Materialisms Reading Group
Materialisms Reading Group
The Materialisms Reading Group meets monthly to discuss a range of critical contemporary theory, including posthuman, new materialist, speculative realist, actor-network and object-oriented understandings that foreground the materiality of life and its governance. This is not a lecture course so we will be mixing up the texts and approaching key or interesting readings in an informal and flexible way, with a brief introduction by one of the group.
NEXT MEETING
Thursday 26 September, 2024 Stuart Watson introducing Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014)
FUTURE MEETINGS
93. Thursday 31 October 2024, Kirstine Epps introducing
94. Thursday 21 November 2024, Ana-Maria Carabelea (Goldsmiths, University of London) introducing Yuk Hui (ed.) Cybernetics for the 21st Century Vol. 1: Epistemological Reconstruction (1) (2024)
95. Thursday 12 December 2024, Adam de Linde introducing Ross Exo Adams, Circulation & Urbanization (2019)
Reading group meetings have been running since May 2013, they are open to all and take place Thursdays 6.30-8.00pm, Westminster Forum, Department of Politics and International Relations, 5th Floor, 32-38 Wells Street, London, W1T 3UW (5 minutes from Oxford Circus tube).
POSSIBLE FUTURE READINGS
Louise Amoore, Cloud Ethics: Algorithms and the Attributes of Ourselves and Others (2020)
José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (2009)
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Undrowned: Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2021)
Dixa Ramírez-D’Oleo, This Will Not Be Generative (2023)
Alexander Galloway, Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age (2021)
Any ideas for books/sessions in the coming year or if you would like to introduce a session or be added to the reading group mailing list, please contact the convenors David Chandler d.chandler@wmin.ac.uk or Olivia Rutazibwa o.u.rutazibwa@lse.ac.uk.
Refreshments sponsored by the Centre for the Study of Democracy, University of Westminster.
PREVIOUS TEXTS
1. Arjan Appadurai (ed.), The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective; 2. John Dewey, The Public & its Problems; 3. Noortje Marres, Material Participation: Technology the Environment and Everyday Publics; 4. Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect; 5. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern; 6. Michael Callon et al, Acting in an Uncertain World: An Essay on Technical Democracy; 7. William Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism; 8. Andrew Barry, Material Politics: Disputes along the Pipeline; 9. Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning; 10. Roy Bhaskar, The Possibility of Naturalism: A philosophical critique of the contemporary human sciences; 11. John Law, After Method: Mess in social science research; 12. Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature; 13. Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman; 14. Joanna Zylinska, Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene; 15. Annemarie Mol, The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice; 16. McKenzie Wark, Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene; 17. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy; 18. Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade; 19. John Protevi, Political Affect: Connecting the Social and the Somatic; 20. Graham Harman, Bruno Latour: Reassembling the Political; 21. Alexander Wendt, Quantum Mind and Social Science: Unifying Physical and Social Ontology; 22. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, ‘Introduction: Rhizome’, from A Thousand Plateaus; 23. Kate Soper, What is Nature: Culture, Politics and the Non-Human; 24. Quentin Meillassoux, After Finitude: An Essay on the Necessity of Contingency; 25. Bernard Steigler, ‘Relational Ecology and the Digital Pharmakon‘, Culture Machine; 26. Laurent Berlant, Cruel Optimism; 27. Elizabeth Grosz, Becoming Undone: Darwinian Reflections on Life, Politics, and Art; 28. Levi Bryant, The Democracy of Objects; 29. Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and Manual Labour: Critique of Epistemology; 30. Jason Moore, Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital; 31. Levi Bryant, Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Men; 32. Timothy Morton, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World; 33. Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us; 34. Claire Colebrook, Death of the Posthuman: Essays on Extinction vol 1; 35. Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology or What its Like to be a Thing; 36. Katherine Behar (ed.), Object-Oriented Feminism; 37. Elizabeth Povinelli, Geontologies: A Requiem to Late Liberalism; 38. Isabelle Stengers, In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism; 39. William Connolly, Facing the Planetary: Entangled Humanism and the Politics of Swarming; 40. Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene; 41. Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins; 42. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal Metaphysics; 43. María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care; 44. Eduardo Kohn, How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human; 45. Steven Shaviro, The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism; 46. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality; 47. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology; 48. Michael Taussig, Palma Africana; 49. Adele Clark and Donna Haraway (eds) Making Kin not Population – Reconceiving Generations; 50. Elizabeth Grosz, The Incorporeal: Ontology, Ethics, and the Limits of Materialism; 51. Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in a New Climate Regime; 52. Bernard Stiegler, The Neganthropocene; 53. Catherine Malabou, What Should We Do with Our Brain?; 54. Vicky Kirby, Quantum Anthropologies: Life at Large; 55. Michel Serres, The Natural Contract; 56. Francois Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy; 57. Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None; 58. Deborah Bird Rose, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction; 59. Thom Van Dooren, Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction; 60. Jairus Grove, Savage Ecology: War and Geopolitics at the End of the World; 61. Calvin Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation; 62. Julietta Singh, Unthinking Mastery: Dehumanism and Decolonial Entanglements; 63. Gilbert Simondon, On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects; 64. Eva Haifa Giraud, What Comes after Entanglement? 65. Christina Sharpe, In The Wake: On Blackness and Being; 66. Benjamin Bratton, The Revenge of the Real: Politics for a Post-Pandemic World; 67. Dipesh Chakrabarty, The Climate of History in a Planetary Age; 68. Deboleena Roy, Molecular Feminisms: Biology, Becomings and Life in the Lab; 69. Nigel Clark and Bronislaw Szerszynski, Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences; 70. Elizabeth Povinelli, Between Gaia and Ground: Four Axioms of Existence and the Ancestral Catastrophe of Late Liberalism; 71. Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt; 72. Dylan Robinson, Hungry Listening: Resonant Theory for Indigenous Sound Studies; 73. Malcom Ferdinand, Decolonial Ecology: Thinking from the Caribbean World; 74. Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz (eds), Saturation: An Elemental Politics; 75. Andrew Culp, Dark Deleuze; 76. David Marriott, Lacan Noir: Lacan and Afro-pessimism; 77. Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation; 78. James Der Derian and Alexander Wendt (eds), Quantum International Relations: A Human Science for World Politics; 79. Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive; 80. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, All Incomplete; 81. Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others; 82. Giorgio Agamben, The Use of Bodies; 83. Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes; 84. Frédéric Lordon, Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire; 85. Frank B. Wilderson, Afropessimism; 86. Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism; 87. Yuk Hui, Art and Cosmotechnics; 88. Gilbert Simondon, Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information: Volume 1; 89. Gökçe Günel, Spaceship in the Desert: Energy, Climate Change, and Urban Design in Abu Dhabi; 90. Claire Colebrook, Who Would You Kill To Save The World; 91. Rei Terada, Metaracial: Hegel, Antiblackness, and Political Identity;