Research

UPCOMING EVENTS

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Mattering: Feminism, Science & Materialism

CUNY Grad Center (NY, USA: February 14-15, 2013)
Jami Weinstein: "Wild Life: Toward a Posthumous In/Difference Ethics"

 

EVENTS ARCHIVE

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1. Affective Tendencies: Bodies, Pleasures, Sexualities

Rutgers University (NJ, USA: October 7-9, 2010), co-sponsored by SKOK University of Bergen

This conference addresses the question of how sexuality, pleasure and bodies constitute, at least in part, affective life. Affective tendencies, orientations, trajectories have regulated how we understand and experience bodies, pleasures, sexualities. How are we to understand affective life? How are our conceptions of the body altered and complicated through understanding affective forces? Joy and sadness, as much as passion and desire, expand or contract our worlds, while they link bodies in particular styles of living in the world. How are relations of power - those that constitute relations of oppression, whether in terms of gender, race, class, nationality, religion or sexuality - to be understood following the 'affective turn'? How is sexuality to be understood affectively? How is affect to be understood sexually? Are pleasures sexual? Are they
always forms of joy? Keynotes by: Lauren Berlant, Leo Bersani, David Eng, and Jasbir Puar.

Jami Weinstein "Posthuman Affect"

 

2. Evolution and Extinction: Reconsidering Race, Sex/Gender, and Ethics

Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (Montreal, CA: November 4-6, 2010)

Problem: we’re stuck in a stalemate. Feminist and queer theorists have been spinning their cognitive wheels for a long time over the role, value, meaning, and implications of the notions of sex and gender but, to date, have not arrived at any sort of definitive theoretical stance toward either of them individually or both taken together. Even those thinkers who carefully engage with evolutionary theory in insightful and original ways seem to end up falling short of undermining the basic principles that would need to be repudiated in order to make feminism obsolete, i.e. annihilate sexism. We will argue here that the underlying reason for this has to do not with the fact that we have to better understand sex and gender or sexual difference, nor does it have to do with ranking various differences according to a hierarchy of ontology and epistemology, or of constitutive and contingent, rather we need to look through evolution differently. We need to exercise caution in our research about sex and gender so as not to create or reinforce other hierarchies of difference such as white non-white and human-nonhuman. We need to see the infinite multiplicity of sex. We need to use it to get beyond humanism and its pernicious binary logics, those that reinforce the logics of sexism, racism, speciesism and the like. And we need to see that the debunking of humanism will put us face to face with the concept of our extinction. Once we arrive there, we might come to understand that in the face of the reality of our extinction, the human species might, finally, be presented with a genuine ethics, with a sense of what it owes to place (ethos) and to those beyond its own organic life (the future). If it is not presupposed that the only life worthy of consideration is ethico-political – or, having to do with a sense of ethos, polity, abode or dwelling – then one might consider those modes of life that are not defined by milieu. In relation to the human one might ask whether modes of living and modes of relation could exist without the assumption of a ‘we’, and without the assumption that ‘we’ are worthy of living on; one might ask whether the future should not be saved for another mode of life altogether. Such a question might force a consideration of what is worthy of survival, even if such survival appears, today, to be less than certain.

Myra J. Hird "Becoming Sex and Race: A Conversation with Darwin and Grosz"
Jami Weinstein "The Move to Genre: Evolution and Imperceptibility"

 

3. Between Bodies: Emotion - Sense - Affect

Uppsala University Body/Embodiment Symposium (Uppsala, SWE: November 18-19, 2010)

The symposium takes its point of departure from the role of the body as a centre for emotions, sensations and affectivity. It enquires into the relation between inner emotions and their expression in outer forms of behavior. It asks questions concerning the role of emotion and affectivity as foundational for intellectual life, for thinking, rationality and communication. It highlights the vast milieu of meetings between human and animal, nature and technology, self and other which constitute and are constituted by bodies. By examining the idea of bodies and embodiment as transgressive in a number of different ways, we put focus on bodily boundaries, points of meeting/melting/tension, kinship and skinship between bodies of different kind and different singular experiences; making manifest the interrelationality of drawing boundaries and constituting singularities, differences and commonalities.

Jami Weinstein "Posthuman Affects: The Ontology, Methodologies, and Promise of Affective Theorizing"
Ulrika Dahl "Femmebodiment: Notes on Queer Feminine Shapes of Vulnerability"

 

4. Against Life

American Comparative Literature Association Conference (Vancouver, CA: April 1-3, 2011)

Seminar Organizers: Stephanie Youngblood (U of Wisconsin Madison); Alastair Hunt (Portland State U)

     At a moment when everyone seems to be asking, again, what can the humanities do for life? This seminar asks a new question: What is the place of life in the humanities? Our premise is that the humanities have of late encountered two limits of “life” as an enabling trope. The first is biopolitics, in which life becomes the ground upon which political decisions are made concerning lives which do and do not deserve to live. The second limit is found in various accounts of ethics that, even on the far side of deconstruction, take life as that which, however refigured and resignified, must ultimately be defended.
     In response to this turn to life, and drawing on the emphasis on vitality evoked in the conference theme itself, this seminar interrogates “life” as a figure for the ends of critique in the humanities. In what ways is this emphasis on life, and on a life that deserves to live, detrimental to a shared ethico-political project? How does the rendering and deployment of life foster conditions antithetical to its ostensible aims? What would an ethics and a politics insubordinate to life look like? Can the humanities productively declare itself to be against life? Some possible areas of interest, alongside ethics and biopolitics, include: vitalism and vitality, reproductive rights, ecology, queer life, the body, end-of-life debates, affect and social responsiveness, animal life, and testimony.  Participants included: Alastair Hunt, Stephanie Youngblood, Matthias Rudolf, Annie Moore, Lee Edelman, Branka Arsic, James Penney, Anne-Lise François, Penelope Deutscher, and Donna V. Jones.

Jami Weinstein "The Blasphemy of Life"
 

5. Tema Genus Higher Seminar • Myra Hird & Jami Weinstein

May 31st, 14:15-17:00 
Location: Room Delfi, Tema Building, Linköping University Language: English

Myra J. Hird  “Volatile Bodies, Volatile Earth: Towards an Ethic of Vulnerability”
Several decades of intensive scholarship around the interchange between the human and nonhuman focuses on the extent to which humankind is impacting upon the biophysical world and the ways in which other-than-human entities react back. In many ways, this concern has reinforced the assumption that the most significant juncture is that which lies between humans and everything else. This talk introduces a larger project which aims to interrogate this premise by redirecting attention to what is, arguably, a much more important juncture on the planet we happen to inhabit: that which divides and connects the living and non living, life and matter, the organic and inorganic, the biosphere and geosphere. Many contemporary issues – from climate change to energy crises, pathogen emergence to extinction – demand not only that we explore the inter-zone between the human and the nonhuman, but that we push on into regions where constitutive processes involve entities, forces and encounters that are overwhelmingly other-than-human. This has implications beyond simply affirming that the social is assembled out of heterogeneous materials or co-enacted with nonhuman others. In this talk, I trace the evolution of my research microontologies. Microontologies speaks to the deep time origins of sexual difference, sex entangled within and through bodies as ongoing productions, sex's remark-able yet largely unrecognized diversity within and between biophysical, biocultural and biodigital strata, and the radical asymmetry challenging post-Kantian humanism. Thinking through this radical asymmetry in terms of metabolism leads to my current research aimed at developing of an ethics of vulnerability.

Jami Weinstein “Posthumous Life: Toward an Inhuman Ethico-politics”
I aim to investigate the ways in which “life” might be counterintuitive to ethico-politics. Insofar as the concept “life” is a defining trope in the humanities, it becomes the ‘that which cannot but be maintained as sacred,’ an irreducible given, and signals an adherence to a basic form of humanism. In thinking beyond the human and humanism, we must also relinquish a certain claim to life as thus sacred. For, how can we account for the immaterial forces, the pre-accelerated motor of self-overcoming, and the ultimate inevitability of human extinction in the face of this sanctity of life? In this culture of life, which includes the politics of right to life, quality of life campaigns, considerations about whose lives matter, and even algorithms to attach a financial value to a person’s life for the purposes of insuring it, it seems possible that a less euphemistic and more genuine ethico-political stance might be found by subverting the claims to life as a foundation for analysis. Perhaps turning to questions of genocide and extinction, to the inhuman, might provide more productive and interesting analytical tools for developing normative and political theories. This paper will interrogate that possibility. 

 

6. Conflict Zones: Genocide, Extinction, and the Inhuman

Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy conference (Philadelphia, USA: Oct. 19-22)

Claire Colebrook: "Ethics of Extinction"
Sarah Clark Miller: "Corporeally Inscribed Conflict: Moral Harm and Genocidal Rape"
Jami Weinstein: "Posthumous Life: Toward an Inhuman Ethico-politics" 

 

7. Theory Sex Matters

 

Sexual difference theory has become one of the cornerstones of continental feminist philosophy over the past couple of decades. While its historical relevance remains clear, we want to investigate ways in which we might move the discussion to another level. Thinking about how we might retain the import of sexual difference by employing the concept as a theoretical and methodological tool instead of seeing it as a fundamental ontological fact might be one avenue to explore. In turn, this might help us realign our focus by moving away from the notion of sexual difference and its inextricable humanistic bent and toward notions of sex and reproduction reinterpreted from a microontological perspective. This seminar will attend to those methodological and ontological reinterpretations toward the aim of "thinking differently."

The workshop is organized by the The Finnish Research School in Women’s and Gender Studies but also other PhD students working on the thematic field of gender studies within different disciplines may apply. The number of students will be limited to 10. 

Applications specifying interest as well as the stage of doctoral studies and dissertation work should be sent by e-mail to: spt-tohtoriohjelma@helsinki.fi by Friday 21.10.2011. 

Please follow the Research School website for a reading list and further instructions on the workshop session: http://www.naistutkimuksentohtorikoulu.fi/english

 

8. Higher Seminar - Transgenres: Zoopolitics and The Dandy

9. Zoopolitics panel

Modern Language Association conference (Seattle: Jan. 5-8, 2012)

Seminar Organizer: Alastair Hunt (Portland State U)
Participants: Mario Ortiz-Robles (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Ron Broglio (Arizona State University), Nicole Shukin (University of Victoria in British Columbia)
Respondant: Jami Weinstein (Linköping University)

     For two thousand years theories of politics have offered variations on Aristotle’s claim that the human being is an animal whose extra-added capacity for language raised it above mere animal life to a properly political existence. Recently, however, Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben have suggested that the modern human being is an animal whose politics places his existence as a living being in question. For Foucault, biopolitics is a “bestialization of man achieved through the most sophisticated political techniques.” For Agamben, “the decisive political conflict, which governs every other conflict, is that between the animality and humanity of man.” At the same time as they bring into clear focus the understanding that what is at stake in contemporary politics is the life we share with animals, however, they exclude the living in general from its empirical effects. As a result, contemporary biopolitical theory somewhat paradoxically takes for granted that we can decisively read the distinction between those who are really animals and those who are animals only by virtue of a figure of biopolitical speech. 
     The contributors to the proposed panel—all exciting new voices in animal studies—suggest that biopolitics works by managing this distinction between literal and figurative animals in a more complex manner. We take seriously the illegibility of the human/animal difference implied in the description of biopolitics as a “bestialization of man” or a conflict between “the animality and humanity of man.” In doing so, we see several important questions emerge. How are we to separate the political animality of the human being from the supposedly apolitical animality of the animal? If we admit that biopolitics indiscriminately targets all forms of animal life, how is the appearance of the human species within the biological continuum a primary biopolitical effect? In what way is the act of deciding between humanity and animality a predicament of language and literature? Is politics possible because human beings alone out of all living beings have language or because language is a mark of animality as much as humanity? In short, how might rethinking biopolitics as zoopolitics help us understand the figure of the “political animal”?

 

10. INTERGENDER Doctoral Course - Life Matters: Microlife, Species, and Extinction

Linköping University (May 2-4, 2012)
Claire Colebrook - "Framing the End of Species"
Myra Hird - "Microlife: Waste, FLow, Care, and an Ethic of Vulnerability"
Jami Weinstein - "Wild Life: Outside the Bounds of Species"

No question could seem simultaneously more trite and more important that the question "what is life?" However unoriginal, if we are going to understand the way the concept of life implies a humanistic conception that becomes a defining almost sacred trope in the humanities (thus locating it squarely within humanism), we are going to have to first understand what we mean by life. This doctoral course will, thus, aim to address life matters--both the matter of life and which lives matter--and the ethics and politics that unfold from various analyses. From microlife all the way down, to the boundaries of species classification and what counts as life, we will investigate the ways in which life as we currently and hegemonically conceptualize it implies an ethics and politics that are detrimental to life as we know it. Concepts like vulnerability and extinction, sustainability and protection, contamination, asymmetrical care, and materiality and imperceptibility will all play a role in framing these issues and defining both the stakeholders and what is at stake in matters pertaining to life.

More info at: www.intergender.net/

 

11. Feminist Epistemology, Methodologies, Metaphysics, and Science Studies Conference

Pennsylvania State University, USA (May 9-13, 2012)
Jami Weinstein - "Theory Sex as a Feminist Method"

 

12. Entanglements of New Materialisms

13. Joint Seminar in Philosophy and Ethics 

Center for Applied Ethics
Linköping University (Sept. 20, 2012 13:15-16:15)
KVA conference room, top floor, Key building, Campus Valla
Jami Weinstein: "Regarding a Posthumous In/Difference Ethics" 

 

 

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Last updated: Sat Feb 09 11:34:37 CET 2013