Jonathan Bratt

Jonathan Bratt is a PhD candidate in Geography at Arizona State University. He is interested in urban livability and the aesthetics of everyday public life. He is currently completing a dissertation titled “Making Heat and Noise: Aesthetic Sociality and Urban Public Life in Tianjin, China” under the supervision of Kevin McHugh. He completed an M.A. in East Asian Studies at Indiana University and conducts much of his research in Chinese. At ASU he is a co-director of the Post-Human Network and a student affiliate of the Center for Philosophical Technologies and the Synthesis Center. He has published articles in Tourist Studies and Literary Geographies and a co-authored chapter in Handbook of Cities and the Environment.

Garrett Laroy Johnson

Garrett Johnson works with responsive media environments to probe, condition,

engender, and refract relations between technological determinations and productions of

subjectivity. Trained as a musician and musicologist, questions of ensemble, materiality,

expression, gesture, and vocality are central to his research. Johnson designs and creates

digital-physical systems activating sound, light, and expressive materials in immersive and

quotidian spaces alike.

Mark LaRubio

Mark LaRubio is a PhD student in English Literature. His area of expertise is Early Modern drama. His theoretical interests are in economic theory, critical race theory, and many others.

Nat Mengist

Nat Mengist is a proud union worker at the University of Washington, part-time outreach coordinator for the Comparative History of Ideas Department (CHID), and part-time research study coordinator for an NSF grant-funded project called Learning in Places. His intellectual project engages historiographic, epistemological, critical, and ecological thinking to envision rhizomatic relationalities across domains of living and learning. Nat wrote an extended undergraduate thesis exploring interdisciplinary understandings of alchemy with Phillip Thurtle in 2015. He then leveraged a master’s in education policy to facilitate racial equity work in the Seattle environmental nonprofit scene.

Celina Osuna

Celina Osuna is a second year PhD student in Literature at ASU. She is also enrolled in the Critical Theory Certificate. Currently her research interests include: Nonhuman and Human Phenomenology of the desert, American Literature of the long 20th Century, Solargraphy, Desert Literature, Critical Theory and Studies of: Place, Memory, Time, and Light.

Angela Sakrison

Angela Sakrison is a Cultural Geography PhD student, studying the cultural effects of climate change -- how the experience of destruction and decay reshapes community and culture, beyond the geophysical, and beyond the human. She is particularly interested in the role affective objects and art encounters play as creative incongruities, how they encourage attunement to the environment or shifts in perspective (and perception). Her research is informed by the process philosophies of Whitehead, Bergson, and Deleuze, as well as post-phenomenology, and contributes to emerging work on the embodied experience of climate change.

Zachary Thomas

Zachary Thomas holds an MA from Arizona State University focused on literature,

cinema, ecological and cultural studies. His theoretical practice includes materialist and

process ontologies in the posthumanities. His engagements with music and film keep

him limber in both an interdisciplinary and professional sense.

Emiddio Vasquez

Born in Dominican Republic and raised in Cyprus, Emiddio Vasquez works at the interstice of media art, continental philosophy and mathematical thinking. He works with sound on both the stage and in the gallery space.

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