For further information on the following event, please contact:
Jeannette Silva-Flores: [log in to unmask]
With the support of the Warwick Institue for Advanced Studies, we are delighted to announce the forthcoming visit to Warwick of Karen Barad, Myra Hird and Elizabeth Wilson. Each of these scholars have considerable reputations in the field of interdisciplinary science studies. In their distinctive ways, Professors Barad, Hird and Wilson are providing new theoretical approaches which have their roots in feminism and which challenge conventional wisdoms of ontology and epistemology in the study of the social and natural through which they draw upon, inter alia, quantum physics, bacteria and artificial intelligence. Their visit will be of particular relevance to colleagues in psychology, sociology, politics, education, history, health and medicine, philosophy and gender studies. We believe this will prove to be a landmark intellectual event.
· THURSDAY 9 JUNE, 15:00-17:00, Gillian Rose Room (R3.25), Ramphal Building, 3rd Floor: READING GROUP In preparation for this visit, we have organised a reading group. Discussion will be facilitated by Steve Fuller. Further details of the readings can be obtained from Jeannette Silva-Flores ([log in to unmask])
· MONDAY 13 JUNE, 12:00-14:00, Gillian Rose Room (R3.25), Ramphal Building, 3rd Floor: (including lunch): Interdisciplinary Research Symposium: An exchange and discussion based on the work of Professors Wilson, Hird and Barad
· MONDAY 13 JUNE, 17:00-18:30, Room S0.21 Ground Floor Social Studies Building: Public Lecture: Myra Hird, Elizabeth Wilson and Karen Barad In Conversation: What can feminism, the human sciences and the natural sciences each learn from the others?’ Interlocuter: Professor Steve Fuller
· TUESDAY 14 JUNE, 10:30-12:00, Room SO.28 Ground Floor Social Studies Building: Early Career Advance Class: An opportunity to explore developing research in this area from Warwick early career colleagues and to explore further interdisciplinary and institutional linkages.
Organising Team
Professor Christina Hughes, Department of Sociology
Professor Steve Fuller, Department of Sociology
Professor Koen Lamberts, Department of Psychology
Professor Quassim Cassam, Department of Philosophy
Dr Claudia Stein, Centre for the History of Medicine
Dr Nick Lee, Warwick Institute of Education
Dr Karen Throsby, Department of Sociology
BIOGRAPHIES
Professor Karen Barad
Professor Barad originally trained as a theoretical particle physicist. She is particularly reknown for her development of the idea of ‘agential realism’ as a metaphyical and methodological interperetation of some of the classic quantum mechanics experiments of the 1920s which she then uses to understand physics as an embodied human practice. Here she provides us with two important concepts. The first is that of intra-action which enables her to convey how the distinction between the social and natural as separate entities arises out of specific intra-actions. The second is that of the agential cut which points to the ethical responsibility of all researchers of their role in the framing of research knowledge. Overall her work represents a reconfiguration of space, time, matter, causality, agency, subjectivity and objectivity. Her work includes: Queer Causation and the Ethics of Mattering,” in Queering the Non/Human, edited by N Giffney and M Hird. Ashgate Press (2008); "Schrödinger’s Cat,” in Bits of Life: Feminism and the New Cultures of Media and Technoscience, edited by A Smelik and N Lykke (University of Washington Press, 2008); Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007).
Professor Myra Hird
Professor Myra Hird studied with Lynn Margulis, the theorist of biological symbiosis and is now a Professor of Sociology at Queens University and Queen’s National Scholar. She has been working towards a generalised conception of ‘social life’ that would encompass not only the sorts of entities and processes conventionally studied by social scientists but also natural ecologies, animal collectives and even cellular and molecular formations. Indeed, in The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies (2009, MacMillan) Hird takes a microontological perspective to detail scientific research on bacterial capabilities such as perception, communication, community organization and symbiosis. In so doing she critically analyzes evolutionary theories about the development of the species (including neo-Darwinism, epigenetics and symbiogenesis). Her concerns are to also draw on bio-philosophical discussions of sexual difference, identity, environmentalism and ethics to provide a transdisciplinary framework with which to engage the social and natural sciences together to recognise bacterial liveliness in structuring social relations. Her further work includes: Sociology of Science: A Critical Canadian Introduction (Oxford, forthcoming), The Science of Social Relating (Palgrave, forthcoming), Sex, Gender and Science (Palgrave, 2004) and Engendering Violence: From Childhood to Adulthood (Ashgate, 2002).
Professor Elizabeth Wilson
Professor Elizabeth Wilson, a psychologist by training, is now a Professor of Women’s Studies at Emory University, Atlanta. Her work explores how biology, psychoanalysis and evolutionary theory can be used to break new ground. In her most recent book Affect and Artificial Intelligence (2010, University of Washington Press), Wilson draws on archival and unpublished material from the early years of AI (1945-70) until the present to show that early researchers were more engaged with questions of emotion that many commentators have assumed. She documents how affectivity was managed in the canonical works of Walter Pitts in the 1940s and Turing in the 1950s, in projects from the 1960s that injected artificial agents into psychotherapeutic encounters, in chess playing machines from the 1940s to the present, and in the Kismet (sociable robotics) project at MIT in the 1990s. Her text considers how humans, machines, affects, psyches and sexualities were affiliated as computations theory and computational devices were first being built. She is the author of Neural Geographies: Feminism and the Microstructure of Cognition (Routledge 1998) and Psychosomatic: Feminism and the Neurological Body (Duke 2004).