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Materialisms Reading Group

Materialisms Reading Group

The Materialisms Reading Group meets monthly to discuss a range of critical contemporary theory, including posthuman, new materialist, speculative realist, actor-network and object-oriented understandings that foreground the materiality of life and its governance. This is not a lecture course so we will be mixing up the texts and approaching key or interesting readings in an informal and flexible way, with a brief introduction by one of the group.

NEXT MEETING

Thursday 28 March 2024, Allan Parsons (Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London) introducing Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information: Volume 1 (2020)

FUTURE MEETINGS

89. Thursday 25 April 2024, Rob Cowley (King’s College, London) introducing
Gökçe Günel, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi (2019)

90. Thursday 30 May 2024, Caroline von Taysen (University of Westminster) introducing
Claire Colebrook, Who Would You Kill To Save The World (2023)

91. Thursday 27 June 2024, David Chandler (University of Westminster) introducing
Rei Terada, Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity (2023)

92. Thursday 26 September, 2024 Stuart Watson introducing Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014)

93. Thursday 31 October 2024, Kirstine Epps introducing Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (1988)

Reading group meetings have been running since May 2013, they are open to all and take place Thursdays 6.30-8.00pm, Westminster Forum, Department of Politics and International Relations, 5th Floor, 32-38 Wells Street, London, W1T 3UW (5 minutes from Oxford Circus tube).

POSSIBLE FUTURE READINGS

Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (2020)

José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2021)

Ramon Amaro, The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being (2022)

Ross Exo Adams, Circulation & Urbanization (2019)

Alexander Galloway, Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (2021)

Any ideas for books/sessions in the coming year or if you would like to introduce a session or be added to the reading group mailing list, please contact the convenors David Chandler d.chandler@wmin.ac.uk or Olivia Rutazibwa o.u.rutazibwa@lse.ac.uk.

Refreshments sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster.

PREVIOUS TEXTS

1. Arjan Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective; 2. John Dewey, The Public & its Problems; 3. Noortje MarresMaterial Participation: Technology the Environment and Everyday Publics; 4. Nigel ThriftNon-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect; 5. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; 6. Michael Callon et al, Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy; 7. William Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism; 8. Andrew Barry, Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline; 9. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning; 10. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences; 11. John Law, After Method: Mess in social science research; 12. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature; 13. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman; 14. Joanna Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene; 15. Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice; 16. McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene; 17. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy; 18. Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade; 19. John Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic; 20. Graham HarmanBruno Latour: Reassembling the Political; 21. Alexander Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology; 22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, from A Thousand Plateaus; 23. Kate Soper, What is Nature: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human; 24. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency; 25. Bernard Steigler, ‘Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon‘, Culture Machine; 26. Laurent Berlant, Cruel Optimism; 27. Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art; 28. Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects; 29. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: Critique of Epistemology; 30. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital; 31. Levi Bryant, Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Men; 32. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World; 33. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us; 34. Claire Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction vol 1; 35. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology or What its Like to be a Thing; 36. Katherine Behar (ed.), Object-Oriented Feminism; 37. Elizabeth PovinelliGeontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism; 38. Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism; 39. William Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming; 40. Donna HarawayStaying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene; 41. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins; 42.  Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics; 43. María Puig de la BellacasaMatters of Care; 44. Eduardo KohnHow Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human; 45. Steven ShaviroThe Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism; 46. Alfred North WhiteheadProcess and Reality; 47. Gregory BatesonSteps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology; 48. Michael TaussigPalma Africana; 49. Adele Clark and Donna Haraway (eds) Making Kin not Population – Reconceiving Generations; 50. Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism; 51. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in a New Climate Regime; 52. Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene; 53. Catherine MalabouWhat Should We Do with Our Brain?; 54. Vicky KirbyQuantum Anthropologies: Life at Large; 55. Michel SerresThe Natural Contract; 56. Francois Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy; 57. Kathryn YusoffA Billion Black Anthropocenes or None; 58. Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction; 59. Thom Van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction; 60. Jairus GroveSavage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World; 61. Calvin WarrenOntological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation; 62. Julietta SinghUnthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements; 63. Gilbert SimondonOn the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects; 64. Eva Haifa Giraud, What Comes after Entanglement? 65. Christina Sharpe, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being; 66. Benjamin BrattonThe Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World; 67. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age; 68. Deboleena RoyMolecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings and Life in the Lab; 69. Nigel Clark and Bronislaw SzerszynskiPlanetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences; 70. Elizabeth Povinelli, Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism; 71. Denise Ferreira da SilvaUnpayable Debt; 72. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies; 73. Malcom FerdinandDecolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World; 74. Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz (eds), Saturation: An Elemental Politics; 75. Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze; 76. David Marriott, Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-pessimism; 77. Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation; 78. James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt (eds), Quantum International Relations: A Human Science for World Politics; 79. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive; 80. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete; 81. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others; 82. Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies; 83. Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes; 84. Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire; 85. Frank B. Wilderson, Afropessimism; 86. Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism; 87. Yuk Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics;

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