Posthuman Symbioses Masterclass
A Thinking-With Donna Haraway and Rosi Braidotti
Focusing on the urgent question of our ‘becoming-with’ environments, the ‘Posthuman Symbioses Masterclass’ aims to find conceptual tools for redirecting future architecture and urban design towards a more sympoietic direction that may mitigate the increasingly complex crises in the Anthropocene.
As the posthumanist philosopher Rosi Braidotti argues, the environmental, social, and technological transformations that define the present can no longer be addressed separately by the sciences, humanities, and engineering. This disciplinary separation along divisions of nature, culture, and technology prevents the approach of these immense and irreversible problems as processes that are created, co-constituted, and co-individuated by design. The concept of sympoiesis elaborated in Donna Haraway’s well-known work critically extends autopoietic notions of self-organising systems by attending more closely to the forms of co-evolution in which things always ‘become-together-with’ other things.
Held in conjunction with Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, the host of ‘An Evening With Donna Haraway, Bruno Clarke and Rosi Braidotti’ on Thursday, 7th December, the ‘Posthuman Symbioses Masterclass’ on 8th December at BK/TU Delft is open to a maximum of 100 participating MSc students and PhD candidates.
The Masterclass is organised around two sessions where a total of 12 selected students will be given the opportunity to deliver a brief pitch presentation of their research (maximum of 5 slides, 10 minutes) with a following discussion round. The event is conceived as an intergenerational experience of ‘learning-with’ Haraway and Braidotti as leading (eco)feminist/posthumanist theorists, and (PhD) students with a keen interest in adopting and adapting their approaches in their own research and designerly work. The wider intention is to generally foster inter- and trans-disciplinary approaches to architecture and urban design that embrace the life sciences or humanities, and especially posthuman/sympoietic approaches, situated forms of knowledge, and ‘minor’ angles.
Schedule
9:45-10:00 Welcome
10:00-12:30 Session 1 on Posthumanism
10:00-10:30 Introduction by Setareh Noorani
10:30-11:30 Six research pitches
11:30-12:30 Discussion
12:30-14:00 Lunch
14:00-16:30 Session 2 on Sympoiesis
14:00-14:30 Introduction by Bruce Clarke
14:30-15:30 Six research pitches
15:30-16:30 Discussion.
16:30 Drinks