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Stand Up Philosophy at Melbourne International Comedy Festival
My name is Mitch Alexander, and I’m bringing across the UK show “Stand Up Philosophy” for two nights at the Melbourne International Comedy Festival.
Stand Up Philosophy teams the funniest comedians with the smartest philosophers to lecture, joke, pontificate and ruminate on a different topic each show. Each performer has about twenty minutes to present whatever they feel is most relevant and interesting for the crowd, with an audience Q&A, involving both comedians and academics, to end the night.
The show is a great way to get philosophy in front of people who might not normally be interested, as well as presenting it in a more approachable and light-hearted (though still respectful) way. At the same time, philosophy enthusiasts are very rarely catered for outside of the serious lecture or conference – it’s not all dour beard stroking!
The two themes for the Melbourne Comedy Festival are
- “Sexbots And Self Driving Cars: Autonomy, AI and Ethic” and
- “Love, Life, And Loss.”
The themes are kept somewhat vague to allow myriad different opinions and arguments, and to ensure that no one feels stymied for their performance.
So far the line ups include comedians Corey White (ABC, Best Newcomer MICF 2015) Alice Fraser (BBC, The Bugle, multiple 5 star reviews), Kirsty Webeck, Martin Dunlop and Lauren Bok, and philosophers such as Prof Robert Sparrow, Prof Suzy Killmister and Prof Oisin Deary.
The two shows take place at 08:30pm at The Spotted Mallard on Sydney Rd, Brunswick, on the 29th of March and the 12th of April respectively.
Ticketing link: www.moshtix.com.au/v2/event/stand-up-philosophy/101512
Facebook event link: https://www.facebook.com/events/2010649419149386/
CFP: Digital Media and Borders: Infrastructures, Mobilities, and Practices across Asia and Beyond
Workshop
7-9 December 2017
Lingnan University, Hong Kong
Invited speakers: Brett Neilson, Jack Qiu, Ned Rossiter, Nishant Shah, Ravi Sundaram
Workshop organizers: Rolien Hoyng, Iam-chong Ip, Lisa Leung, Yvonne Yau
Sponsored by: Lingnan University and Kwan Fong Cultural Research and Development Programme.
Digital communication, despite its apparent immateriality, remains dependent on infrastructure placed somewhere. This workshop focuses on the intersection of urban situatedness and geo-location in order to examine the spatial relations that digital infrastructures either make part of or generate, especially in Asia. The internet features a layered design, including undersea cables, Cloud architecture, platforms, and apps. In what ways does this design reproduce or undo borders and territories? Relinquishing assumptions of a singular global regime of cybernetic power, how does the internet as stack transform the governance of populations, now addressed as “users,” and what contradictions emerge in this process? Moreover, considering that different bodies relate to digital infrastructure differently, how do users negotiate and exploit the modes of power afforded by digital infrastructure? How do these processes amount to either the reproduction of dominant formations of citizenship or alternative identifications and subjectivities, for instance for migrants or “uncivil” users?
We welcome critical scholarship and non-traditional inquiries that help us reflect on digital infrastructures and practices in relation to the production of space and the particularities of place and context in Asia and beyond.
Topics include but are not limited to:
- Digital infrastructure, (extra)statecraft, urbanisms
- Local or global apps, platforms, and data-driven governance
- Speculative digital culture
- “Uncivil” webs: hacking, porn, radical free speech, trolling
- Digital media, citizenship, populism
- Digital media, migration, and belonging
A conference dinner is planned for the evening of 7 December. On the morning of the 9th we invite you to join a local excursion exploring digital infrastructure and borders in Hong Kong. There is no conference fee.
Abstracts of max. 500 words are due by 15 July and should be sent to digitalmediaonsite@gmail.com. Authors will be notified of acceptance via email by the end of July. Full papers are expected no shorter than 10 days before the start of the workshop. Please provide full name, affiliation, contact information, and a short bio with your abstract submission. Guidelines for presentation will be provided upon acceptance of the abstract.
Event webpage: http://www.ln.edu.hk/ihss/crd/CFP2017.html
Inquiries: digitalmediaonsite@gmail.com
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Race, Sex, and Reproduction in the Global South, c.1800–2000
An international workshop at the University of Sydney, 18-19 April 2017
Conveners: Warwick Anderson (Sydney), Chiara Beccalossi (Lincoln), Hans Pols (Sydney)
Sponsored by Race and Ethnicity in the Global South, an ARC Laureate Research Program, and the Sydney Centre for the Foundations of Science
Biomedical scientists grew preoccupied with the size of the population and patterns of reproduction at the beginning of the nineteenth century. By its close, sexology, a science devoted to the study of human sexual behavior, emerged, and at the beginning of the twentieth century the eugenics movement advocated active social engineering and state intervention in citizens’ reproductive sexuality. This medical attention to reproduction and sexual behaviour has been closely intertwined with interest in evolutionary theories, the improvement of hereditary traits and racial differences. Scientific and pseudo-scientific inquiries into race and sexuality increasingly informed national policies in the modern period. The medical and scientific knowledge on race and sexuality has moved across countries and continents to become global through processes of translation, hybridisation and transculturation. However, historical accounts of how science and medicine have shaped modern ideas of race and sexuality in a global context often refer only to developments in the Global North. Recent histories of the Global South have shown that debates on race and reproduction in the southern hemisphere have their own history. Biomedical scientists in the southern hemisphere, for instance, showed greater interest in racial plasticity, environmental adaptation, mixing or miscegenation, and blurring of racial boundaries; sexologists in the Global South were more likely to cross disciplinary boundaries, incorporating criminal anthropology, psychiatry, biology, endocrinology and psychoanalysis in their studies until well into the 1970s.
Keynote speakers: Alison Bashford (Cambridge), Margaret Jolly (ANU)
Presenters: Ellen Amster (McMaster), Chiara Beccalossi (Lincoln), Shrikant Botre (Warwick), Nicole Bourbonnais (Graduate Institute Geneva), Eve Buckley (Delaware), Sarah Ferber (Wollongong), Vera Mackie (Wollongong), Daksha Parmar (Jawaharlal Nehru), Yolana Pringle (Cambridge), Lisa Todd (New Brunswick), Rebecca Williams (Exeter)
The workshop is free, but limited places are available. Registration necessary by 4 April 2017. Contact:
Dr James Dunk E james.dunk@sydney.edu.au T +61 2 9351 2809
More information here.
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