28-30 MAY 2020, VIRTUAL SYMPOSIUM (GMT+01:00)
__Biographies
OUR KEYNOTES:
Keti Chukhrov is ScD in philosophy, an associate professor at the Department of Сultural Studies at the Higher School of Economics (Moscow). In 2017-2019 she has been a Marie Sklodowska Curie fellow in UK, Wolverhampton University. She has authored numerous texts on art theory and philosophy. Her full-length books include: To Be—To Perform. ‘Theatre’ in Philosophic Critique of Art (European Un-ty, 2011), and Pound &£ (Logos, 1999) and a volume of dramatic writing: Merely Humans (2010). Her research interests and publications deal with: 1. Philosophy of performativity; 2. the impact of socialist political economy on the epistemes of historical socialism; 3. Art-systems. Her forthcoming book Practicing the Good. Desire and Boredom in Soviet Socialism deals with the communist epistemologies in the Soviet Marxist philosophy of 1960-s and 1970-s.
Mijke van der Drift is a writer, educator, and performer, using ethics as a focal point in multi-disciplinary research about social transformation. Van der Drift lectures at the Royal College of Art, London and is a research fellow at BAK, Utrecht. Their current project The Logic of Loss in Bonding uses film and philosophy to formulate a counterpoint to managerial theories of accumulation. Their film A way of dying… (2017), co-directed with Alex Reuter, is touring. In addition, Van der Drift is currently working on their book Nonnormative Ethics: The Dynamics of Trans Formation. They obtained a PhD from Goldsmiths, University of London.
Antke Engel is director of the Institute for Queer Theory in Berlin; a site where academic debate meets up with political activism and artistic/cultural practices. Engel received their PhD in Philosophy at Potsdam University and works as independent scholar and guest professor in the fields of queer, feminist and poststructuralist theory, political philosophy, and visual cultural studies. They were Asa Briggs fellow at the University of Sussex and visiting fellow at the Gender Institute of the London School of Economics as well as the Institute of Cultural Inquiry Berlin. Engel co-edited Hegemony and Heteronormativity (2011) and Global Justice and Desire: Queering Economy (2015), and published numerous essays and two monographs. Their considerations on desire can be found in German in the book Queering Psychoanalysis, edited by Esther Hutfless and Barbara Zach, Vienna 2017.
Chandra Frank is a PhD candidate and independent curator. She holds an MPhil in African Studies from the University of Cape Town and is currently a PhD candidate at Goldsmiths, University of London and guest lecturer at California State University in Los Angeles. Chandra’s work is focused on the Black, Migrant and Refugee women’s movement in the Netherlands during the 1980s. She explores the role of archives, transnational queer kinship, the making of feminist genealogy and the politics of pleasure. Chandra has written for, amongst others, Africa is A Country, Discover Society and Warscapes. In 2016, she was a Curatorial Fellow at the Institute of the Creative Arts (University of Cape Town). Previous exhibitions include Re(as)sisting Narratives at Framer Framed and the Homecoming Centre, District Six Museum, Fugitive Desires at 198 Contemporary Arts & Learning, and Proclamation 73 at Durban Art Gallery.
Juliet Jacques is a writer and filmmaker based in London. Her most recent book was Trans: A Memoir (Verso, 2015). Her short fiction, journalism, essays and criticism have appeared in Frieze, Granta, Sight & Sound, London Review of Books and many other publications. Her short films have screened in galleries and festivals worldwide.
Minou Norouzi is a filmmaker, film curator and writer. She is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher in the Arts at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, University of Helsinki (2019 – 2020). Her research examines documentaries in an interdisciplinary context drawing on decolonial feminist scholarship. Between 2011 – 2019, Minou was responsible for the creative direction and production of the artist-led research project and film programming initiative Sheffield Fringe.
Nat Raha is a poet, trans / queer activist and scholar, living in Edinburgh, Scotland. Her third collection of poetry is of sirens, body & faultlines (Boiler House Press, 2018), and her creative and critical writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the South Atlantic Quarterly, LIES: A Journal of Materialist Feminism, and the Verso blog. Nat holds a PhD from the University of Sussex, and recently completed a postdoctoral position on the 'Cruising the 70s: Unearthing Pre-HIV/AIDS Queer Sexual Cultures' project at the Edinburgh College of Art. She co-edits Radical Transfeminism zine.
Nydia A. Swaby is a creative writer, performance lecturer, and ritual artist working at the intersection of archives, ethnography, and visual culture. She has a PhD in gender studies from SOAS and specializes in theories of gendered, racial, and diasporic formation, black feminism, and black queer studies. Nydia is Curator of Learning at the Institute of Contemporary Arts. She is amember of Feminist Review’s Editorial Collective and is co-editing a forthcoming issue on how we engage archives in queer, feminist, diasporic, and postcolonial studies.
PARTICIPANT BIOGRAPHIES:
Denise Ackerl is currently completing a practice-based PhD where she investigates strategies of resistance from a feminist performance perspective within a Post-Fordist economy. Additionally, to her mostly live performances, she considers the publication of her academic writing as part of her artistic practice and research. In 2017, she received the AHRC Doctoral Research Award, in 2016 the MEAD British School of Rome scholarship and in 2012 the Theodor Koerner award. Previous to her PhD, Ackerl did an MA in Fine Art at Chelsea College of Art and studies Painting, Political Sciences and Economics in Vienna.
Marcus Bell is a dancer, choreographer and researcher. They completed their BA and MA at King’s College London with a focus on the reception of the classical in dance through the 19th and 20th centuries, queer theory, film studies, and practice as research. They have performed with Matthew Bourne’s New Adventures, and Thomas Page Dances. Marcus’ more recent work investigates queer co-presence and intra-action. They are reading for a DPhil at Oxford university with a focus on queering the relations between the classical and the postmodern in dance at the turn of the twenty-first century.
Jacob Breslow, Dr. is an Assistant Professor of Sexuality and Gender at the LSE Department of Gender Studies. His primary area of research is on the ambivalent investments in childhood within contemporary U.S. social justice movements: Black Lives Matter, transfeminism, queer youth activism, and anti-deportation movements. His book on this research, forthcoming in March 2021 with the University of Minnesota Press, is tentatively titled Speculative Childhoods: Ambivalence, Belonging and the Psychic Life of the Child. His work is published in Comparative American Studies (2020), American Quarterly (2019), Porn Studies (2018), and Transgender Studies Quarterly (2017).
Genevieve Costello is a cultural researcher and artist. She is currently working on her PhD project, "Communities of Care for Technofeminist Futures" at Royal Holloway, University of London and collaborates as part of ReUnion Network.
AC Davidson thinks, writes, teaches and sometimes tweets (@acdavids) on the intersections of sustainability and social justice. Her work is informed by feminists who subvert normative understandings of gender, race, nationality, sexuality, economy and ability to construct utopian demands. She is a lecturer in human geography at the University of Huddersfield, and is involved in local organising in relation to the climate emergency and anti-racists practice and education.
Phoebe Eccles is a philosophy and literature graduate from Hackney, London. Her poetry and prose has appeared in Strix, SOFT EIS and Ambit, and is forthcoming in SPAM Zine. She performs comedy spoken word and is the creator of literary zine Algae.
Caroline Harris is a poet, publisher and editor. Her interdisciplinary practice-based PhD at Royal Holloway brings together innovative digital and material poetries of deer, the poetics of nonhuman others (including in the work of Pascale Petit, Alice Oswald, Joy Harjo) and current philosophical, cultural and ecological theory. Her interests cross experimental poetics, literature, animal studies, the materialist turn in philosophy, translation between media and species, aesthetics, feminist theory. Her debut poetry pamphlet and artist’s bookwork SCRUB management handbook no.1 Mere is published by Singing Apple Press (2018) and held in the collections of the National Poetry Library and Bodleian Library.
Christian Klesse is Reader at the Department of Sociology at Manchester Metropolitan University. Christian studied Social and Economic History, Anthropology, Politics, Contemporary German Literature and Gender and Ethnicity Studies in Germany and the UK and holds a Ph.D. in Sociology from the University of Essex. His research interests lie in the fields of gender and sexual politics, including non-monogamy and polyamory, transnational LGBTQ activism and Queer Film Festivals. His work is interdisciplinary and often collaborative. He is author of The Spectre of Promiscuity. Gay male and Bisexual Non-monogamies and Polyamories (Ashgate, 2007). Recent journal articles include ‘The politics of age and generation at the GAZE International LGBT Film Festival in Dublin’ (with Jon Binnie) The Sociological Review (2017), ‘Theorising Multi-partner Relationships and Sexualities – Recent Work on Non-monogamy and Polyamory’, Sexualities (2017), and ‘Marriage, Law and Polyamory. Rebutting Mononormativity with Sexual Orientation Discourse?’ Ońati Socio-Legal Series Oñati Socio-Legal Series (2016).
Cynthia Montier & Ophélie Naessens are a duo of artist-researchers. Their work explores the notion of esoterico-geography, the apprehension of geography and urban or rural geology as spaces with a double dimension: both physical (concrete) and esoteric (hidden meaning), revealing a profound meaning; the symbolic representation of a spiritual, mystical, or emotional experience. They imagine and experiment with participatory forms of navigating between art, activism and magic. Together, they are interested in devices for mediating and transmitting knowledge and practices — ritual pedagogies — as well as in the place of spirituality in artistic, vernacular and militant practices.
Andrea Ray is an artist who received a PhD in fine art from the Malmö Art Academy. Ray’s installations embody both visual and aural approaches to the subjects of attachment and community, attempting to repair an alienated subjectivity through what Ray terms expanded affinities. Ray’s work has been exhibited at Wesleyan University’s Zilkha Gallery, in NYC at Sculpture Center, Apex Art, MoMA P.S.1 Clocktower, and Wanås Foundation in Sweden. Awards include Art Matters and Whitney Museum Independent Study Program Fellowships.
ReUnion is a network of independent collaborators of cross-cultural background and multi-disciplinary practices, who are exploring ideas and experimentation under the framework of ReUnion Network – a design prototype for civic implementation and research. ReUnion Network is mainly operating in The Netherlands and funded by Creative Industries Fund NL since 2018.
Lou Lou Sainsbury (she/they) is a trans artist and writer based in Margate, UK & Rotterdam, Netherlands. They self-identify as a time traveller, making things that unwrite histories of living beings into mythopeaic dreamscapes, informed by queer & ecological activisms. They often seek intimate approaches to understand technology, power, and how living beings transform within these worlds; using sloppy words, noisy performances and unstable images to create tricksterish fables for utopian thinking.
Sorana Santos is a composer, multi-instrumentalist, and writer whose work brings together elements of Contemporary Music, Jazz, Electronic and Experimental Music and Songwriting to explore themes concerning semantics, structure, and psychic portrayal in song and vocal music. Her portfolio includes commissions from and work with the BBC, The Rose Theatre, Southbank, and the Millennium Commission, and her music has been broadcast on BBC3 and BBC6. Her previous work, a conjoined book and album release, toured the UK with support from Arts Council England and was nominated by BASCA for a British Composer Award. She is a visiting lecturer at Oxford University and The Guildhall School of Music’s Centre for Young Musicians.
Anna Segal is a 2nd year PhD candidate in Sociology and Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Kent. She has a background working in mental health care services, both within the NHS and the charitable sector. She has been awarded an MA in Social Research Methods from the University of Kent’s School of Social Policy, Sociology and Social Research. Her doctoral research focuses on women’s engagement with BDSM practices and how this influences their sense of self and development of sexual identities within BDSM communities. Her areas of interest include gender, sexuality, kink, non-normative relationship structures, feminist activism, and critical theory.
Despoina Tzanou is a curator, art historian and writer based in Braga, Portugal. She is currently the Deputy Director & Curator at Galeria Duarte Sequeira and was a founding member of DOW Collective. Her curatorial practice is focused on the exploration and deconstruction of cultural symbols and socio-political events, while drawing connections between mythology, technology and contemporary theoretical discourse. She holds a BA in Art Theory and History from the Athens School of Fine Arts (2015) and a MA in Curating the Contemporary from the London Metropolitan University in conjunction with the Whitechapel Gallery (2017).
Nadira Wallace is a London-based poet and third-year Practice-based PhD student at Royal Holloway, University of London. She read English (BA, 2008) and English and American Studies (Mst, 2010) at Oxford University before going on to complete a Masters of Fine Art in Writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2013-2015). Nadira has participated in a couple of festivals, including ‘Extinction Underground’ at The Vaults (February, 2020)–––where she handed out zero-waste poetry on edible paper––and the Runnymede Literary Festival (patrons: Sir Andrew Motion and Dame Hilary Mantel).