"Materia has been a key academic discussion setting to help me think through my investigative interests and methodological frameworks. Its interdisciplinary character has provided me with an enriching exposal to a variety of possibilities of approaching theories of material phenomena and corporeal life, and to think of literature, feminism and cultural theory in a...
2018-2019 Calendar Building on our meetings from previous years, the main theme for the new academic year will be “Re-assemblage.” We have an exciting line-up of reading sessions and guest speakers joining us this year. FALL Oct 4: Andrés Burbano, U.de los Andes & Orit Halpern, Concordia University Oct 29: Reading Discussion Nov 29: Bonnie Honig, Brown University WINTER Jan 24: Reading...
Since Fall Quarter 2014, materia has hold twelve workshops and a conference to date. The former averaged twenty-five participants; the latter had over seventy. During the first year, the group discussed--and coined-- the notion of “post-anthropocentric” as an umbrella term that sets in conversation a host of otherwise divisive trends. This is in itself...
Power and the Non-Human The main theme of the third year was “Power and the Non-Human.” We took our cues, among other sources, from the rich discussion of the New York city blackout of 1977 in Jane Bennett, the quasi-novelization of the Cuban history of tobacco and sugar in Fernando Ortiz, and the multifarious elucidations...
POSTED IN: OF INTEREST ARHIST 273 / FILMSTUD 273: "Visual Culture of the Arctic and Climate Change" Spring Quarter 2015-16, Tue/Thurs 10:30am-11:50am Instructor: Lisa Bloom In what ways does contemporary art address the slowly unfolding catastrophes of melting ice and thawing permafrost in the Arctic due to climate change? How might contemporary art and experimental cinema help us...
POSTED IN:LECTURE How did the American family become a machine? Starting in the 1950s a community of progressive mental health therapists, ethnographers, and artists around the Bay Area put forth visions of the modern American family as a cybernetic machine. Researchers including anthropologist Gregory Bateson, filmmaker Weldon Kees, and psychiatrist Don Jackson proposed that family...
POSTED IN: LECTURE Space reports back these days ― in a brutal way. While we are told that Europe's external borders have stopped to exist, old legal-political concepts loom in the background of the current discussion on the Decline of the West: mare nostrum, mare clausum, res omnium, and the (impossible) Nomos of the Sea. With...
POSTED IN: OF INTEREST "Migration, Farming, Labor, and Livelihoods" With distinguished participant Héctor Hoyos, Assistant Professor of Latin American Literature and Culture, Stanford University Tuesday, February 23, 2016 6:00 to 8:00pm Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg. 460) Terrace Room (4th Floor) Next Tuesday, the Environmental Humanities Project's Winter Seminar on Drought will continue to explore the history, present, and future of California's...
POSTED IN: CFP The Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences and "New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on 'How Matter Comes to Matter' " will hold the Seventh Annual Conference on New Materialisms from September 21-23, 2016 in Warsaw. The conference topic is "Performing Situated Knowledges: Space, Time, Vulnerability." For the...
POSTED IN: LECTURE In this provocative lecture on El té de Dios (2010), by the Argentine writer César Aira (b. 1949), Hoyos focuses on a singular question: what can the Higgs boson, an Indian monkey God, and the Tea Party tell us about the agency of literature? The talk will be in English, with bilingual materials....
