Keynote Speakers

Stine Willum Adrian (Aalborg University, DK)

Keynote: Stitching Stories of Broken Hearts:  Rethinking technologies of Death and Dying at the Beginning of Life

Stine Willum Adrian is an Associate Professor in Techno-Anthropology at Aalborg University in Copenhagen, Denmark. She holds a PhD in feminist STS and cultural analysis. Adrian’s work has always been interdisciplinary joining ethnography of medical technologies, feminist theory with cultural analysis, ethics and law. Her research interests lies in questions concerning reproductive technologies of life and death, gender, intersectionality, feminist materialisms, the entanglement of technologies and ethics, and ethnographic methods. Adrian has previously done comprehensive ethnographic studies on creations stories at fertility clinics in Denmark and Sweden, sperm banks, fertility traveling, cryopreservation of sperm deposits, and she is currently engaged with questions of technologies of death and dying at the beginning of life.

 

Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)

Keynote: Embracing Death, Opening the World

Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Cinesexuality (2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2012), the editor of The Animal Catalyst: Toward Ahuman Theory (2014) and the co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008), Deleuze and the Animal (2017) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (2018). She publishes extensively in the posthuman, queer theory, animal studies, horror film, and Continental Philosophy.

 

Kira O’Reilly (independent artist, IE/FI)

Keynote:

An un’seaming mourning

(second iteration)

a year later

Kira O’Reilly is an Irish visual artist currently based in Helsinki. Her practice, both wilfully interdisciplinary and entirely undisciplined, stems from a visual art background; it employs performance, installation, photography, biotechnical practices, writing and anything that comes to hand with which to consider speculative reconfigurations around The Body. She writes, teaches, mentors and collaborates with humans of various types and technologies and non-humans of numerous divergences including mosses, spiders, the sun, pigs, cell cultures, horses, micro-organisms, bicycles, rivers, landscapes, tundras, rocks, trees, shoes, food, books, air, moon and ravens. Since 1998 her work has been exhibited widely throughout the UK, Europe, Australia, China and Mexico. She has presented at conferences and symposia on both live art and science, art and technology interfaces. Her practice and research have been presented across multiple contexts from visual arts to art, science and technology, performance and liveart, dance, medical humanities, and has been extensively written and discussed in both academic research literature and visual arts publications. She has completed significant residencies at SymbioticA, the art science collaborative research lab, School of Anatomy and Human Biology, University of Western Australia and School of Biosciences, University of Birmingham in collaboration with Dr. Janet Smith, both funded by Wellcome Trust. In 2013 she completed a three year Arts and Humanities Research Council funded creative fellowship at Department of Drama, Queen Mary University of London developing Untitled Techné writings and art works, that hinged between the thresholds of the laboratory and the gallery. In 2016 she created andled the short lived but impactful pilot masters programme in Ecology and Contemporary Performance at University of the Arts, Helsinki. Her most recent work was a durational site based installation/performance, what if this was the only world she knew commissioned and produced by SymbioticA for Unhallowed Arts, Perth, Australia in October 2018. Currently a Taike artist grant recipient, 2019 sees her collaborate with Laura Beloff (FI) on a Kone Foundation funded artistic research project on ticks and later take up a residency at Saari. The monograph Kira O’Reilly: Untitled (Bodies) edited by Harriet Curtis and Martin Hargreaves was published in autumn 2017 as part of the Intellect Live series. http://www.kiraoreilly.com/

 

C. Riley Snorton (University of Chicago, USA)

Keynote: Mud: Queer Death and Teeming Forms of Wildlife

C. Riley Snorton is a cultural theorist whose work focuses on race, gender, and sexuality. He is Professor of English and Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago. Snorton is the author of Nobody is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2014) and Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Univ. of  Minnesota Press, 2017). His research has been supported by the Ford Foundation, Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities and writings have appeared in SOULS: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society, the Black Scholar, GLQ, and TSQ.