Organisers: Mariya Dzhimova, Sandra Lang, Indrawan Prabaharyaka, Georgia Samaras, David Seibt, Klara-Aylin Wenten
Collaborating Postdocs: Judith Igelsböck, Carlos Cuevas Garcia
When? Oct. 12.-13. 2016, 9 am – 5 pm
Where? Seidlvilla, Nikolaiplatz 1b, 80802 München
Who? MCTS doctoral candidates
This year’s Summer School is about ‘Experimenting with Hybridity’.
Hybridity has long been a mainstay of MCTS scholarship. Metaphors such as ‘cyborg’ and ‘techno-society’ coexist with analytical approaches such as assemblages and actor-networks. If we have learned anything from past MCTS research, it is that we are living in a hybrid world without clear distinctions between human, animal and machine, society and technology, science and non-science. Which new forms of order and organization, relationality and praxis can be understood in terms of the hybrid? ‚Experimenting with Hybridity‘ means exploring meaningful dimensions of hybridity in today’s techno-society.
Many prominent images of hybridity like artificial intelligence, genetic modification or virtual reality share a distinct emphasis on the future. However, these imaginations of the future are not unitary, a future of hybrids, but are themselves hybrid, ranging from egalitarian utopias to post-human dystopies. How are our expectations, projections and simulations of these futures related to their emergence? ‘Experimenting with Hybridity’ means discovering the unfolding temporal dynamics of hybrid arrangements.
The thematic focus on hybridity and their continuous emergence will be supported by an experimental setting. Beyond classical forms of presentations and workshops, we invite contributions that themselves blur the boundaries between experts and lay people, presenters and audience, the ones researching and the ones being researched. ‘Experimenting with Hybridity’ means being entangled in its becoming.