Entanglement – Non-linear Challenges to Transitional Realities – Kathrin Thiele

Friday, March 31st 2017 – 17:00-18:00

In my talk I will engage the notion of ‘in transit’ as it is centrally placed in the title for this workshop. I aim to flesh out why moving towards an understanding of entanglements of matter and mobility in today’s global and transitional realities cannot be pictured simply as a moving towards in a linear progressive sense. Instead, if the interventions of contemporary critical posthuman(ist) and (new) materialist entanglement-thinking shall matter to today’s sociopolitical realities – and when approached from with/in feminist, queer, and decolonial perspectives they aim to do so – then it is essential to fully account for the different temporality at stake with/in the entangled matters proposed here. In my talk I will argue for ‘new materialist’, ‘posthuman(ist)’ scholarship as cosmo-political practices and show the significance that this might have for contemporary cultural debates, in which both of these theory-labels are often introduced as a kind of promise for ‘the new’, ‘the fluid’ and/or for ‘open’ sociopolitical horizons.

Kathrin Thiele is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory in the Graduate Gender Programme, Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University, where she teaches courses in contemporary feminist theories, philosophies of difference, queer theory and feminist technoscience studies. Her research also pursues these areas in feminist and continental philosophies, theories of difference(s), and posthuman(ist) studies. Her work emerged from the Deleuzian feminist legacy with specific focus on questions of ethics and politics. Her current research explores critical thinking for a queer feminist cosmopolitics. With it she aims also at the revitalization of critical analyses within the (new) humanities. She is co-founder of the international humanities network Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities (http://terracritica.net). For publications see: https://www.uu.nl/staff/KCThiele/0