|
|
|
Thanks for Being Who You Are!
|
|
|
Dearest Posthumans,
We hope this Newsletter finds you Well, Inspired, and Energized!
It has been a Posthuman Summer in the Northern hemisphere filled with exciting events and opportunities for the Global Posthuman Network to gather in person, such as the World Congress of Philosophy in Rome and the Posthuman Summer Camp in Galliera, Italy. These encounters offered new insights and magical moments to remember. Now, we’ve curated a selection of events, CFPs, and publications to help you continue this exploratory journey in Your lives, work, and existential paths, with the hope they will inspire even more growth in the months to come!
Thanks for being (p)Art of this community; thanks for Your Presence and Visions!
Peace and Much Appreciation,
The Global Posthuman Network
www.posthumans.org |
|
GPN Community:
1. Greetings from...the POSTHUMAN SUMMER CAMP (10-13 August, Naturama)
2. Greetings from...the World Congress of Philosophy (Rome, Italy 1-8 August)
Events:
3. JORNADA DE INVESTIGACION: Posthumanismo y extinción (9 Sept)
4. CONFERENCE: Inaugural Conference of the Cultural and Mainstream Posthumanist Forum (15 Sept)
5. TALK: Vulner-ability, Affirmative Empathy, and Joyful Extinction: Keeping Futures Open (16 Sept)
6. WORKSHOP: Nested and (Un)nested Human and Nonhuman Life-forms in Industrial Toxic Environments (28 Oct)
New Publications:
7. NEW BOOK: "Mimetic Posthumanism. Homo Mimeticus 2.0 in Art, Philosophy and Technics" by Nidesh Lawtoo
8. NEW BOOK: "Plants as Designers of Better Futures: Can Humans Let Them Lead?" by J. Rutten, A. Holland and S. Roudavski
9. NEW BOOK: "Fungi Media: Performing Fungosexual Mutations" by Piotr Bockowski
CFPs:
10. CFP: (4º) Foro de Futuros Metahumanos – Iberoamericano Online – 2024. Crisis Planetarias y Respuestas desde el Cuerpo
11. CFP: Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference
12. NEW BOOK REVIEW: Review of "The Art of Being Posthuman" (F. Ferrando) by Bimal Pratap Shah
Get involved:
13. JOINING AND VOLUNTEERING
|
|
|
NEWS FROM THE GLOBAL POSTHUMAN NETWORK
|
|
|
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This Newsletter, September 2024, was kindly complied by our Editor Stefano Rozzoni. Here, you can find more info about our extraordinary Team!
REMINDER: A WAY FOR PROMOTING YOUR EVENTS / CFPs / NEWS
Our Newsletter currently counts with more than 1500 international members. Please check out this page of the GPN website to discover how to promote your event(s). There is no fee to submit. All submissions will be reviewed and, if found in tune with the posthuman turn, will be published in our next Newsletter. Please, keep in mind that the Newsletter is monthly, so if you send an event that expires by the time we send the Newsletter, we will not be able to publish it. Thanks for your interest.
|
|
|
Greetings from....the POSTHUMAN SUMMER CAMP (10-13 August, Naturama)
|
|
|
We are very pleased to share our joy over the Posthuman Summer Camp, organized at Naturama in Galliera, Italy, by the Rete Postumana Italiana and the Centro Studi Filosofia Posthumanista. It was a four-day event full of ideas, activities, workshops, and many moments of togetherness, such as sharing meals, organizing spaces, and cooking together as tools for connection.
More than thirty people, both in person and online, from all over the world and from different contexts—within and beyond academia—joined us. Participants included scholars, artists, and performers, who proposed and took part in workshops to explore this year’s theme: coexistence, through a strong dialogue between theory and practice.
We will soon share some reflections on this experience on the Rete Postumana Italiana website. In the meantime, we want to Thank all those who made this enriching experience possible, one that benefited participants on personal, professional, and existential levels! Stay tuned through the RPI website. |
|
|
Greetings from...the World Congress of Philosophy (Rome, Italy 1-8 August)
|
|
|
|
The World Congress of Philosophy not only provided a significant meeting point for philosophers from around the world—bringing together over 4,000 participants—but also served as an important opportunity for engagement among many posthumanists. It was a special moment to share studies, research, and opportunities of connection in the beautiful setting of Rome. Many members of the Global Posthuman Network established new and reinforced old connections across more than 12 panels dedicated to posthumanism, with a strong interdisciplinary focus that aligned with the conference's theme of 'Philosophy beyond Boundaries.' Some of these panels included topics such as Environmental and Posthuman Philosophies, Gender and Posthuman Philosophies, Posthumanism, Religion and Spirituality, Posthuman Education, and Existential Posthumanism, but the list goes on: the scholarship of our Community is wide and pluralistic!
The WCP was a real concert of ideas, visions, and forms of wisdom that will enrich the paths of those who participated, as well as all the members of the GPN who were unable to attend, through future exchanges, new projects, and collaborations this experience will surely inspire. Thank you to Everyone involved!
|
|
|
JORNADA DE INVESTIGACION: Posthumanismo y extinción (9 Sept)
|
|
|
|
|
|
CONFERENCE: Inaugural Conference of the Cultural and Mainstream Posthumanist Forum (15 Sept)
|
|
|
|
"Posthumanism offers fluidity and freedom, and a metaphysic daring enough to think a whole world into life." Bruce Sterling
|
|
|
TALK: Vulner-ability, Affirmative Empathy, and Joyful Extinction: Keeping Futures Open (16 Sept)
|
|
|
|
WORKSHOP: Nested and (Un)nested Human and Nonhuman Life-forms in Industrial Toxic Environments (28 Oct)
|
|
|
Narrations of ecological disasters e.g. marine and air pollution, deforestation, toxic waste, etc. are found in various literary periods, texts and genres. In this lecture, we will study two authors, Michael Makropoulos’ The Black Water and Amitav Ghosh’s The Glass Palace, aiming to explore the literary genre of “oil fiction,” conveying empirical and ecocritical understanding of toxicity through a series of questions in how toxic waste, its slow and violent impact on life-forms (Nixon, 2013) are represented in the above authors’ works, focusing particularly on the concept of ‘nesting’ between human and nonhuman life-forms under the ‘threat’ of disruption and extinction. While the authors raise ecological awareness about toxic waste, framing a dystopian present, addressing the future political, social and economic impacts on life-forms, they also lay the ground for similar empirical ecocritical approaches on literary texts, proving that toxicity could be ‘storytelling device’ for ‘nesting’ various voices across transnational literatures.
This online workshop is offered by Dr. Nikoleta Zampaki, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Faculty of Philology at the School of Philosophy of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens in Greece. E-mail: nik...@phil.uoa.gr |
|
|
NEW BOOK: "Mimetic Posthumanism. Homo Mimeticus 2.0 in Art, Philosophy and Technics" by Nidesh Lawtoo
|
|
|
It is tempting to affirm that on and about November 2022 (post)human character changed. The revolution in A.I. simulations certainly calls for an updated of the ancient realization that humans are imitative animals, or homo mimeticus. But the mimetic turn in posthuman studies is not limited to A.I.: from simulation to identification, affective contagion to viral mimesis, robotics to hypermimesis, the essays collected in this volume articulate the multiple facets of homo mimeticus 2.0. Challenging rationalist accounts of autonomous originality internal to the history of Homo sapiens, this volume argues from different—artistic, philosophical, technological—perspectives that the all too human tendency to imitate is, paradoxically, central to our ongoing process of becoming posthuman.
For further info, click HERE |
|
|
NEW BOOK: "Plants as Designers of Better Futures: Can Humans Let Them Lead?" by J. Rutten, A. Holland and S. Roudavski
|
|
|
This research by Julian Rutten, Alexander Holland and Stanislav Roudavski explores the idea of plants as designers and discusses approaches that humans can use to support plant’s productive agencies. It argues that plants have unique and valuable capabilities for creating and caring for their environments. Human interventions often overlook or constrain such capabilities. In response, the article proposes to use numerical modelling to better understand plants better while challenging the anthropocentric assumptions that are common in design. It focuses on large old trees in Tasmania as examples of outstanding plant-designers that need more recognition and protection. The article also raises open questions for further research on the ethical, ecological, and aesthetic implications of vegetal design.
For further info, click HERE
|
|
|
NEW BOOK: "Fungi Media: Performing Fungosexual Mutations" by Piotr Bockowski
|
|
|
|
Examining ecologies of rot and fungal decomposition, it outlines a theory of fungosexuality beyond sexual reproduction and binary gender roles. This theoretical perspective repositions queer sexualities in the context of the original meaning of the term ‘queer’, which is ‘rot’ – and which stands for a fungi-induced process of decomposition. With this, Fungi Mediaexplores the foundational importance of rot for both breaking down and sustaining bodies, relationships and life as such.
The project was developed in a squatted sewage space in London, adopted by the author as a laboratory for mutant performance. The space hosts Chronic Illness events, where Internet-inspired body artists enter an environment populated with fungi. The interventions of human performers are incorporated into the rotten physiology of the space, which itself becomes a live entity. This book involves those events in the analysis of connections between media technologies and primal life processes. It also offers strategies for urban dwelling which transcend normative family life.
For further info, click HERE
|
|
|
CFP: (4º) Foro de Futuros Metahumanos – Iberoamericano Online – 2024. Crisis Planetarias y Respuestas desde el Cuerpo
|
|
|
El Foro de Futuros Metahumanos lanza desde su inicio en 2022 una propuesta radical para un debate urgente: que la totalidad de formas de expansión humana desde el neolítico, basadas en la explotación de la vida y los monocultivos de todo, son la causa intrínseca e inevitable tanto del conjunto de formas de desigualdad humana, como de la crisis ecológica que según Naciones Unidas plantea una amenaza inminente de extinción humana y de millones de especies en este siglo. Durante el 99% de su historia el Sapiens ha tenido apenas un millón de población global de recolectores nómadas, sin agricultura, ni ganado, ni ciudades, y fueron estos últimos, según la revolucionaria teoría antropológica de la Sociedad Próspera Original, los que trajeron consigo todas las formas de desigualdad humana y la crisis ecológica. La propuesta metahumanista de Jaym* del Val expande estas premisas planteando que en lo más hondo de esto problema está la creciente atrofia de capacidades sensorimotoras que ciertos bípedos desarrollaron al externalizarse en técnicas exosomáticas y semiótica.
For further info, click HERE |
|
|
CFP: Thinking with Plants and Fungi Conference
|
|
|
|
Harvard Divinity School’s (HDS) Center for the Study of World Religions is excited to announce the upcoming conference, Thinking with Plants and Fungi: An Interdisciplinary Exploration into the Mind of Nature. This three-day academic conference will be held from May 15-17, 2025 at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. To learn more about the Thinking with Plants and Fungi (TWPF) Initiative, please visit the TWPF website. Confirmed speakers include Merlin Sheldrake, Giuliana Furci, Emanuele Coccia, Banu Subramanian, Jessica J. Lee, and Michael Marder.
This conference convenes scholars from across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences together with artists, culture keepers, and practitioners to explore how plants and fungi help us rethink the nature of mind and matter, and humans’ relationship to the ‘more-than-human' world.
For further info, click HERE
|
|
|
NEW BOOK REVIEW: Review of "The Art of Being Posthuman" (F. Ferrando) by Bimal Pratap Shah
|
|
|
|
"Ferrando’s writing, though dense with the weight of her ideas, is also lyrical, almost poetic, drawing us in, making us want to understand, to engage, to act. As we grapple with this philosophical and ethical crossroads, one pressing question emerges: Will we grant AI a form of citizenship, and if so, will it be relegated to a secondary status compared to human citizenship?"
To access the full review, click HERE
|
|
If you are interested in joining the community, and / or volunteering, and/ or forming regional posthuman networks in your area, please email us at: NYposthuman[at]gmail.com
Thanks for connecting and sharing your insights and visions!
Peace, Health and Much Appreciation,
The Global Posthuman Network
www.posthumans.org |
|
|
|
|
|
|
