A Land2/PLaCE International Conference &
The Third Annual Art & Humanities Postgraduate Conference, University of Dundee
29-30 January 2015
Keynote Speaker: Dr Peta Hinton completed her Ph.D. in Sociology at the University of New South Wales, Australia, and most recently undertook a postdoctoral fellowship with the Institute for Cultural Inquiry (ICI) Berlin (2013/14), where she is an Affiliated Fellow for the 2014-15 academic year. Her current project investigates the way death and nothing(ness) might figure for a new (feminist) materialist politics and ethics.
Title: Assembling Vital Life, or, Ecology is the New Ethics: Bennett’s Vital Materialism (co-sponsored by Scottish Centre for Continental Philosophy, University of Dundee, School of Humanities and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design, University of Dundee)
Abstract: In this talk I will discuss certain commitments in Jane Bennett’s vital materialism that mark it out as both an important new materialist contribution to questions (and issues) of ecology and methodology, that at the same time work to delimit its capacity to shift the terrain of a more conventional politics (or political economy) and ethics, as Bennett proposes to do. The crux of this discussion lies with Bennett’s notion of assemblage and its potential to revitalise the humanism that she endeavours to displace in her formulation of a posthumanist, material ecology. If we turn to the question of death, or the inanimate, in Bennett’s text, then her argument reveals both a complicated and yet problematic relationship with life that draws some of these issues into focus.
Invited speakers:
Dr Helmut Lemke (German/UK, currently based on Skye)*
Dr Judy Tucker (Leeds) & Dr Harriet Tarlo (Sheffield Hallam)
Dr Paul Wilson (Leeds)
Dr Andrea Thoma (Leeds)
Dr Susan Trangmar (Central St. Martins, London)
Dr Gina Wall (UHI-Moray College)
Dr Rebecca Thomas (Hertfordshire)
Dr Louise K Wilson (Leeds)
Dr Dom Smith (Dundee, philosophy)