Vivian Blaxell’s brilliant essay, 'Nuclear Cats', was shortlisted for the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2021. In this Q&A, we get deeper into the thought behind her writing, covering themes like beauty, gender, the animal / human divide, history and Australian culture. Vivian Blaxell is a trans pioneer, former teenage sex worker, mental health nurse and professor of history and politics specialising in Japan and East Asia, and the co-founder of Tiresias House (now the Gender Centre in Sy...
Jan 03, 2022•45 min•Season 2Ep. 9
What are feminine masculinity and masculine femininity, and how do popular digital representations shape our notions of beauty, self-care, and work? In this episode, we speak to Dr Hannah McCann and Shirley Xue Chen about digital representations of gender and beauty in RuPaul's Drag Race and Queer Eye, as well as romance and gender in Australia's new season of The (Bisexual) Bachelorette. We also discuss their research on Beyond Skin Deep, ( https://www.beautysalonproject.com/ ) an ARC-funded pr...
Oct 28, 2021•49 min•Season 2Ep. 8
Why are women so frequently targeted with hate speech online and what can we do about it? In this talk, we chat with Dr Louise Richardson-Self about her new book, Hate Speech against Women Online, published in 2021 with Rowman and Littlefield International. Dr Louise Richardson-Self is Lecturer in Philosophy & Gender Studies in the School of Humanities at the University of Tasmania, and her new book investigates the woman-hostile norms of the English-speaking internet, the ‘rules’ of engagem...
Oct 28, 2021•51 min•Season 2Ep. 7
In this Q&A we chat with Gary Hall about his book, A Stubborn Fury. This book offers a powerful and provocative look at the consequences of this inequality for English culture in particular. Focusing on the literary novel and the memoir, he investigates, in terms that are as insightful as they are irreverent, why so much writing in England is uncritically realist, humanist and anti-intellectual. Experimentally pirating McCarthy, Eribon and Louis, A Stubborn Fury addresses that most urgent of...
Aug 20, 2021•39 min•Season 2Ep. 6
Can computers be creative? Is algorithmic art just a form of Candy Crush? Cutting through the smoke and mirrors surrounding computation, robotics and artificial intelligence, in this Q&A Joanna Zylinska argues that, to understand the promise of AI for the creative fields, we must not confine ourselves solely to the realm of aesthetics. Instead, we need to address the role and position of the human in the current technical setup – including the associated issues of labour, robotisation and, l...
Aug 20, 2021•32 min•Season 2Ep. 5
How can we implement posthuman ways of existing in everyday life? And what does it mean to be 'posthuman' in Australasia? Dr Elese Dowden discussed these questions with leading Posthuman scholar Dr Francesca Ferrando, Founder of the Global Posthuman Network and Adjunct Assistant Professor in Philosophy at New York University. Our conversations revolve around her recent book, Philosophical Posthumanism, and we consider how we might apply ideas in posthumanism to our everyday lives in Australasia....
May 05, 2021•36 min•Season 2Ep. 3
In this Q&A with feminist philosopher Christine Daigle, we discuss how Simone de Beauvoir’s philosophy represents a first major step towards a rejection of the humanist subject. Christine argues that Beauvoir's work is influential for the development of contemporary posthumanist material feminism. Specifically, she argues, Beauvoir's unprecedented attention to embodiment and biology, in The Second Sex and other works, as well as her notion of ambiguity, serve to challenge the humanist subjec...
Apr 22, 2021•29 min•Season 2Ep. 2
In this talk, we'll hear from Rose Trappes and Ali Teymoori. Honour killing is the murder of women and sometimes men who have been perceived to have broken codes of sexual conduct in a local community. The crimes are typically justified as part of the process of restoring honour to a family or community. Rose and Ali use philosophical, feminist, and social theories to develop an interpretation and explanation of honour killing as a “dark side of modernity”. Specifically, they discuss how sexism ...
Feb 15, 2021•35 min•Season 1Ep. 8
In this Q&A, Matt Sharpe gives us insights from his recent public policy research into the impacts of marketization and casualization on Australian and German universities. The marketization of higher education, although presented as a neutral means to achieve 'efficiencies', inescapably produces “problem tendencies” (cf. Habermas, 1992; Crioni et al, 2015) within teaching, between casualization and reduction of teaching staff and quality of instruction; within research, between free inquiry...
Feb 11, 2021•52 min•Season 2Ep. 1
In this podcast, Erin McFadyen thinks about the human desire to voice animal subjectivity, and the limitations of our power to do so. In works such as Les Murray’s Translations from the Natural World and John Kinsella’s The Jaguar’s Dream, a lyric impulse to speak from the subject position of the animal taps into a long Anglophone poetic tradition of ‘translating’ or ‘voicing’ our more-than-human companions. With recourse to Latour’s actor-network theory and the object-oriented ontology of Jane ...
Feb 11, 2021•35 min•Season 1Ep. 7
In this podcast, Magdalena talks about how material objects in cultural memory studies question the philosophic assumptions about inanimate things and ‘lower level’ organic objects in the Aristotelian hierarchy of beings. She analyzes the nexus of materiality, plasticity and memory in the work of French philosopher and art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, with the aim of, first, contributing to explorations of the mnemonic effects and affordances of material things, and, also, of approaching col...
Oct 24, 2020•51 min•Season 1Ep. 6
What is the "posthumanities?" Taking a pragmatic approach to the posthumanities, Stephen's seminar engages with the work of Rosi Braidotti, Isabelle Stengers, Bruno Latour and Lesley Green in order to glean some methodological principles in this wide-ranging field. Stephen asks what the posthumanities makes it possible to do that we couldn’t do so well before, and what kinds of practical problems the field can address. More information about the Australasian Post-Humanities at aposthumanities.or...
Oct 19, 2020•42 min•Season 1Ep. 5
Andrew shows that algorithmic modes of thought have long and problematic histories of collusion in processes of governmentality, dating at least back to the Atlantic slave trade and including the othering of neurodiverse, black and indigenous, and queer cultures. Beyond their instrumentation within systems of power, he proposes that at the foundation level of algorithmic design there are a series of assumptions about what constitutes legitimate thought processes. These assumptions are based on n...
Oct 19, 2020•39 min•Season 1Ep. 4
Tracy asks, 'Do one's abdominal organs "belong" to oneself?' In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari refer to the Body Without Organs - a mysterious and confounding concept. Interestingly, they're careful to explain they have nothing against organs; it's the assemblage that is the problem, because assemblages tend to concentrate or enact power. In my novel, working title The Pouch of Douglas*, the affected organs in a cancerous human body tell us about their own lives and trials. It is a ca...
Oct 17, 2020•32 min•Season 1Ep. 3
As Dinesh argues, existentialism is no Humanism; that is, no forms of Humanism can be properly existentialist. Sartre’s idea of free will cannot be denied to non-human animals (henceforth simply labelled animals), because like humans, animals undertake projects and make choices throughout their lives. And it cannot be logically or empirically argued, without uncertainty, that animals are only mechanical automata; if humans can be argued, with certainty, to be free via the experienced structures ...
Oct 17, 2020•44 min•Season 1Ep. 2
As Maddy explores, shame is the psychological desire to be socially connected and understood, and its fulfillment is essential to our wellbeing and flourishing, while its neglect leads to psychological and moral damage. Invoking the eudaemonistic framework of (neo-Aristotelian) virtue ethics, she argues that the practice of shaming cannot therefore ever be ethically justified. From this it follows that the most ethically desirable reaction one can have to shame is one which best allows them to r...
Oct 17, 2020•26 min•Season 1Ep. 1
