Key note speakers

Erin Manning is a professor in the Faculty of Fine Arts at Concordia University (Montreal, Canada). She is also the founder of SenseLab (http://senselab.ca/wp2/), a laboratory that explores the intersections between art practice and philosophy through the matrix of the sensing body in movement. Current art projects are focused around the concept of minor gestures in relation to colour and movement. Art exhibitions include the Sydney and Moscow Biennales, Glasshouse (New York), Vancouver Art Museum, McCord Museum (Montreal) and House of World Cultures (Berlin) and Galateca Gallery (Bucarest). Publications include For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Duke UP, forthcoming), The Minor Gesture (Duke UP, 2016), Always More Than One: Individuation’s Dance (Duke UP, 2013), Relationscapes: Movement, Art, Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2009) and, with Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience (Minnesota UP, 2014).

Erin's keynote address at the conference is entitled 'We Owe Each Other Everything – The Undercommons of the University'

“We owe it to each other to falsify the institution, to make politics incorrect, to give the lie to our own determination. We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything".

Fred Moten and Stefano Harney

Crossing an institutional threshold comes at a cost: the threshold carries a presupposition about who passes, and who crosses easily. What is the character of the debt to the crossing itself? What techniques are necessary in a radical pedagogy of infinite debt-without-credit that takes the threshold seriously? How might we transform the threshold toward an undercommons of the university? This paper explores the ways in which neurodiversity challenges the university to open itself to the neurotypicality – and by extension, the whiteness – that undergirds its edifice and supports its definition, almost always unspoken, of what qualifies as knowledge, and, by extension, of credit.

Erin will not be able to physically travel to the conference and her keynote talk will be offered virtually.

Ezekiel Dixon-Román is an associate professor in the School of Social Policy & Practice at the University of Pennsylvania. Although trained in the social sciences and psychometrics, he does work on the cultural studies of education, quantification, and social policy. His research employs new materialisms to rethink and reconceptualize technologies of quantification. He’s particularly interested in how power and difference are reproduced, especially in bodily capacities, and the ways in which sociotechnical systems of quantification are working on, with, and in the body as processes of biopolitical control of populations. Dixon-Román is also deeply interested in creative interventions that philosophically and methodologically develop alternative modes of inquiry and practices of quantification. He co-guest edited (with Liz de Freitas & Patti Lather) “Alternative Ontologies of Number: Rethinking the Quantitative in Computational Culture” (2016, Cultural Studies-Critical Methodologies) and is the author of Inheriting Possibility: Social Reproduction & Quantification in Education (2017, University of Minnesota Press). He is currently working on a book project tentatively titled Haunting Algorithms: Algorithmic Governmentality and the Racial Logics of Colonialism.

Ezekiel's keynote address at the conference is entitled 'Materialist Enumerations: From the SAT to Learning Analytics'

In this talk, Ezekiel Dixon-Román will discuss the material and sociopolitical forces of sociotechnical assemblages of higher education. He begins by examining the ontology of the SAT as a measuring apparatus of college admissions and its intra-actions with conceptions of “meritocracy”; how the apparatus is socially understood by test-takers and how that influences preparation; and the intra-acting force of present pasts of the grandparents education with grandchild SAT performance. Then, shifting from enumerating practices of discipline to networked processes of control, he also examines the sociopolitical implications of learning analytics as they are integrated into writing instruction and assessment. Drawing from new materialist and Black feminist thought, he considers how both of these sociotechnical assemblages become agencies of sociopolitical relations enabling an iterability of enumerated hierarchized difference.

Fikile Nxumalo is an assistant professor of teacher education at OISE, University of Toronto. Her work is centered on environmental and place-attuned early childhood education that is situated within and responsive to children’s inheritances of settler colonialism, anti-blackness and environmental precarity. This scholarship is rooted in perspectives from Indigenous knowledges, Black feminist geographies, critical posthumanisms, as well as the environmental humanities and sciences. Her book, Decolonizing Place in Early Childhood Education (Routledge, 2019) examines the entanglements of place, environmental education, childhood, race, and settler colonialism in early learning contexts on unceded Coast Salish territories in British Columbia, Canada.

The title of Fikile's keynote address at the conference is 'Anti-colonial attunements to place in higher education: Thinking with radical relationality'

This keynote address engages with the generative potentials and necessity of attunement to place in higher education. It focuses in particular on what radical relationality; conceptualized by bringing new feminist materialisms, Indigenous knowledges, and Black feminisms into conversation, might mobilize towards unsettling the anthropocentric priorities and inheritances of higher education. The engagements are situated with place within ongoing and intensifying anthropogenic environmental precarity that underlines the imperative of more relational ways of living and learning in always already more-than-human worlds. In bringing new materialisms into conversation with Indigenous knowledges and Black feminisms, Fikile mobilizes relationalities that unsettle human-centredness while also disrupting the universalization of the category of the human.

Elizabeth de Freitas is a Professor in the Education and Social Research Institute and co-director of the Biosocial Laboratory for Research on Learning and Behavior, at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on philosophical investigations of mathematics, science and technology, pursuing the implications and applications of this work across the social sciences. Her research has been funded by the Canada Council for the Arts, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She has published 3 books and over 50 chapters and articles. She also writes about social science research methodology, exploring alternative ways of engaging with data, and developing experimental and speculative research methods. She is co-editor of a number of recent journal special issues - Thinking with Spinoza about Education (EPAT, Fall 2018), and Science and Technology Studies x Educational Studies (ES, Fall 2017). She is co-author of Mathematics and the body: Material entanglements in the classroom (2014).

The title of Liz's keynote address is 'Speculative fiction, science distrust, and the non-relational outside'

New materialisms often appeal to relational ontologies, remix the physical and social sciences, and find affinities in various kinds of naturalism and realism. In pursuing affective, terrestrial and metamorphic couplings across conventional divides (matter-meaning, mineral-microbrial alliances, …) such approaches emphasize both empirical and speculative techniques. This talk takes up that dual objective, exploring the power of speculative fiction to help us study pluralistic posthuman ecologies.