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Detheologize to Historicize
No full textThis essay argues that detheologizing — as theorized by Teodolinda Barolini — is the necessary precondition for historicizing Dante’s Commedia. By dismantling the interpretive habits shaped by Dante’s theological framework through a re-examination of the formal structures of the poem, detheologizing makes possible a systematic assessment of the significance of the historical context. This in turn allows for historicized readings that complicate traditional interpretations
Dante’s War:Exiles, <i>carestia</i>, and Conflict in the Florentine Countryside, 1301–1304
No full textDuring two years of public service (1300 and 1301), Dante was engaged in initiatives to ensure food (grain) security for Florence. However, as a signatory of the San Godenzo accord in June of 1302, the exiled Dante joined and helped lead the armed struggle by White Guelfs and Ghibellines in the Mugello valley to disrupt Florentine interests, particularly grain shipments, during the 1302–03 food crisis ( carestia). His involvement in this effort seems to contrast with certain aspects of the model of leadership that he developed in later works, including Convivio and the Commedia
That Uncertain Voice:Voice-as-Skin
Full text linkBased on Zeynep Bulut’s book, Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin (Goldsmiths Press, 2025), this presentation and discussion will explore how voice can be imagined as skin and what such a conception offers in times of crisis and uncertainties. Drawing on the notions and practices of embodied voice in experimental music and participatory media art, the event will revisit individual, collective, and multi-sensory processes of voice-making in everyday life. In so doing, it will consider the conception of a voice, one that is both individual and anonymous, and one that functions like a skin, a multi-sensory interface and surface that both connects and differentiates bodies of all kinds without being limited to discursive labels of language. Through the notion of voice-as-skin, this book presentation and discussion will reflect on the ethical implications and significance of voice-making processes for global issues like environmental crisis and artificial intelligence, while also questioning rushed forms of communication and presumed understandings of empathy. Zeynep Bulut is a voice and sound theorist. She is a lecturer in Music at SARC, Centre for Interdisciplinary Research in Sound and Music, at Queen’s University Belfast. Her work theorises the emergence, embodiment and mediation of voice as skin. She is the author of Building a Voice: Sound, Surface, Skin (Goldsmiths Press, 2025). Her articles have appeared in various volumes and journals including The Oxford Handbook of Sound Art, Perspectives of New Music, Postmodern Culture, and Music and Politics. She is project lead for the research platform Music, Arts, Health, and Environment, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council’s Impact Acceleration Account at QUB. Alongside her scholarly work, she has also exhibited sound works, composed and performed vocal pieces for concert, video, and theater, and released two singles. Her composer profile has been featured by British Music Collection. She is a certified practitioner of Deep Listening. Brandon LaBelle is an artist, writer, theorist, and artistic director of The Listening Biennial. His work focuses on questions of agency, community, pirate culture, and poetics, which results in a range of collaborative and extra-institutional initiatives, including: Communities in Movement (2019-23), The Living School (with South London Gallery, 2014-16), Oficina de Autonomia (2017–), The Imaginary Republic (2014–19), Dirty Ear Forum (2013-22), Surface Tension (2003-08), and Beyond Music Sound Festival (1998-2002). In 1995, he founded Errant Bodies Press, an independent publishing project supporting work in sound art and studies, performance and poetics, artistic research and contemporary political thought. His publications include: Poetics of Listening (2025), Acoustic Justice (2021), The Other Citizen (2020), Sonic Agency (2018), Lexicon of the Mouth (2014), Acoustic Territories (2010, 2019), and Background Noise (2006, 2015). Holger Schulze is a full professor of musicology at the University of Copenhagen and the principal investigator at the Sound Studies Lab. His sonic anthropology explores how sounds and listening in the 21st century stabilise, disrupt, and permeate everyday life. Artistic practices and everyday objects are both of equal concern to his sonic critique. He is currently writing a book on meme music and working on The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Sound Studies in three volumes (as one of three editors-in-chief with Jennifer Stoever and Michael Bull), as well as The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sound in Museums (with Alcina Cortez, Gabriele Rossi Rognoni, and Eric de Visscher). His publications include: The Bloomsbury Handbook of the Anthropology of Sound (2021, ed.), Sonic Fiction (2020), The Sonic Persona (2018) and Sound as Popular Culture. A Research Companion (2016, co-ed. with Jens Gerrit Papenburg).00:00 Introduction by Christoph F. E. Holzhey04:36 Talk by Zeynep Bulut36:00 Discussio
Towards a Genealogy of Moffie:Troubling the Binary Model of Understanding either Homosexuality or Homophobia as Un-African
Full text linkCustomarily a pejorative marker for individuals read as effeminate men, the Southern African word moffie has been somewhat reclaimed over the past few decades. Foregrounding moffie’s predominance in relation to formerly classified-‘coloured’ communities, this chapter sketches an alternate genealogy in relation to two twentieth-century ‘scenes’ which underscore the misleading nature of the debate about what is ‘un-African’ — a debate that limits possible answers to ‘homosexuality’ or ‘homophobia’
What Can Be Done about Semantic Perversion?
Full text linkToday’s communication produces an incredible amount of what could be described as ‘semantic perversion’. Moreover, it seems that the critical faculties of too many people have been dulled, dried up, and withered. These conditions make people particularly susceptible to demagoguery, to enslavement by perverse power. The discussion, based on the book The Rhetoric of Manipulation by Robert Harvey, centres on a frank exposure of vicious discursive practices and the gullibility that accompanies them; it aims to address the damage already done, to help reverse the trend and improve the current situation in view of a far more ethical immediate future. Robert Harvey is Distinguished Professor Emeritus (Stony Brook University) and former Program Director at the Collège International de Philosophy. His research explores the interpenetrations of literary and philosophical discourse, the relations between art and philosophy, and how both dynamics may inform ethics. Author of many books, his latest are Parmi les gisants: penser le cimetière (Presses Universitaires de France, 2024), which visits burial grounds and explores what the living think they can learn from the dead; and The Rhetoric of Manipulation, which has just appeared with Bloomsbury Press (2025). Sverre Raffnsøe is Professor of Philosophy at Copenhagen Business School. Author of the following monographs: A History of the Humanities in the Modern Universities: A Productive Crisis (Palgrave 2024); Philosophy of the Anthropocene: The Human Turn (Palgrave 2016); Michel Foucault: A Research Companion. Philosophy as Diagnosis of the Present (Palgrave 2016); History, Diagnostics and Metaphysics in Nietzsche’s ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’ (Palgrave 2025); Aestheticizing Society: A Philosophical History of Sensory Experience and Art (Bloomsbury 2025). He has contributed to the fields of philosophical aesthetics, social philosophy, management philosophy and recent French and German philosophy
The Scales of Influence in a World of Exhalations
No full textScientists and policy makers typically think about the consequences of climate change in terms of discrete local ‘impacts’ that are extrapolated from global models. Implicit is the assumption that change begins on the global level, setting the parameters to which local communities must reactively adapt. What’s missing from this framework are the humble drivers of change that unfold at the scale of everyday life and grow bottom-up rather than top-down. Scientists working at the nexus of atmospheric science, ecology, and public health have recently produced evidence that Earth’s climate depends on biological processes that modify the atmosphere from the ground up. Climate models have ‘limited scale awareness’, meaning that they are insensitive to feedbacks between long-term, planetary-scale warming and rapid, local fluctuations of trace constituents of the atmosphere. How plants fare as the climate warms will have cascading consequences for the quality of the air we breathe. This means that local land-use decisions matter at every scale, even as their consequences can’t be foreseen with certainty. This presentation seeks to contribute to the imagination of grassroots transformative change by assembling a history of ‘atmospheric influence’, the science of the atmosphere as a medium of communication and connection. Deborah R. Coen is a historian of science whose research focuses on the modern physical and environmental sciences and on central European intellectual and cultural history. She earned an A.B. in Physics from Harvard, an M.Phil. in History and Philosophy of Science from Cambridge, and a Ph.D. in History of Science from Harvard, where she was also a Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows. Before coming to Yale, she taught for ten years in the History Department at Barnard College and was Director of Research Clusters for the Columbia Center for Science and Society. At Yale she is also a member of the steering committee of the Environmental Humanities Initiative. One of the questions driving Professor Coen’s research is how scientists cope with uncertainty. Her first book, Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty: Science, Liberalism, and Private Life (2007), centered on an extraordinary scientific dynasty, the Exner-Frisch family. Contrary to typical accounts of fin-de-siècle central Europe, the Exners reveal a strain of Austrian liberalism that was (literally) at home with modernist subjectivity and uncertainty. Vienna in the Age of Uncertainty won the Susan Abrams Prize from the University of Chicago Press, the Barbara Jelavich Prize from the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies, and the Austrian Cultural Forum Book Prize. Professor Coen has pursued her interest in the history of private life in articles such as ‘The Common World: Histories of Science and Domestic Intimacy’, Modern Intellectual History 11 (2014): 417-438. Professor Coen’s recent research has explored the production of environmental knowledge. In 2013 she published The Earthquake Observers: Disaster Science from Lisbon to Richter, which examines seismology’s history as a form of ‘citizen science’. In the nineteenth century, standing networks of seismic observers transformed earthquakes into natural experiments at the nexus of human behavior and planetary physics. The Earthquake Observers was a finalist for the Turku Book Prize from the European Society for Environmental History; click here to read a review in The Times Higher Education or The Los Angeles Review of Books. Her latest book is Climate in Motion: Science, Empire, and the Problem of Scale (2018), winner of the 2019 Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society in recognition of an outstanding book dealing with the history of science. Climate in Motion is the first study of the science of climate dynamics before the computer age. Professor Coen argues that essential elements of the modern understanding of climate arose as a means of thinking across scales of space and time, in a state—the multinational Habsburg Monarchy, a bricolage of medieval kingdoms and modern laws—where such thinking was a political imperative. Linking Habsburg climatology to the political and artistic experiments of late imperial Austria, Climate in Motion grounds the seemingly esoteric science of the atmosphere in the everyday experiences of an earlier era of globalization
Poetics and Politics in Slow Cinema
No full textThis event will engage with the debates surrounding Slow cinema as both an aesthetic movement and a political intervention. The discussion will focus on how extended duration and dead time in film have been seen as challenging capitalist temporalities while simultaneously risking recuperation by the very systems they purportedly resist. Works by directors like Chantal Akerman, Albert Serra, Emmanuelle Demoris, and Michelangelo Frammartino will be analysed to consider how Slow cinema’s radical engagement with the everyday — its focus on dead time and quotidian rhythms — may open up alternative ways of experiencing time and attention, yet often remains confined to exclusive art-house circuits. Slow cinema’s long takes and durational emphasis have been interpreted as producing profound shifts in spectatorial consciousness — ranging from boredom to deeper attunement with more-than-human temporalities. The event will explore what the style’s potential significance might be in our contemporary moment, and considers the possibility that such potential lies less in on-screen choices but, rather, in the urgent need to expand these alternative temporal valuations into new modes of production, distribution, and collective reception. Rosa Barotsi is a researcher at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia and Principal Investigator of the NextGeneration EU-funded project IMFilm. Her research and curatorial work explores the intersections of film, gender, and labour. She is a co-founder of the Feminist Frames network and the In Front of the Factory collective. She recently co-edited the special issue ‘Gender and Labour in the Italian Screen Industries’ in Comunicazioni Sociali (2023). She was previously a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow and a Fellow at ICI Berlin. James Burton is Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies and Cultural History at Goldsmiths. A former Fellow of the ICI, he publishes work in the areas of cultural theory, process philosophy and science fiction studies, with particular interests in the cultural roles of fabulation/storytelling, critical ecology, and animism.00:00 Introduction by Manuele Gragnolati04:57 Introduction by Rosa Barotsi06:48 Discussion with Rosa Barotsi and James Burton1:03:34 Q&
Scale Beyond Objects and Subjects:Experimental Protocols for a Theory of Scale
Full text linkConceptions of scale often start by assuming objects (which are at a scale or may change scales) or assuming subjects (who re-present or form scales). A different notion of scale, resolution, and science emerges when scale is considered independently from this presumption of objects and subjects. As a device for measuring variations, observations, and experience, scale tracks changes in the configurations of objects, actors, and subjects specifically in relation to units of space and time. When these units of space and time exceed those generated by an observing apparatus — especially the ones called ‘human’— scale enables to cross thresholds of intelligibility in new and astonishing ways. Untangling the disorienting results of these extensions require some experimental protocols for reorienting how the very human, non-scalar concepts, language, and practices operate. This talk will dwell in the simplicity, even naivete of the widely assumed sense of scale. It will consider two thought experiments that DiCaglio calls ‘experiential origins of scale’, and explore how they generate a need for scale. DiCaglio will unpack a few provocations that arise from this notion of scale discussing how they reorient towards foundational philosophical assumptions. Specifically, he will discuss 1) what constitutes an object if an object can also be many things depending on the scale and 2) who is the subject that scales? Joshua DiCaglio received a PhD in English (rhetoric of science) and currently is an associate professor of English at Texas A&M University. His work travels through the tangles of some intractable rhetorical practices, starting with bewildering aspects of science and finding itself, somewhat by accident, in the domain of mysticism. Along the way, he has published on environmental communication, rhetoric of science, and rhetorical theory with some side forays ranging from technical writing to science fiction. His first book, Scale Theory: A Nondisciplinary Inquiry (University of Minnesota Press, 2021), outlines a theoretical basis for and implications of scale, in the sense of the significant shifts in size from the quantum to the cosmic. An edited collection following up on this project, entitled Visions of Scale: Art and the Technoscientific Universe, is under contract with Bloomsbury. This collection gathers together 18 artists, writers, and critics to examine artistic responses to the scalar conceptions of science. DiCaglio has published essays in Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, Configurations, Philosophy and Rhetoric, Science Fiction Studies, and Environmental Communication. His next project, tentatively entitled ‘The Sustainability Paradox: Lithium and the Ecologies of Scalar Objects’ uses lithium as a figure for examining the many challenges and contradictions that arise in our attempt to adjust our planetary structures to ecological relations.00:00 Introduction by Marietta Kesting04:06 Talk by Joshua DiCaglio58:18 Discussio