Field Theory
Dates: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4-28 March 2025 (Final Workshop at Framer Framed in Amsterdam on 27-28 March
Time: 10:00-14:00
Location: University of Amsterdam
Instructor: Jeff Diamanti
Credits: 6 ECTS
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*This course is fully booked. If you sign up, you will be placed on a waiting list.
Traditionally, “the field” of research has been treated as the raw material from which objects and cases are drawn in order to advance knowledge in a given discipline. A forest, tribal territory, archive of literature, or body of water, for instance, yields data and patterns in need of an analytic. That data demands interpretation, theorization, and disciplinary vetting. In Kantian epistemology, the world is coherent and legible but verifiably not self-evident. In this orientation, the lab, library, or desk is the site where information becomes knowledge, and it is for this reason that “the field” has remained an opaque realm for philosophical inquiry and epistemic habit (even as “the world” begins to force itself back into disciplinary reckoning). Any epistemic culture bears a determinate (and determined) relation to the field, but how exactly remains an under-examined question. Will time in the forest, the archive, or body of water modulate assumption, expectation, concept formation, or conclusion? Can the field write itself into our analytic disposition? Ought we assume a normative orientation toward what often bifurcates field frequencies, embedded relation, biosemiotic idiom (in short, the world) from the stylistics of disciplinary habit (what we make of it)? What might motivate the recent imperative in feminist science, new materialist philosophy, and ecological theory to find commensurabilities and reciprocities between the field and the interpretive apparatus?
This seminar invites participants to 1) engage in recent scholarship concerned with the constitution, force, and animacy of the physical field, and 2) experiment with letting the field co-create the categories and concepts of analysis through immersive and collaborative techniques of engagement. Across six sessions, we will discuss leading contributions to field philosophy (including works from Edouard Glissant, Tim Ingold, Anna Tsing, Thomas Nail, Isabelle Stengers, and Luce Irigaray) in conversation with various guest speakers working at the intersection of artistic and scientific research.
Students in this course will have opportunity to 1) explore these emergent environmental philosophies and their antecedents; 2) evaluate critical viewpoints on contemporary discourses of environmental sustainability, transition, and responsibility; and 3) acquire research skills necessary for 21st century environmental advocacy and policy work.
Critical Raw Cartographies
By 2050, the European Union will demand upwards of ninety times more rare earth elements for digital technologies and renewable energy infrastructure than today. All of those materials will be mined from the earth. Until now, nearly all of the supply of these and other critical materials has been supplied by the Chinese mining sector. In March 2023, the European Union passed the Critical Raw Materials Act which seeks to counter European dependence on the import of rare earths and critical raw minerals. Instead of moving away from the logic of extraction intrinsic to the climate emergency, this act aims at fast-tracking the growth and exploitation of new mining sites in Europe and its map of influence. A new cartography of critical extraction will mark the “energy transition”, and the political power of Europe will depend on the economic security of these supply chains.
How do we build on the militancy of restorative solidarities negotiated in the present tense of past violences and move toward pre-emptive reciprocities, reading with the extractive gaze of weaponised supply chains in order to anticipate intimate ecologies and dispossessive legacies about to get written? As long cycles of accumulation shift with the tectonics of transition cultures, what future archives of violence and power are hinged propositionally to the nomos of European sovereignties?
The three-week field seminar invites researchers to collaboratively map the emergent cartography and counter-cultures of these supply channels.