Field Theory

Dates: Semester 2, 2024 (course with weekly meetings and a final presentation day) 
Location: University of Amsterdam
Instructor: Jeff Diamanti (UvA)
Contact: j.diamanti@uva.nl
Credits: 6 ECTS

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 and 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.