Seminar on Contempary Cultural Theory

Starting Thursday September 18, the Centre for the Humanities will launch a new seminar on contemporary cultural theory. The idea for the seminar was conceived by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin (both at Media and Cultural Studies) who will chair the sessions.

In the seminar we plan to (close) read texts that are valuable to the humanities as a whole. As such, the seminar differs from the Deleuze seminar and Why Theatre (since we read more broadly) as well as What’s Cooking and the Media seminar (as we do not focus on our own work). We would like the seminar to be open to anyone interested; colleagues, PhD students, BA/ MA/ RMA students, but also those who work outside of academia are more than welcome.

If you would like to attend the only thing we ask of you is to read the text we are about to discuss with the greatest care (don’t worry, they are all of exceptionally high level, so they are good to read). You are not asked to attend all meetings. They do not compose a whole, nor do they build up knowledge in that one text is a necessary introduction to the one following. There are no credits to be given, there are no lectures planned. We just like to read good texts. And we would like you to join in.

Come couch with us,

Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin

Location: KNG 29 curatorenkamer (N.B.: Oct 2 Janskerkhof 13 room 006)

Time: Thursdays starting September 18th from 13.15 until 14.45 (you
can bring your lunch)

Themes: The seminar as we would like to develop it, works around a series of themes. Future themes are of course open to discussion. This time we picked a theme which we thought would be interesting to many of you.

First Theme: Naturecultures: Materialist Explorations of the Embodied Mind

As a start we propose a series of key texts that show how we as cultured humans are always already in nature and how nature is necessarily cultured. As opposed to the transcendental and humanist traditions that never stop haunting us, these texts propose materialist perspectives that travel the fluxes of matter and mind, body and soul, nature and culture.

Schedule:

18 September   Claire Colebrook: Postmodernism is a Humanism

25 September – Manuel Delanda: The Geology of Morals: a
Neo-Materialist Interpretation
http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/geology.htm

2 October –    Rosi Braidotti: Transpositions (Ch. 3 Transplants: Transposing Nature)

9 October –     Michel Serres & Bruno Latour: Conversations on Science, Culture and Time (Ch. 3 Demonstration and Interpretation)

16 October –     Brian Massumi: Parables for the Virtual (Ch. 8 Strange Horizons: Buildings, Biograms, and the Body Topologic).

23 October -  Alfred North Whitehead: Process and Reality (Ch. 2 The Extensive Continuum)

30 October –     Shaun Gallagher: How the Body Shapes the Mind (Ch. 1 The Terms of Embodiment and Ch. 10 Before You Know It)

13 November -  Sara Ahmed: Queer Phenomenology (Ch. 1 Orientations Toward Objects)

20 November -  Karen Barad: Meeting the Universe Halfway (Ch. 2 Diffractions: Differences, Contingencies, and Entanglements That Matter)

27 November -  John Mullarkey: Post-Continental Philosophy: an Outline (Ch. laatste h)

We will compile several readers and place them in a pigeonhole at the KNG 29 (first floor) and the Janskerkhof 13 (ground floor). Please make a copy of the texts and put them back.

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