1,720,972 research outputs found
The Posthumanities Hub Webinar Spring Sessions 2023 : Weird Queer Ecologies with Dr Alison Sperling (GE/USA)
No full textDr Alison Sperling of Technische Universität Berlin presented work on Weid Queer Ecologies.The presentation might come available on our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCceWDyovuMbKpYVgiKYI_gw </p
CfP Emiliano Guaraldo and Alison Sperling eds | Science Fictional Ecologies in Contemporary Art | Extrapolation | 1 November 2024 | mid-2026
No full textEmilija Škarnulytė, Eternal Return, 2021, Tate Modern, London Call for special issue of EXTRAPOLATION : Science Fictional Ecologies in Contemporary Art, by Emiliano Guaraldo and Alison Sperling In a moment defined by planetary transformations and crises, speculative and science fictional narratives have become crucial modes for imagining possible and alternative futures and realities. Across media, these narratives decenter the human perspective within the intersections of technology, the sc..
Art of Encounter:On Non-Human Art Production
No full textA vast set of associations surrounds both popular and academic ideas of what art actually entails. Art is assumed to be expression, experience, and intention — and often at the same time. Intentionis a difficult concept; it might feel conscious, rational, or substantiated, but is that really the case? The human mind is a notoriously unreliable piece of equipment and hardly capable of understanding its own intentions. In order to discard the assumptions that one has to be conscious to make art, one could hark back to surrealism and place art in the domain of the sub- or un-conscience. But then what’s to keep us from stretching things a little bit further, proclaiming non-human natural entities to be capable of art, of authorship?
This event stems from the research project and exhibition ‘Reading by Osmosis’ (Amsterdam, Zone2Source/Het Glazen Huis, 16 February – 28 April 2019, curated by Semâ Bekirović), focusing on artworks made by non-human artists — by animals, trees, the wind, and other entities and processes. Bekirović’s project focuses in particular on works that are inspired by the human domain, or deploy humans or man-made objects as tools and material and has resulted in the book Reading by Osmosis – Nature Interprets Us.
After a short presentation of Bekirović’s project, the evening will begin with a lecture by Michael Marder.
The lecture will be followed by a discussion with ICI Fellows Daniel Liu and Alison Sperling on the possibility and consequences of non-human art production
Post Atomic: A conversation between Alison Sperling and Anna Volkmar with a visual response by Donald Weber
No full textFrom 2005 until 2007, Canadian photographer Donald Weber spent time aroundthe Chernobyl region in Ukraine, documenting the area and its inhabitants. Theresult of this is the photographic series Post Atomic (2005-2007). On a lateNovember afternoon, Alison Sperling, a post-doctoral fellow at the ICI (Institutefor Cultural Inquiry) in Berlin, and Anna Volkmar, a PhD candidate at LeidenUniversity, engaged in a conversation on these photographs, which functionedas an impulse for a broader reflection on the nuclear era and its conceptualchallenges. Faced with a phenomenon that resists comprehension, Sperling andVolkmar deal with ways of challenging popular framings of the nuclear, especiallyin the so-called ‘exclusion zones’, through different theoretical tools and objectsof study. What kind of artistic practices can unshroud the complexity usuallyassociated with the nuclear in popular imaginaries? What potential does the(non-)human body hold to broach the disturbing effects of the nuclear legacy?How can we face and responsibly address the ethical stakes that come withliving in and with the nuclear, more than 30 years after the Chernobyl disaster?</p
(Post)Colonial Haunting
No full textGhosts are first and foremost figurations of power. By giving intersubjective communication a form that can challenge anthropocentrism and Western conceptualizations of Nature, ghosts have the ability to generate alternative histories. This renegotiation of past events is particularly important in the context of colonialism. Yet, while this characteristic can certainly be instrumentalized for recuperative purposes, it can also be a narrative tool that supports forms of othering and exclusion. In fact, in literature, film, and culture ghosts can and have been mobilised to perpetuate unjust social structures. Particularly the haunted forest has often served as the matrix through which racial subordination has been put in the service of subject formation. A ghost is a reminder that history is not the past, or as William Faulkner famously put it: ‘The past is never dead. It’s not even past’. But who is reconfiguring the past in the present? This discussion is led by the often-neglected question, who is hosting the ghost? Ghosts may have the ability to expose the narrativity of history, but they do not necessarily function as a corrective. Based on Sladja Blažan’s recent book Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonisation of the Invisible World, the discussion will focus on ways in which settler colonial imaginaries are reproduced and sustained through cultural and personal narratives that centre on spectral land. Particularly forests will be at the centre of our attention. Sladja Blažan is a writer and lecturer at Bard College Berlin. She received her Ph.D. in North American Literature and Culture from Humboldt University Berlin and her ‘habilitation’ in American Studies from University Würzburg. She has taught as a professor for Literature and Media Cultures at PhilippsUniversity Marburg, Bard College, New York University, Free University Berlin, Dutch Art Institute, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and University College Dublin. Research areas include speculative fiction, critical posthumanism, environmental humanities, and critical refugee studies. Her book Ghosts and Their Hosts: The Colonization of the Invisible World was published in 2025 with University of Virginia Press. Other publications include the edited collection Haunted Nature: Entanglements of the Human and the Nonhuman, the manuscript American Fictionary: Postsozialistische Migration in der U.S. Amerikanischen Literatur and numerous articles on the intersection of race, gender, and class issues. Edna Bonhomme is a historian of science, culture writer, and journalist based in Berlin, Germany. Her writing explores how people navigate the complex states of health—especially subjects that discuss contagious outbreaks, medical experiments, reproductive assistance, or illness narratives. Her writing has appeared in Al Jazeera, The Atlantic, Berliner Zeitung, Esquire, Frieze, The Guardian, London Review of Books, The Nation, and other publications. A graduate of Princeton University’s Ph.D. program in History of Science, she held awards and fellowships from the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Camargo Foundation, the Robert Silvers Foundation, and the Andy Warhol Foundation. Edna Bonhomme is the co-editor (with Alice Spawls) of After Sex (2023), an anthology about reproductive justice, and the author of A History of the World in Six Plagues, which was published in 2025. Alison Sperling is assistant professor of Literature, Media, and Culture at Florida State University. She has previously held positions as a Junior Faculty Fellow at Technische Universität Dresden (2023), an International Postdoctoral Initiative Fellow (IPODI Fellow) at the Technische Universität Berlin (2020-2022), and a fellow at the ICI Berlin (2018-2020). She works on 20th and 21st century American literature and culture, ecocriticism/the Anthropocene, science fiction and the Weird, queer and feminist theory, Black studies, and contemporary art. She has published and has work forthcoming at the intersection of these fields in Cultural Politics, Ecozon@: European Journal of Literature and the Environment, Symplokē, Paradoxa, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, Studies in the Fantastic, Girlhood Studies, and in over a dozen edited collections and artist monographs. She is the editor of the journal issue ‘Climate Fictions’ (Paradoxa) and the co-editor of issues on ‘Anthropocene Sublimes’ (Ecozon@) and ‘Weird Geographies’ (Cultural Politics, forthcoming). She is currently serving as co-editor of Science Fiction Film and Television (Liverpool University Press).00:00 Introduction by Alison Sperling05:05 Talk by Sladja Blažan31:55 Discussio
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
No full textThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
No full text“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
No full textWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
No full textWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
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