Due to the pandemic this event was canceled.
Join us on Wednesday 15 April for the lecture The Critical Posthumanities with media theorist Rosi Braidotti.
Wednesday 15 April 2020, 16.00 – 18.00
Master Institute of Visual Cultures, Parallelweg 21-23, ‘s-Hertogenbosch
Entrance is free.
Drinks afterwards
This lecture is built on the assumption that we are currently situated in a posthuman convergence between the Fourth Industrial Age and the Sixth Extinction, between and advanced knowledge economy, which perpetuates patterns of discrimination and exclusion, and the threat of climate change devastation for both human and non-human entities. This convergence calls for a posthuman critical intervention in the form of intersecting critiques of western humanism on the one hand and of anthropocentrism on the other.
Rosi Braidotti discusses in this lecture the impact of this convergence upon three major areas: the constitution of our subjectivity; the general production of knowledge and the practice of the academic Humanities. It addresses directly the following questions: what are the implications of the fact that knowledge production is no longer the prerogative of academic or formal scientific institutions like the university? What are we to make of the sudden growth of new trans-disciplinary hubs that call themselves: the Environmental and Digital Humanities, the Medical, Neural and Bio-Humanities, and also the Public, Civic and Global Humanities and so on?
This lecture offers both a genealogy of these Critical Posthumanities and a theoretical framework by which to assess them.
Biography Rosi Braidotti
Rosi Braidotti is a university professor at Utrecht University. She received honorary degrees from the Universities of Helsinki (2007) and Linkoping (2013). Braidotti is fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (2009), member of the Academia Europaea (2014) and Knight in the Order of the Dutch Lion (2005). Her recent publications are: Nomadic Subjects (2011) and Nomadic Theory (2011) (Columbia UP), The Posthuman (2013) and Posthuman Knowledge (2019) (Polity).
In 2016 Braidotti was co-editor of Conflicting Humanities with Paul Gilroy and in 2018 she edited The Posthuman Glossary (Bloomsbury Academic) with Maria Hlavajova.
Lecture series
The Performative Defiance Lecture Series is an initiative of the Autonomy Research Chair at the Centre of Applied Research for Art, Design and Technology (Caradt), organized in collaboration with and hosted by the Master Institute of Visual Cultures. Its aim is to provide within Avans University an open, public forum where some of the foremost national and international voices challenge us to think about and discuss the role of art and design for the creation of a different future, to imagine another kind of world, the kind of world we wish to live in.
The notion performative defiance refers to creative practices that depart from the idea of the future as a mere update of the present and calls for a recharge of aesthetic practice that turns complicity into defiance. What is required of art and design is an aesthetic mobilization to unsettle and then create the conditions that will ensure our survival and enhance our capacity to create and resist in the future. Performative defiance is therefore an articulation of a creative longing for a desirable future that lends itself to a counter position set against the deadlock of the present and against the symbolic misery of our time.
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Watch previous lectures online
The lecture by Rosi Braidotti is the fifth public lecture in the Performative Defiance Lecture Series. The previous lectures can be viewd on the Youtube Channel of the Master Institute of Visual Cultures.
#1 Brian Holmes, After Chimerica: Art and Bioregionalism in the Anthropocene
#2 Justin O’Connor, Creative Industries in China: From Catch-Up to Cold War 2.0
#3 Patricia Reed, Xenofeminism and Planetary Orientation
#4 Geert Lovink, Sad by Design: Notes on the Networked Psyche