Saturday, 7.7.2018
11:30
In English
Moderation: Irina Raskin

In this presentation I bring together two interests that I see as significant for and in present day critical (feminist) interventions: On the one hand I hope to make resonate the potential of ›figuration‹ as a feminist methodology (Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway) for earthly relations in thought and life. On the other hand, by drawing so affirmatively on figuration as a critical method, tool or technique, I also want to intervene critically into possibly too easy or comforting appropriations of figuration as a specifically relational methodological practice.

Thus, in my talk I will devote a lot of energy to explicate and situate well what the second part of the title for this presentation states; namely how important it is to continually stress ›non-innocence‹ – another so well-known feminist concern in critical epistemological endeavors – when engaging with/in relational matters.

Kathrin Thiele is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Trained transdisciplinarily in Gender Studies, Sociology, Literary Studies and Critical Theory, her research focuses on questions of ethics and politics from queer feminist, decolonial and posthuman(ist) perspectives. Her published work intervenes in contemporary feminist debates around (sexual) differences, de/coloniality and new materialism/posthumanisms, and it pays specific attention to questions of relationality, implicatedness and ontological entanglements. Currently, her work pushes critical thinking for a queer feminist cosmopolitics, with which she aims at the revitalization of critically aware analyses in the (new) humanities. Together with Birgit M. Kaiser (Comparative Literature, Utrecht University) she founded and coordinates Terra Critica: Interdisciplinary Network for the Critical Humanities (http://terracritica.net).