On Monday June 13, 2022, Distinguished University Professor Rosi Braidotti formally retired with Utrecht University and gave her farewell valedictory lecture Affirmative Ethics: We Are Rooted But We Flow in the Aula of the Academiegebouw.
The lecture was preceded by a celebratory conference in the Belle van Zuylenzaal. Colleagues and former students from all over the world looked back on, but also looked forward with, Rosi Braidotti’s important body of work in the Humanities. She has been an iconic role-model for many students and researchers both inside and outside academia. Her critical yet affirmative thought is rooted in feminism, nomadism, and posthumanism. Her books offer insight into the complexity of contemporary society and culture and inspire readers to commit to socially sustainable systems. Rosi’s many publications, lectures, and workshops have been highly influential within academic institutions, policymaking, and European networks, as well as projects and networks of feminist and the LBTGQ+ activists, and art and curatorial practices. Rosi firmly believes in intergenerational solidarity, emphasizing the role played by young people, especially women, to address the global challenges that we are collectively facing.
Both events have been livestreamed, and you are invited to watch the recording of the lecture.
The link to watch the lecture, Affirmative Ethics: We Are Rooted But We Flow, is here
In light of her retirement from Utrecht University, DUB conducted and interview with Prof. Rosi Braidotti in which she reflects on her time at Utrecht University, her future, and the future of our world. You can find the interview, ‘A war between feminism and the LBGTQ+ movements plays into the hands of the Right’, here
Met terugwerkende kracht (‘With retroactive force’) is an audio tour and podcast from Utrecht University in honour of International Women’s Day. Across six episodes they take you across locations with overlooked histories and listen to people with a story.
In the second episode Rosi Braidotti walks you through TivoliVredenburg to discuss feminism and punk. The show can be listened to herewith an English language transcript here
You can find further information (in Dutch) on the university website, here.
On Friday May 20th, Het Nieuwe Instituut invites you to the presentation of Posthuman Feminism (Polity Press, 2022), the new book by philosopher Rosi Braidotti. It is presented in interaction with live music, that runs as a score through her book by means of reflection, comments and annotation.
About the book:“Posthuman Feminism is an analytic and creative response to contemporary conditions and a call to action. It highlights the constraints but also the potentialities available to feminist political subjects as they confront the ever-growing injustices of sexism, racism, ecocide and neoliberal capitalism.”
The booklaunch also marks the public launch of The New Academy, a collaboration between Het Nieuwe Instituut and Rosi Braidotti. The New Academy focuses on the transition of Rotterdam towards a green and inclusive city that takes the cognitive capital of its human and non-human citizens (such as plants, animals, technology) as a catalyst.
We are delighted to invite you to this festive launch in the institute’s Auditorium. Afterwards, Rosi Braidotti is signing copies of her new book at NAi Booksellers and there are drinks & bites at Het Nieuwe Café.
Applications are now open for the 2022 Posthuman Summer school! The theme this time is ‘The Posthuman Life of Methods.’
‘The 2022 intensive Summer School course aims to dig deeper into the methodological innovations introduced by posthuman critical theory, defined as the convergence of critiques of Humanism and critiques of Anthropocentrism. This critical approach introduces new themes and objects of enquiries, but what does it do in terms of methods and approaches? What sort of qualitative transformations are entailed by a critical posthuman framework? Thew course will explore approaches such as: transversal methodologies; neo-materialism; the new empiricisms; current textual practices; non-representational theories; inter/trans and post-disciplinarity; methods to exit colonialism; critical feminist theory and art practices as research methods. The participants will be invited to discuss and present work related to their own research topics and experiences.’
The course will take place entirely online and will be sub-divided into five groups across three time zones. Places are allocated on a first come first served basis so it is recommended to apply early.
Distinguished University Professor Rosi Braidotti has received a Humboldt Research Award. Every year, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation selects up to 100 Humboldt Research Awards. This Award is granted to internationally leading researchers from all disciplines, working outside Germany, in recognition of their life accomplishments in research and teaching to date.
Rosi Braidotti adds: “My research collaboration with Prof. Casper-Hehne and her team at Göttingen University has been extremely productive and forward-looking. We share a commitment to highlight the importance of the Humanities to the contemporary world, stressing both the strength of their traditions and the force of their interdisciplinary creativity. We especially care for the social relevance of the field in Europe today and its ability to address the great technological challenges of our times in a spirit of social and environmental justice.”
The Humboldt Research Awards will be officially presented to the winners during the Humboldt Foundation’s annual meeting in Berlin, on June 24-26, 2022, at an awards ceremony hosted by the President of the Foundation, which will be followed by a reception hosted by the President of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Listen back to Prof. Braidotti’s two-part guest appearance on ‘The Good Robot,’ a podcast exploring what feminism can bring to our understanding of technology and the modern tech industry. In part one, Prof. Braidotti and Eleanor Drage discuss the effect of modern capitalism on subjectivity, NASA’s use of Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man in its logo, and the colonial enterprise embedded in modern transhumanism. In the bonus episode, Prof. Braidotti tracks a genealogy of feminisms through figures such as Alice Walker and Shulamith Firestone, and brings attention to how capitalism has problematized our traditional conceptions of gender.
Dialogue with Anna Maria Crispino
Introduced by Cristina Guarnieri
The Castelvecchi publishing house participates in the Festival of the Peripheries with a review of 29 meetings organized for the occasion. During the review, Italian and foreign intellectuals, of national and international fame, discuss the theme of the periphery according to different declinations: urban, social, political, existential, identity-based peripheries, reflecting on the hottest issues of our contemporaneity.
Of these 29 meetings, 8 are organized in collaboration with Filosofia in Movimento and one meeting is organized in collaboration with the International Lacanian Association of Rome.
Due to COVID-19, this course will now be provided entirely online. The course will be a mixture of live online teaching and discussion, pre-recorded lectures and offline assignments and reading. Utrecht University will provide an online platform.
The 2021 intensive Summer School course will continue the tradition of neo-materialist, critical feminist posthuman theory that Braidotti is known for. It focusses on the intersections and divergences between two movements of thought that are close, but distinct. The posthuman turn is defined as the convergence, within the context of advanced or cognitive capitalism, of post-humanism on the one hand and post-anthropocentrism on the other. Neo-materialism is a theoretical framework that straddles several research fields and emphasizes the embodied, embedded, relational and affective interconnections across human and non-human entities. The intersections between these two lines of critical enquiry generated some of the most exciting contemporary debates. The course offers a selected overview of this scholarship across a trans-disciplinary range of fields that includes philosophy, literature, law, media, pedagogy and the arts. Mindful of the patterns of exclusion of the sexualized, racialized and naturalized “others” that were not recognized as belonging to humanity, special attention is devoted to perspectives emerging from Black and indigenous epistemologies and to the efforts to think beyond anthropocentrism. Priority will be devoted to art practices as forms of advanced research and methodological issues in general.
Application deadline: May 15 (9:00 am CEST), 2021. Due to high demand we will process applications on a first-come, first-served basis. If the maximum number of participants is reached before the deadline, we may close the application process earlier.
Course fee for students: €350
Course fee for non-students: €550
Please note that all participants of this summer school are expected to have read several selected entries of Rosi Braidotti’s Posthuman Knowledge (Polity Press, 2019).
