Between Bios and Art: Aesthetic and Ethical Significance of Art Working with Living Materials
Agnieszka Anna Wolodzka | Leiden University | Promotor: Prof. dr. R. Zwijnenberg In my research I investigate the aesthetico-ethical implications of art as practice and vehicle of meaning production. I am focusing in particular on how art comes with ethical concerns and responsibilities within its creative practice. This aesthetico-ethical dimension of art expresses a quest […]
Political animal voices
Eva Meijer | The view that nonhuman animals cannot be political actors because they cannot speak is common in both philosophical tradition and political practice. This view seems to be false in two respects. It refers to a flawed conception of political agency and, second, it ignores the fact that animals clearly do communicate, with […]
From Myths to Memes: Transnational Memory and Ukrainian Social Media
Mykola Makhortykh | My project deals with World-War-II memory in Ukraine and its transformations in our digital age. If many Western-European societies have experienced a boom in World-War-II and Holocaust commemoration, Ukrainian war memory is marked by ambiguous relationships between processes of collective remembering and forgetting. This ambiguous stance to war memory does not stand on […]
Noise Identities. Toward a Noise-Based Concept of Identity in Recorded Music
Melle Jan Kromhout | ‘Noise’ is often referred to in opposition to ‘sound’ and ‘music’: an abject, transgressive or disruptive element, a threat to identity. Contrary to this view, recording practices, musical developments and listening habits show that noise is actually an important feature of recorded music. Based on this, the project argues noise is not just […]
Non-Visibility and the Politics of Presence: a spatial analysis of contemporary Iran
Pedram Dibazar | This project is a cultural study of tactics of presence in the present-day Iranian public sphere. It refers to a multiplicity of spheres of socio-cultural presence of within and beyond the city. The concept of the city encompasses numerous spatio-temporal formations, including public appearances, power relations, social interactions, urban configurations, cultural representations, societal sensibilities, […]
The Politics of Plasticity. Sex and Gender in the 21st Century Brain
Annelies Kleinherenbrink | The aim of this project is to trace and reflect on the many different ways in which the notion of ‘neuroplasticity’ is conceptualized, deployed, circulated, shared, contested, rejected or ignored when the relationship between sex / gender and the brain is at stake. Referring to the ability of the brain to undergo functional […]
Map Art: Alternative Visions of Globalisation
Simon Ferdinand | The use of cartography as the thematic and formal substance of artistic production has become increasingly prevalent amongst a very diverse set of visual artists over the last century. This project aims to establish the significance of this developing genre within the context of the ongoing theoretical debates over the nature, future trajectory and […]
Critical Identities in the Age of Surveillance
Lonneke van der Velden | This research project comprises an empirical-philosophical analysis aiming to develop conceptual tools for analysing contemporary surveillance networks and forms of critical identity formations
Neuroarcheologies of the Present
Timothy F. Yaczo | My project aims to intervene in the methodologies, discursive deliveries and implications of cognitive neuroscience. What concerns me most about contemporary neuroscience is the seductive apophenia at play; in a quest to capture and predict ‘the brain’, consciousness and affect are annexed— and abbreviated—into patterns of data always already observable and intelligible.
Beirut in Contemporary Art
Judith Anne Naeff | This research project aims at analysing contemporary artistic and literary productions as a reflection of the urban experience of post-civil-war Beirut within the framework of the efforts at reconstruction initiated by the Lebanese authorities
Freezing Fertility
Lucy van der Wiel | The basis of my research is the triangulation of the technology of oocyte cryopreservation, its representation in the popular imagination and a concept that is surprisingly under theorised in the study of culture: ageing. Reshuffling the abilities of the reproductive body, oocyte cryopreservation reveals the modes of thinking employed to give cultural and political shape to biotechnologies and the bodies they engage with.