María del Rosario Acosta López (UC Riverside) "Grammars of Listening as Decolonial Grammars: Notes for a Decolonization of Memory" This talk engages in a self-critical reflection on the limits and decolonial potential of the project advanced by the author and entitled ‘grammars of listening’. In the first part, the author explores the theoretical context that […]

Valeria Meiller (Spanish and Portuguese, Georgetown) "Matadero Modelo: Argentine Rural Modernity Seen Through The Slaughterhouse” This work is an examination of the slaughterhouses built by the architect Francisco Salamone in the 1930s as spaces that hold valuable answers to how the meat industry helped shape a nation known worldwide for its meat production and steak […]

What happens when toxicity breaks through its spatial containment? How can a virus contaminate spheres, bodies, media, places and landscapes? How do parasites, viruses or toxins penetrate, subvert, destabilize and/or promote and establish power structures and economic paradigms? In this workshop, Gisela Heffes & Arndt Niebisch address these questions and highlight how the politics of […]

The Forgotten History of Operative Writing: Women's Contributions to Digital Literacy Sybille Krämer (Aesthetics and Culture of Digital Media, Leuphana University) with respondent Hank Gerba (Art & Art History, Stanford) What does writing mean, what does 'script' mean? Within the framework of the Western alphabetic form of literacy, the answer is usually: writing is fixed […]

We are pleased to announce that our next gathering will be held on Thursday, May 13 and will feature Jameelah Morris (Anthropology, Stanford) and Reagan Ross (Communication, Stanford). Our guest speakers have kindly shared the following description of their talks: Jameelah Morris (Anthropology, Stanford) - "No innocence to be found: On Gendered Anti-black Violence against Black Youth" In this presentation, […]

In her talk "The Inhuman and the Anarchist: Rafael Barrett’s Anthropodecentric Writings," Prof. Jennifer French (Williams College) will be continuing her exploration of the Hispano-Paraguayan anarchist Rafael Barrett (1876-1910) by focusing specifically on the anthropodecentric aspects of his writing. A pre-circulated paper by French on Barrett will provide an overview of his work, specifically his best-known […]

Our second Fall event featured McKenzie Wark (Media and Culture, Eugene Lang College, The New School) in conversation with Orlando Bentancor (Spanish and Latin American Cultures, Barnard College). McKenzie Wark is the author of, among other things, Molecular Red (Verso 2015) and Philosophy for Spiders: On the Low Theory of Kathy Acker (Duke UP 2021). Prof. Wark delivered a talk titled "Non-Politics and Non-Ecologies." Orlando Bentancor […]

Our third and last event of the Fall quarter featured Mary J. Weismantel (Anthropology, Northwestern University) and Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra. Our speakers will discussed Weismantel's new book Playing with Things: Engaging the Moche Sex Pots (University of Texas Press, 2021) in connection with Gamarra's artistic work on Indigenous objects. The event, co-sponsored by the Department of Art and Art History and the Stanford Archaeology Center, will take place TODAY, […]

Our first event of the Winter quarter featured historian Thomas Moynihan (author of X-Risk (Urbanomic/MIT Press 2020) and Spinal Catastrophism (Urbanomic/MIT Press, 2019), among others) and artist Carolina Caycedo (2020-2022 Inaugural Borderlands Fellow at the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands-Arizona State University and the Vera List Center for Art and Politics; recent and upcoming solo shows include: Care Report at Muzeum Sztuki in Łódź, Wanaawna, Rio Hondo and […]

Our two-day event "Framing Law and Humanities in/from the Global South" consisted of an opening roundtable and a discussion panel. The first session sought to broaden the horizons of the Law and Humanities critical paradigm, and the second centered on the juridical personhood of nature, nonhuman rights, and the role of cultural production in conceptualizing these […]

materia’s first event of the 2022-2023 academic term took place on September 29. It centered on the filmscreening of Ana Vaz’s short filmApiyemiyekî?, commissioned as a response to the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985). Vaz works with an extraordinary archive from Brazilian educator and indigenous rights activist, Egydio Schwade ―over 3000 drawings collected during a literacy […]

Gustavo Carvajal (Universidad Finis Terrae, Chile) and Azucena Castro (Stockholm University/Stanford University) discussed the relationship between poetry, poetics and climate futures with the notion of narratives of the socio-technical. This second event in the 2022/2023 academic term took place on October 20 at Pigott Hall.

Literatures of Planetary Thresholds When: Thursday, November 17th, at noon. Where: Pigott Hall 252. Watch here Christian Galdón Literature facing Gaia Building my reflection around the example of Christian Bök's The Xenotext, Vivian Abenshushan's Permanente Obra Negra and Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia I point out the challenges that Literature faces when integrating and materializing the ontological turn (Descola) practiced by other human sciences […]

The webinar consisted in a conversation between: Artist and curator Camila Marambio, founder and director of Ensayos, a collective research practice centred on de-extinction, multispecies dialogues, coastal health and peatland protection. The peatland research done by Ensayos gave rise to Turba Tol Hol-Hol Tol, the Chilean pavilion at the 59th venice Biennale, curated by Marambio, […]

A panel with Jaime Rodríguez Matos (CSU, Fresno) and Romina Wainberg (Stanford University). About the event: To Get Out of Our Human Nook: Chance, Thinking, Literature in the Anthropocene Recent interventions concerning the link between the humanities and the Anthropocene have returned to well-known literary tropes for the de-centering of the human point of view vis-à-vis "Nature" and the world. I […]