism.science@gmail.com by November 1, 2012.

Friday, July 6th, 7pm
@ Proteus Gowanus, http://proteusgowanus.org/

South African researchers made a surprising discovery in 1934. When they injected the urine of a pregnant woman into a frog it laid hundreds of eggs. This trick earned members of this frog species, Xenopus laevis, a ticket around the world. The frog pregnancy test quickly became a standard test used by medical doctors as well as organizations like Planned Parenthood. Free pregnancy tests will be performed in the Proteus Gowanus gallery on Friday, July 6th. We will also share some simple laboratory skills. Frogs will be given away—free to good homes who are ready to use knowledge of this Do-It-Yourself test. No permanent harm is done to the frogs in testing and they can be reused multiple times.

Participatory: New York City Frog Survey
Saturday, July 14th, 7pm
@ Proteus Gowanus, http://proteusgowanus.org/

New York City pet stores sell Xenopus laevis frogs for cheap. In the 20th century this frog was widely used as a pregnancy test. Unbeknownst to anyone in this era, Xenopus can carry a deadly frog disease, the chytrid fungus. Shortly after Typhoid Mary spread disease among the people of New York, this frog started spreading chytrid around the world. Chytrid kills most frogs on contact and has already driven a number of species extinct in the wild. Right now about 3,900 amphibians, over half of all species known to science, are endangered. Help us discover if Xenopus is still spreading chytrid around New York City. Please visit your local pet shop and buy a frog! Sold under the common names of “Underwater Frog”, or “African Clawed Frog”, baby Xenopus are available for just a few dollars in stores in all five boroughs. Choose the color you’d like—white albinos and speckled brown frogs are both available. Write down the phone number and address of your local store and bring a frog along to the Proteus Gowanus gallery. We’ll test to see if your frog has the fungus, and show you how to treat your new friend if it is a carrier. We’ll also show you how to do the frog pregnancy test in the comfort of your own home. This crowd sourced research project will be part of an academic study. All participants are potential coauthors of a paper that will be submitted for publication.

For pictures of this frog, see:

http://tinyurl.com/brown-xenopus

http://tinyurl.com/albino-xenopus

More information: Dr. Eben Kirksey, ekirksey@gc.cuny.edu

All events are free and open to the public
Proteus Gowanus
543 Union Street, Brooklyn, NY 11215

http://proteusgowanus.org/

What secrets does the model’s body hold? What might it tell us about our technology-intensive society? Elizabeth Wissinger’s work explores the notion of “glamor labor,” and how the current state of productive and scientific technologies influence the bodily ideal. Having lived with a fashion photographer for several years as well as worked in the front lines herself, her work is an intimate and critical analysis of ways this industry influences us in more ways than we think.

Elizabeth Wissinger is an Associate Professor of Social Science at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

After presenting at the Multispecies Salon last November, Lori Gruen sat down with us to talk about her investigations in animal ethics.

Lori Gruen is a Professor of Philosophy, Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Environmental Studies at Wesleyan University.