Topics in Critical Thought is returning to OSE with four more sessions throughout September and October.

This session on new materialisms and gender looks at S. Alamo and S. Hekman’s ‘Material Feminisms’ and Karen Barad’s lecture ‘Remembering the future – reconfiguring the past – temporality, materiality and justice to come’. Facilitated by Maria Drakopoulou.

The impact of recent developments in the physical and biological sciences is transforming feminist thought. Paying attention to matter and mattering (matter’s on-going process of self-generation), has re-orientated analysis towards movement, vitality, morphogenesis, and becoming of the material world, whilst it has generated novel concepts of analysis such as Karen Barad’s ‘agential realist perspective’, ‘quantum entanglement’, ‘posthuman performativity’, and ‘diffraction’. In the context of this new ‘material turn’, can feminism continue to rely on the intellectual insights of social theory and on cultural and representational analysis? How are we, feminists of today, to think of the dyads nature/culture, mind/body, and sex/gender, which hitherto have dominated feminist thinking? How are we to understand power, corporeality, identity and subjectivity?  And why Karen Barad’s book Meeting the Universe Halfway, has been proposed as a fundamental reading for any art student?

Please find the reading here and watch the lecture here.

This short course is designed to offer an introduction to critical thought in general and provide a series of engaging talks and discussions related to topics of contemporary concern to critical theorists. Members of the Centre for Critical Thought at the University of Kent delivered the sessions alongside selected guests.

Free, no booking required.

You don’t have to have a background in theory to attend these seminars. And you can choose to come to only one, two or more of the sessions.

Accessibility info
Due to factors beyond our control, this event is inaccessible to those with limited mobility. We can record parts of the session if there is a demand. Please send an email to info@openschooleast.org if you are interested.