We are thrilled to hold several local, hybrid and online events, where you can tune in and engage with the work of Prof. MacCormack. One of these events is the Tema Genus Higher Seminar taking place on 29th March 2023 at 13:15-15:00 CEST.
Pleas, see details below!
Tema Genus Higher Seminar on
“Occult Ahuman Pedagogy: Death to the Anthropocene by Witchcraft”
Speaker: Prof. Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)
Where: Faros, Tema huset, Campus Valla, Linköping University & on Zoom
When: 29th March 2023, 13:15 – 15:00 CEST
BIO:
Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge. She has published extensively on philosophy, feminism, queer and monster theory, animal abolitionist activism, ethics, art and horror cinema. She is the author of Cinesexuality (Routledge 2008) and Posthuman Ethics (Routledge 2012) and the editor of The Animal Catalyst (Bloomsbury 2014), Deleuze and the Animal (EUP 2017), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (Continuum 2008) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury 2018). Her new book is The Ahuman Manifesto: Activisms for the End of the Anthropocene. She is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow researching death activism.
In case you cannot make it for our symposium on 23rd March in Norrköping, or if you are still thirsty and wish to explore the theme further, you are warmly invited to join us – in a bit altered line-up – for this online event:
Welcome to The Posthumanities Hub & The Eco- and Bioart Lab Webinar
“Ecologies of Death, Ecologies of Mourning vol. II: A Roundtable”
30th March 2023, 13:15 – 15:00 CEST
Where: on Zoom
Our starting point for the international symposium “Ecologies of Death, Ecologies of Mourning: vol. I” (taking place on 23rd March 2023 in Norrköping, SE) is the context of planetary environmental disruption, slow and abrupt environmental violence, and the ways in which ecological, more-than-human dimensions of death have traditionally been underplayed in public debates. During the symposium, we emphasise that what is urgently needed – now more than ever – is the systematic problematisation of the planetary-scale mechanisms of annihilation of the more-than-human worlds in their philosophical, socio-cultural, ethico-political and very material dimensions.
In this follow-up roundtable, or volume II of “Ecologies of Death, Ecologies of Mourning”, the panellists: Prof. Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK), Dr Margherita Pevere (independent artist, DE/IT) and Dr Marietta Radomska (Linköping University, SE) will zoom in on the potential, role, (im)possibilities, urgencies and frictions of artistic and philosophical practices and praxes linked to ecologies of death, care, grief and mourning.
Prof. Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)
Dr Margherita Pevere (independent artist, DE/IT)
Dr Marietta Radomska (Linköping University, SE)
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES:
Patricia MacCormack, PhD, is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge. She has published extensively on philosophy, feminism, queer and monster theory, animal abolitionist activism, ethics, art and horror cinema. She is the author of Cinesexuality (Routledge 2008) and Posthuman Ethics (Routledge 2012) and the editor of The Animal Catalyst (Bloomsbury 2014), Deleuze and the Animal (EUP 2017), Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (Continuum 2008) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury 2018). Her new book is The Ahuman Manifesto: Activisms for the End of the Anthropocene. She is currently a Leverhulme Research Fellow researching death activism.
Dr Margherita Pevere is an artist and researcher working across biological arts and performance with a distinctive visceral signature. Her inquiry hybridizes biotechnology, ecology, queer and death studies to create artworks that trail today’s ecological complexity. Her body of work is a blooming garden crawling with genetically edited bacteria, cells, sex hormones, microbial biofilm, blood, slugs, growing plants and decomposing remains. She is affiliated to the Eco- and Bioart Lab and co-founded the artists’ group Fronte Vacuo. Web: Www.margheritapevere.com and https://frontevacuo.com
Marietta Radomska, PhD, is an Assistant Professor of Environmental Humanities at Linköping University; director of The Eco- and Bioart Lab; co-founder of Queer Death Studies Network; member of The Posthumanities Hub; co-editor of the book series ‘Focus on More-than-human Humanities’ at Routledge (with C. Åsberg); and the PI of ‘Ecological Grief, Crisis Imaginaries and Resilience in Nordic Lights’ (2022-26; funded by FORMAS). She works at the intersection of posthumanities, environmental humanities, continental philosophy, queer death studies, visual culture and contemporary art; and has published in Australian Feminist Studies; Somatechnics; Environment and Planning E and Artnodes, among others. Web: www.mariettaradomska.com
Artwork included in the poster: Margherita Pevere, Semina Aeternitatis (2018)
Venue: Arbetets Museum (The Museum of Work), Norrköping
Keynote speakers:
Prof. Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)
Prof. Em. Nina Lykke (Linköping University, SE/Aarhus University, DK)
Speakers:
Dr Evelien Geerts (University of Birmingham, UK)
Prof. Christina Fredengren (Uppsala University, SE)
Dr Tara Mehrabi & Dr Wibke Straube (Karlstad University, SE)
Dr Marietta Radomska (Linköping University, SE)
In the Anthropocene, the epoch of climate change and environmental destruction that render certain habitats unliveable and induce socio-economic inequalities and shared ‘more-than-human’ vulnerabilities, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns. As climate scientists indicate, in order to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), a much more radical transformative action is needed from all stakeholders: governments, the private sector, communities and individuals (Höhne et al. 2020).
Simultaneously, planetary environmental disruption, contributing to the mortality of humans and nonhumans, destruction of entire ecosystems, the sixth mass extinction, both abrupt and ‘slow’ violence (Nixon 2011), evoke feelings of anxiety, anger and grief, manifested in popular-scientific and cultural narratives, art, and activism. These feelings are not always openly acknowledged or accepted in society; and the ecological, more-than-human dimensions of death have traditionally been underplayed in public debates. Yet, what we need now – more than ever – is the systematic problematisation of the planetary-scale mechanisms of annihilation of the more-than-human world in their philosophical, socio-cultural, ethico-political and very material dimensions. Only then will it be possible to talk about the issues of responsibility, accountability and care for more-than-human worlds (Radomska & Lykke 2022).
Taking its starting point in critically investigating and challenging conventional normativities, assumptions and expectations surrounding issues of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world (Radomska, Meharbi & Lykke 2020; https://queerdeathstudies.net/), this interdisciplinary symposium zooms in on more-than-human ecologies of death, dying, grief and mourning across spatial and temporal scales.
13:00 – 13:15 – Introduction / Launch FORMAS Eco-Grief Project
13:15 – 14:15 – Keynote I: Prof. Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK), “The Difficult Joy of Death Activism”
14:15 – 14:45 – Break (fika)
14:45 – 15:15 – Dr Evelien Geerts (University of Birmingham, UK), “The Memorial 22/3’s more-than-human hauntings: Reimaging memory, commemoration & mourning through queer(ing) spacetimematterings”
15:15 – 15:45 – Prof. Christina Fredengren (Uppsala University, SE), “Ancestral ecologies of life, death and regeneration”
15:45 – 16:15 – Dr Tara Mehrabi & Dr Wibke Straube (Karlstad University, SE), “Unsettling Intimacies: On World-Making Practices with the Other in Minoosh Zomorodinia’s Mixed-Media Installation Knots and Ripples“
16:15 – 16:45 – Dr Marietta Radomska (Linköping University, SE), “Between Terminal Ecologies and Arts of Eco-Grief: A Queering Reflection”
The participation in the symposium is free of charge, but we have a limited number of seats. If you wish to take part in the event, please, fill out the form: https://forms.office.com/e/Yb4qXpyVtX
NB! EDIT: the event is now fully booked. In order to be added to the waiting list, please send an email to: ecobioartlab[at]liu.se
NB! In case you have registered and it turns out you can no longer participate, please let us know by sending an email to: ecobioartlab[at]liu.se . In this way we may be able to let in anyone who may be on the waiting list.
The issue contains contributions by QDS scholars: Patricia MacCormack, Marietta Radomska, Tara Mehrabi, Stine Willum Adrian, Margrit Shildrick, Hema’ny Molina Vargas, Camila Marambio and Nina Lykke.
The collection strives to advance queerfeminist methodologies and ontological, ethical and political understandings that critically and creatively attend to the problem of death, dying and mourning in the current environmental, cultural, and socio-political contexts.
In order to learn more, do check out the introduction “Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning From a Queerfeminist Perspective”, co-authored by myself, Tara and Nina, available in OAhere.
On 14th July some of the QDS Network researchers had a pleasure to present their work in the two-session panel ‘Queering Ecologies of Death’, proposed by Prof. Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK) and Dr. Marietta Radomska (Linköping University, SE), at the SLSAeu GREEN conference that took place on 13-16 June 2018 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Below you may find the summary of the panel which consisted of the speakers: Dr. Marietta Radomska, Prof. Patricia MacCormack, Dr. Line Henriksen (University of Copenhagen, DK), Dr. Tara Mehrabi (University of Turku, FI), Prof. Margrit Shildrick (Stockholm University, SE) and Prof. Nina Lykke (Linköping University, SE).
‘Green’ as a concept has become a shorthand for ‘ecology’, understood as that which refers to ‘home’ or ‘environment’ with all their constituting relationalities. It not only evokes a reflection on or concern with human and nonhuman entities and their milieus, but also implies a set of discourses (public, political, scientific, philosophical) that focus on the climate change and contemporary ecological crises. The latter, more often than not, entail the degradation and diminution of food and water resources, which make certain habitats unlivable.
Along with ‘climate migration’, these processes lead to the death of individual organisms, populations and species extinction, prompting us to reconsider our ways of understanding and relating to death, dying, extinction and annihilation.
While bioscience and biotechnologies underline and expose interdependency, commonality and relationality as key characteristics of life shared by all organisms, Western thought and cultural imaginaries tend to draw a thick dividing line between human and nonhuman animals and other organisms, notably visible in the context of death. The interdisciplinary field of Death Studies (in its conventional form) gives precedence to the death of human individuals as its main research subject, examined primarily through psychological, anthropological and sociological lens. Western philosophies approach death in a double way: as a process common to all organisms and an event that distinguishes the human from other creatures (e.g. Heidegger [1953] 2010; Calarco 2008).
Yet, in the context of discussions on the so-called Anthropocene – a distinct geological epoch we live in, generated by ‘human activities on earth and atmosphere, and at all, including global, scales’ (Crutzen & Stoermer 2000, 17) – it becomes evident that the stories of species extinction, animal death and annihilation of nonhuman life, broadly speaking, are deeply entangled with the histories of colonial violence, genocide and oppression/elimination of the non-normative human other.
Environmental science and the humanities examine more-than-human death primarily in the form of species extinction, its narratives and imaginaries. Simultaneously, human death is classified, investigated and valued separately: approached through a cultural, social or biomedical lens, it appears as either ‘the end’ of individual’s existence (in religious discourses taken as a step towards an afterlife), or as something to postpone or eliminate by medical means. However, if we look at the human corpse itself, it is an (always already) non/human assemblage of entities, materialities and processes.
Against this background, what strikes is the lack of sufficient theorising of the messy intimacies between materialities of human and nonhuman kind that constitute the processes of death, dying and annihilation. In other words, our cultural understandings require conceptualisations and narratives attentive to multiplicitous relationalities and entanglements of the living and non-living, and human and nonhuman or, what we call, ‘ecologies of death’.
This transdisciplinary panel brings together several different perspectives, encompassing such fields as philosophy, art, cultural studies, monster studies, science and technology studies, gender studies and disability studies, in order to ask what it means to queer ecologies of death. The speakers will not only concentrate on the processes and materialities of death and dying, and living and non-living in a more-than-human world, but also investigate how such enquiries go beyond, unsettle and subvert given norms, normativities and binaries that govern our approaches to and understandings of death, dying, extinction and annihilation. In particular, the
panelists will focus on the following set of questions:
How can ecosophy (a thought informed by entangled intimacies of the living and non-living beyond green) and bio-philosophy (thinking life in its relation to that which takes it beyond itself) attend to multiplicitous difference and relationality constitutive of death and dying as well as its ontology and ethics?
Queering Ecologies of Death: Part 1
While thinking with and through the contemporary practices of eco- and bioart, Marietta Radomska (Linköping University) will ask how such forms of art explore and enact the
relations between the human and the environment in the context of the annihilation of life on Earth resulting from human activity? How can doing biophilosophy through art contribute to a less anthropocentric, non-normative and different understanding of death? And, in return, what kinds of ethics does it mobilise? Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University) will focus on how abolitionism (animal rights at its extreme) can rethink entanglement as grace through a leaving be, while also opening the ecosophical world to freedoms unperceived by anthropocentric apprehension. Furthermore, she will ask how human extinction through a cessation of reproduction or advocation of anti-natalism could further abolition to become
a form of queer death activism that is both vitalistic and caring, creative and jubilant? Line Henriksen (University of Copenhagen) will look at the ways contemporary ecocritical discourses bring forward the questions of disappearance, absence, annihilation, trace and void. More specifically, if ecology is a home/household
(oikos) – she asks – is it haunted? By bringing together hauntology and ecotheory, she will discuss what it means to think spectrality as part of ecological systems, thereby delving
into the transparency of the apparition as much as the traditional ‘green’ of ecology.
Queering Ecologies of Death: Part 2
Drawing on her ethnographic work in a Drosophila Melanogaster laboratory, Tara Mehrabi (University of Turku/Karlstad University) will explore how, in the context of
contemporary bioscience, life (e.g. of animal models) – no longer scientifically ‘valuable’/’useful’ – becomes ‘waste’. How does this particular ecology of death challenge and queer the boundaries of natural/artificial, inside/outside, nature/laboratory,
safe/hazardous and living/non-living beyond green? How does it problematise human exceptionalism and binary logic? Margrit Shildrick (Stockholm University/University of Toronto) will enquire about death (organic/cellular/singular/species) in the context of the research on michrochimerism
beyond the human. She will anchor these questions in the problematics around the ‘greening’ of the gut and eradication therapy.
Finally, Nina Lykke (Linköping University) will concentrate on how human death and the human corpse can be rethought from the perspective of inhuman forces, understood
in an immanence philosophical sense, and redefined against the background of its transcorporeal belonging to a queer planetary kinship of vulnerable more-than-human-bodies. What are the eco-ethical implications of such a redefinition?
Prof. Patricia MacCormack on ‘The Age of Anthropophagus’
Dr. Marietta Radomska on ‘Queering Boundaries: On Biophilosophy, the Non/Living and Death’
Dr. Line Henriksen on ‘One Minute Past: What Survives at the End of the World’
Dr. Tara Mehrabi on ‘Queer Ecologies of Death in the Lab’
Prof. Margrit Shildrick on microbiome, microchimerism and death
Prof. Nina Lykke on ‘Material Corpo-affective Co-becomings with the Human Corpse’
Queer Death Studies Network 