Speakers

ERIN MANNING studies in the interstices of philosophy, aesthetics and politics, concerned, always, about alter-pedagogical and alter-economic practices. Pedagogical experiments are central to her work, some of which occur at Concordia University in Montreal where she is a research chair in Speculative Pragmatism, Art and Pedagogy in the Faculty of Fine Arts. Recent monographs include The Minor Gesture (Duke 2016), For a Pragmatics of the Useless (Duke 2020) and Out of the Clear (forthcoming, minor compositions). Her artwork is textile-based and relationally-oriented, often participatory. She is interested in the detail of material complexity, in what reveals itself to perception sideways, in the quality of a textural engagement with life. Her work often plays synesthetically with touch, of recent in acknowledgement and experimentation with the ProTactile movement for DeafBlind culture and language. Tactile propositions include large-scale hangings produced with a diversity of tools including tufting, hooking, knotting, weaving. 3e is the main direction her current research takes - an exploration of the transversality of the three ecologies, the social, the environmental and the conceptual (3ecologies.org). An iteration of 3e is a land-based project north of Montreal where living and learning is experimented. Legacies of SenseLab infuse the project, particularly the question of how collectivity is crafted in a more-than human encounter with worlds in the making.  

CLAIRE COLEBROOK is currently appointed as the Cecile Parrish Memorial Chair of English Literature at Monash University and was formerly the Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. She has published numerous works on Gilles Deleuze, visual art, poetry, queer theory, film studies, contemporary literature, theory, cultural studies and visual culture. Her recent books include Who Would You Kill to Save the World? (University of Nebraska Press 2023) and Twilight of the Anthropocene Idols (Open Humanities Press with Tom Cohen and J. Hillis Miller 2016). She is the editor (with Tom Cohen) of the Critical Climate Change book series at Open Humanities Press.

CHLOE ANASTASIA is a doctoral candidate at the University of Divinity, working on Spinoza’s Woman problem and its relationship to the history of the modern subject. Her work touches on medieval mysticism, the relationship of the social to the emergence of modern science, particularly biology, and the articulation of the material with the symbolic in psychoanalysis.

LORNA COLLINS is an artist, writer, researcher and practitioner in creative health and mad philosophy. She is the founder and director of ‘A Creative Transformation’, a charitable organisation led by and for people with lived experience of acquired brain injury or neurological condition – we make art, tell our stories, form a community, in hospitals and public settings across Europe. Lorna’s work stems from her own experience of a severe traumatic brain injury, which led her to be detained in psychiatric hospitals across England and France for 20 years, with a severe and enduring eating disorder and organic psychosis. She spoke about how art and creativity supported her recovery in a TEDx Talk ("How Creativity Revived Me") and now does a great deal of global advocacy and public speaking about living with psychosis – a set of experiences which she values as perpetually creative and transformative, despite the inherent difficulties it also poses. A documentary film is currently being made about Lorna’s life. She continues to expand the charity she leads, A Creative Transformation, hoping to support more people and expand healthcare services for acquired brain injury. 

MADS DENGSO: My main area of research is in the philosophy of cognitive science. I am currently working as an associate lecturer at the University of Wollongong where I completed my PhD thesis in 2024. My work concentrates on the distributed organization of cognition in individual and collective systems as well as how the latter shapes our ideas about the former. What is the role of sociotechnological (health, educational, and scientific) institutions in shaping individual notions of agency? My research is informed by theoretical frameworks from phenomenology, science studies, and 4E approaches to cognition.

JP DERANTY is Professor of Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. He has published widely on Hegel, post-Hegelian thought, and the philosophy of work. His recent publications include The Case for Work (Oxford University Press 2024) and the edited volume Debating a Post-Work Future (Routledge 2024, with D. Celentano, M. Cholbi, and K. Schaff). His current research explores the concept of sustainable work through the lens of enactivism.

JOE HUGHES is a Senior Lecturer in English and Theater Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has written widely on contemporary European thought. His most recent book is Philosophy After Deleuze (Continuum: 2012); his current project is a history of the scenic form of the European novel. Research and teaching interests include the history of criticism, history of the novel, theories of media and theories of literature.

LINDA LUKE is an Australian dancer and choreographer who lives in the Dharawal/ Illawarra region, NSW. Her artistic practice aims to deepen sensitivity and excavate the subtler undercurrents we experience in relationship to self, each other and the environment. Since 2005, Linda has been a core member of De Quincey Co, a leading Body Weather dance company, performing extensively in festivals and dance programs across Australia through to 2025.  In addition to her work with the company, Linda has created and toured several solo works, presented at Performance Space’s LiveWorks, Melbourne International Dance Festival, Dancehouse, FormDance, Campbelltown Arts Centre, MAP Festival (Malaysia), and Flower of the Season (USA). She has also conceived, curated, and produced a range of independent dance and performance initiatives, including Platform (De Quincey Co, 2009–2019), Happy Hour (ReadyMade Works, 2016– 2019 but program is ongoing), and CO/MINGLING (Merrigong Theatre, 2025–2026). Linda maintains a vibrant teaching practice in performance-creation at the University of Wollongong, where she is also undertaking a Doctorate of Creative Arts. Her research investigates the role of imagination in Body Weather’s image-based choreography. She is currently the treasurer for AUSTI Dance and Physical Theatre (since 2022) and has been the treasurer for The Cad Factory (2013 – 2020) and board member for ReadyMade (2015 – 2021).

ANNIE SANDRUSSI is a political philosopher with expertise in phenomenology, political ontology and sexual difference, and feminist ecological materialism. Her research considers the formation of subjectivities in relation to institutions, especially concerning the role of understandings of care in social reproduction and ecological justice. Annie is a research fellow in Philosophy at Macquarie University, currently working with the Australian Research Council’s Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology.

JASON TUCKWELL is an Associate Lecturer in English at Western Sydney University. His research interests include Aristotle, Simondon, aesthetics, and technology, with a particular focus upon problems of creative and technical praxes. He is the author of Creation and the Function of Art: Technē, Poiesis and the Problem of Aesthetics (Bloomsbury Studies in Continental Philosophy, 2018) and the editor of a special issue “In the Light of Simondon”, SubStance, 167, (2025).

MARILYN STENDERA is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Wollongong. Her research focuses primarily on the phenomenological tradition, the philosophy of cognition, and the history of philosophy. She is particularly interested in time, and is the co-author (with Emily Hughes) of the recently-published book Heidegger’s Alternative History of Time (Routledge 2024).

EMILY HUGHES is an ARC Discovery Early Career Research Award (DECRA) fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Macquarie University. She was previously a postdoctoral research associate in philosophy at the University of York and a fellow of the Valente Loneliness Seminar at Bentley University. Her research is situated in the intersection between existential phenomenology and the philosophy of psychiatry and psychology, with a particular focus on phenomenological interpretations of affect and the way in which different affective conditions modify temporal, spatial and bodily experience. She is the co-author of Heidegger’s Alternative History of Time with Marilyn Stendera (Routledge 2024).