Convenors

• 2018

  

  Karen Barad

  Karen Barad is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad’s Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory.

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  Annika Capelán

  I have a background in physical theatre and photography, and long term research interest in the visual arts.  I took my PhD at Lund University, Sweden, in 2017 Fibre Formations – Wool as an Anthropological Site (find it here). My current study sets out to advance the understanding of emergent environmental and geopolitical situations as more-than-human and human-nonhuman relations through a focus on woollen fibre. By following up on observations from my thesis it aims to develop the notion of landscape-making to richly understand land-wool-human frictions. I analyse landscape-makings in relation to woolwork, with a comparative move between Patagonian and Australian grasslands. This comparative and ethnographic exploration of woolwork and landscape-making invites a multispecied approach on the Anthropocene.

  Additional interests and knowledge areas:

  • Indigenous knowledge makings
  • Medical anthropology
  • Ethnographic filmmaking

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  Arun Saldahna

  Arun Saldanha is Associate Professor of the Department of Geography, Environment, and Society at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. He is a cultural and historical geographer working mainly on theorizing race and travel, having an undergraduate degree in Communication Studies at the Free University of Brussels (VUB) and a PhD in Geography from The Open University, UK. Arun is author of Psychedelic White: Goa Trance and the Viscosity of Race (University of Minnesota Press, 2007), an ethnography of hippie/rave culture in India, and Space After Deleuze (Bloomsbury Academic, 2017), an introduction to the geographical concepts of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Arun is co-editor with Hoon Song of Sexual Difference Between Psychoanalysis and Vitalism (Routledge, 2013), with Rachel Slocum of Geographies of Race and Food: Fields Bodies Markets (Ashgate, 2013), and with Jason Michael Adams of Deleuze and Race (Edinburgh University Press, 2013). His historical work has been mainly on Dutch colonialism and the history of early-modern geography, culminating in an article in the Annals of the American Association of Geographers on Jan Huygen van Linschoten, a sixteenth-century traveler to Goa. Arun is now working on a theoretical book blending geohumanities, Marxism, and evolutionary theory to rethink race as planetary process, tentatively titled Phenotypically: A Materialist Theory of Race. On a public-engagement front, while Arts, Design, and Humanities Chair of the Imagine Fund at Minnesota over 2016-18, Arun focused on organizing a large symposium on campus called “Prince from Minneapolis”, which inquired into how a black superstar could emerge from a relatively white city and state. He is also working on an edited collection based on this symposium.

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  Alex Zahara

  I’m a PhD Candidate and cross-disciplinary researcher in the Department of Geography at Memorial University in Newfoundland, Canada. My work focuses on the ways in which government-mediated environmental management practices, particularly those associated with pollution and natural hazards, make possible particular understandings of, and relations to, land, nature, wellbeing and community. My dissertation project ‘Worlding Fire Management’ draws on Science and Technology Studies and Indigenous Studies research to examine wildfire management practices and controversies near my home community in Treaty 6 Territory in northern Canada. I’m interested in action-oriented, community-based research that examines how management practices might be done differently and towards Indigenous resurgence.

  I’m also a member of Civic Laboratory for Environmental Action Research (CLEAR), a feminist and anticolonial marine science lab based in Newfoundland that examines plastics in wild food. Here, I direct the Queer Science Reading Group and am working on methods to bring community consent and refusal into the natural sciences. I’m also Collaborating Editor and frequent contributor at Discard Studies blog, an online hub for social science and humanities research about waste and pollution issues. More information on my publications is available on my website.

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