Keynote speakers

Overview keynotes

All keynotes are scheduled in the Offerhauszaal (Academy Building)

Monday, July 1st                    

9-10.00: Prof. Rosi Braidotti, University of Utrecht

Tuesday, July 2nd      

9-10.30: Prof. Annemarie Mol, University of Amsterdam: Feeling, wording, eating. On cultivating bodies

Prof. Gert de Roo, University of Groningen

Wednesday, July 3rd  

9-10.00: Dr. Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, University of Durham: Posthuman / Nonhuman / Prehuman: thinking through the theory and politics of affect and race                                 at the museum this century

17-18.00: Dr. Timotheus Vermeulen, Radboud University Nijmegen and Robin van den Akker, Erasmus University Rotterdam: Periodising the 2000s: the emergence of metamodernism

Annemarie Mol

Annemarie Mol is Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the Amsterdam Institute of Social Science Research of the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of The Body Multiple (2002) and The Logic of Care (2008) and she co-edited Differences in Medicine (1998), Complexity (2002) and Care in Practice (2010). In addition she published many articles on clinical techniques, travelling technologies, topological figures, and fluid theorising, while engaging in feminist ways of writing. Currently she is working with a team and an ERC Advanced Grant on the project ‘The Eating body in Western Practice and Theory’. She will be able to extend this project thanks to the Spinoza prize of the Netherland Organization of Scientific Research that she won in 2012.

Website: http://www.uva.nl/over-de-uva/organisatie/medewerkers/content/m/o/a.mol/a.mol.html

Rosi Braidotti

Braidotti, who holds Italian and Australian citizenship, was born in Italy and grew up in Australia, where she received a First-Class Honours degree from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977 and was awarded the University Medal in Philosophy and the University Tillyard prize. Braidotti then moved on to do her doctoral work at the Sorbonne, where she received her degree in philosophy in 1981. She has taught at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands since 1988, when she was appointed as the founding professor in women's studies. In 1995 she became the founding Director of the Netherlands research school of Women's Studies, a position she held till 2005. Braidotti is a pioneer in European Women's Studies: she founded the inter-university SOCRATES network NOISE and the Thematic Network for Women's Studies ATHENA, which she directed till 2005. She was a Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor at Birkbeck College in 2005-6; a Jean Monnet professor at the European University Institute in Florence in 2002-3 and a fellow in the school of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1994. Braidotti is currently Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University and founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities.

Braidotti’s publications have consistently been placed in continental philosophy, at the intersection with social and political theory, cultural politics, gender, feminist theory and ethnicity studies. The core of her interdisciplinary work consists of four interconnected monographs on the constitution of contemporary subjectivity, with special emphasis on the concept of difference within the history of European philosophy and political theory. Braidotti’s philosophical project investigates how to think difference positively, which means moving beyond the dialectics that both opposes it and thus links it by negation to the notion of sameness. This is evidenced in the philosophical agenda set in her first book Patterns of Dissonance: An Essay on Women in Contemporary French Philosophy , 1991, which gets developed further in the trilogy that follows: Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory , 1994; Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming , 2002; and Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics , 2006.

Throughout her work, Braidotti asserts and demonstrates the importance of combining theoretical concerns with a serious commitment to producing socially and politically relevant scholarship that contributes to making a difference in the world. Braidotti's output also included several edited volumes. Her work has been translated in a total of 19 languages and all the main books in at least three languages other than English.

Influenced by philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and especially "French feminist" thinker Luce Irigaray, Braidotti has brought postmodern feminism into the Information Age with her considerations of cyberspace, prosthesis, and the materiality of difference. Braidotti also considers how ideas of gender difference can affect our sense of the human/animal and human/machine divides. Braidotti has also pioneered European perspectives in feminist philosophy and practice and has been influential on third-wave as well as post-secular feminisms.

On 3 March 2005, Braidotti was honored with a Royal Knighthood from Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands; in August 2006 she received the University Medal from the University of Lodz in Poland and she was awarded an Honorary Degree in Philosophy from Helsinki University in May 2007. In 2009, she was elected Honorary Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.

Internet: http://www.rosibraidotti.com/

Divya Tolia-Kelly

Dr. Divya P. Tolia–Kelly is a Reader in Geography at the University of Durham, UK. Divya was born in Nairobi, Kenya and has lived in Britain since 1973 after her family were expelled from Kenya along with many other East African Asians from the former British colonies. After working in the public sector for nearly 10 years in London including working at the Single Homeless Project, Divya completed her first degree in Geography in 1997 as a mature student. Her degree at the Nottingham School of Geography, inspired her research interests on landscape, visual and material culture and race. Divya then was awarded a teaching fellowship and joined University College London, geography and completed a PhD supervised by Professor Jacquie Burgess in 2001. Her training at UCL consolidated her commitment to consider postcolonial environmental values and ‘ecologies of identity’, visually and materially, through public engagement, participatory methodologies and grounded theory. In 2001 Divya was awarded one of the first ESRC Post-Doctorial fellowships. Since 2002 Divya has taught at UCL, Lancaster University and has been a member of faculty at Durham since 2004. During her time at Durham she has directed the Lived and Material Cultures Research Cluster (2005-10), been an active member of the Institute for Advance Study, and was awarded a Beacon for Public Engagement (2010) thus, recognizing her commitment to Public Engagement. Divya has also been awarded several visiting fellowships and residencies including invitations from Ochimizu University, (Tokyo, Japan), Macquarie University (Sydney, Australia), South Australian School of Art Gallery (Adelaide, Australia), MIRSA (Maynooth, Ireland), Jahangirnagar University (Savar, Bangladesh), Dakha University (Dakha, Bangladesh), and Otago University (Dunedin, New Zealand/Aotearoa).

Divya is an internationally recognized scholar who collaborates with artists to produce exhibitions that re-inscribe the voices and sensibilities of migrants within the circulation of aesthetics that deal with national identities and citizenship. Her work on visual and material cultures has a way of exploring British postcolonial ‘structures of feeling’, identity, diaspora, memory, affective politics and national landscape values; all of which are considered through a critical engagement with theoretical and philosophical accounts of landscape, memory, affect and citizenship. This work is expressed in her monograph Landscape, Race and Memory: material ecologies of home, and several exhibitions. Most recently Divya co-curated the exhibition An Archaeology of ‘Race’ based on postcolonial readings of Hadrian’s Wall (a UNESCO world Heritage site) as part of an AHRC Landscape and Environment award entitled Tales of the Frontier, a joint project with archaeologists, artists, curators, keepers of artefacts, and historians in the North East of the UK.

Divya is currently working on issues of race, affect and post-Imperial politics at national museums and heritage sites for a monograph entitled An Archaeology of Race at the Museum. This research explores the post-Imperial problematic of shedding structures of categorization of ‘other’ cultures based on 19^th century taxonomies of culture and race. For this research she is currently collaborating with artists Kahutoi Te Kanawa and Rosanna Raymond, both internationally recognized artists and curators of exhibitions including the British Museum and Te Papa. The aim of the collaboration is to think through the national heritage spaces of Te Papa, Aotearoa and the British Museum, U.K. to consider how we can visually and materially narrate post-Imperial accounts of national identity. At the heart of this research is a commitment to understanding the effects of the epistemic violence that is experienced by ‘others’ when faced with the representations of ‘Maori’, ‘Polynesian’ at heritage sites, and how new sensibilities can be forged and expressed in the museum space which celebrates a post-Imperial account of cultures formally negotiated as ‘savage’, ‘emotional’ and ‘non-human’.

Internet: http://www.dur.ac.uk/geography/staff/geogstaffhidden/?id=942

Timotheus Vermeulen (Radboud University Nijmegen) and Robin van den Akker (Erasmus University)

Timotheus Vermeulen is assistant professor in Cultural Theory at the Radboud University Nijmegen, where he also direct the Centre for New Aesthetics. He is founding editor of the leading academic arts and culture webzine Notes on Metamodernism. has written on contemporary aesthetics, art, film and television for amongst others The Journal of Aesthetics and Culture, Screen, Monu, Frieze, and various collections and catalogues. Vermeulen act as curatorial advisor, most recently for the Notes on Metamodernism shows at the Moscow Biennial and the MAD Museum New York, and the Discussing Metamodernism exhibition at Galerie Tanja Wagner, Berlin. He currently lives in Germany.

Internet: http://timotheusvermeulen.com/about

Robin van den Akker is a Doctoral researcher at the Faculty of Philosophy and guest researcher at TNO Information and Communication Technology. He teaches courses on everyday life and digital culture (MA, with Valerie Frissen) and everyday life and rhythmanalysis (BA, with Marli Huijer). His research interests are the history of the Internet and the future of new media, everyday life and the philosophy of space and time, contemporary art and architecture, and the writings of Henri Lefebvre.

In his dissertation he investigates the implications of the mobile Internet for our practices in, and our experiences of, urban public space. The main hypothesis is that contemporary social spaces are produced by the interplay between the logic of control and the logic of the commons, between networked individuals and flexible communities.

Together with Timotheus Vermeulen (RU), he also is the co-founder of an international research network on ‘metamodernism’, which attempts to come to terms with, and analyse, recent changes in aesthetics and culture that are symptomatic of the post-postmodern condition. As a co-coordinator of the Center for Art and Philosophy, he has been a curatorial advisor for art exhibitions in, amongst others, Moscow, New York and Berlin. He studied Social History (BA, MA) and Philosophy (MA) at the Erasmus University Rotterdam and Cultural Studies (MPhil, Distinction) at the University of Birmingham.

Internet: http://www.eur.nl/fw/contact/medewerkers/vandenakker/

Gert de Roo

Gert de Roo is full professor in Physical Planning, Head of Department of the Department of Spatial Planning and Environment at the Faculty of Spatial Sciences, University of Groningen and President of the Association of European Schools of Planning (AESOP).

De Roo is responsible for various fields of research, all of which are related to decision-making concerning interventions within the physical environment. Most of his research and his publications are focusing on decentralization processes, in particular those concerning physical and environmental planning. Another part of his research focuses on the development of decision-making models that support choices concerning interventions within the physical environment.

De Roo participates in various national and international associations and organizations, all of them having in common the physical environment, quality of life, sustainability and urban development. Gert de Roo is elected President of the Association for European Schools of Planning (AESOP), which is from 2011 until 2015. In Perth, Australia, July 2011 at the 24th AESOP Annual conference he was elected unanimously by the Country Representatives. AESOP has 170 member schools (see www.aesop-planning.eu) and is the leading network organization promoting the academic discipline Spatial Planning. AESOP offers annual conferences, working groups focusing on specific themes, a network for Young Academics, and more. AESOP also issues various prices being considered prestigious in the field of Spatial Planning. AESOP continuously disseminates crucial information about Spatial Planning to its members.

De Roo is editor of the Ashgate Publishing Series on Urban Planning and Environment, the Ashgate Publishing Series on Planning Theory , and is part of the editorial board of the Sdu series on spatial planning. This latest series is initiated by him in 2005 and has a rather substantial catalogy addressing various planning relevant issues. He also participated in the editorial board of Planning Theory & Practice.

Internet: http://www.rug.nl/staff/g.de.roo/