Conference participants
Joelle Abi-Rached received a BS (Biology) and a Medical Doctorate (MD), both from the American University of Beirut (AUB), Lebanon. Upon graduation in 2006, she was awarded a PJD Wiles Scholarship from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) to complete a master (MSc.) in Philosophy and Public Policy. She joined the BIOS centre of the London School of Economics in 2007 as a Research Officer on the ‘Brain Self and Society’ project directed by Professor Nikolas Rose and funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC). She also has an interest in the social, political and ethical dimensions of memory research and the intertwined relation between war and psychiatry specifically war-related traumatic memory disorders and identity formation.
Ignace Adant holds a PhD in Economics from Ecole Polytechnique (France). His research focuses on the (potentially) adverse effects of transparency and its control in markets, science and policy making. As an economist with a strong background in Sociology and in Risk Management, he relies on a methodology that combines in depth field studies with theoretical and formal treatments. The self-regulation of metal recycling branches through the preserved opacity of their markets (the theme of his PhD. Dissertation), the use of scientific controversies by firms strategically reacting to regulatory threats and the selective transparency induced by voluntary approaches in environmental policies are some examples of his recent and ongoing works.
Jean Xavier Brager is a native of Marseille, France. He holds a Master’s degree in English and American Literature and a CAPES from the Université de Provence; and he is currently a Ph.D. candidate in Post-Colonial French Studies at LSU-Baton Rouge. After serving as the university and linguistic attaché at the Consulate of France in New Orleans between 2001 and 2005, he resumed his teaching career at LSU, where he is in charge of the French Business and Communication track. Trained both in France and in the US, he has been acting, directing and producing plays and short movies for more than 15 years. He is also a translator for the stage and the movie industry, and a free-lance photographer.
Paola Castaño is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the Colombian armed conflict and the problem of violence as an object of study from the perspective of the Sociology of Knowledge. Her dissertation examines practices of categorization of the victims of the armed conflict in Colombia in the National Commission of Reparation and Reconciliation and the role of understandings of violence in this process. She has and MA in Sociology from the University of Chicago and degrees in Political Science and History from the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia.
Alison D'Amato is a choreographer, performer and researcher working in New York City and Philadelphia. She holds an MA in European Dance Theater Practice from Laban, for which she received the Jack Kent Cook Graduate Scholarship, as well as a BA in Philosophy from Haverford College. Alison has presented original works, which are often preoccupied with language, at numerous venues locally and internationally. Her critical writing on performance can be found on The Dance Insider (www.danceinsider.com).
Sergio Delgado is a Ph.D. candidate in the department of Spanish and Portuguese Languages and Cultures at Princeton University. He received a B.A. from the University of California at Berkeley in Philosophy and Spanish and is writing a dissertation on the aesthetics of movement in Latin American avant-garde art and literary practices from Brazil and Mexico.
Michele Del Prete (born Novara, Italy, 1974) studied Philosophy at the Universities of Turin, Utrecht, and Leiden. Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Freie Universität Berlin with a work on Franz Rosenzweigs’ ontology (2005). He received a Diploma in Composition and New Technologies at the Conservatoire B. Marcello, Venezia, studying with C. Pasquotti and A. Vidolin (2008). Selected for the composition masterclass by G. Manzoni (Scuola di Musica di Fiesole, 2008/2009), studying further with A. Vidolin. Conferences in Paris, Cambridge, Rom, Kassel, Darmstadt, Mannheim, Jerusalem. His music (published by Ars Publica) has been performed in Venezia, Pordenone, Rom, Milan, Berlin. A researcher at the Conservatorio Cantelli, Novara, he also teaches at the Accademy of Fine Arts of Palermo.
Sahan Evren has recently begun doctoral studies in philosophy at the Middle East Technical University where he also studied at the B.A. and M.A. levels. He was a visiting student in the University of Alberta in for a year, where he studied Kant’s aesthetics with Alexander Rueger. The outcome of this work is their co-authored paper “The Role of Symbolic Presentation in Kant's Theory of Taste” which appeared in the British Journal of Aesthetics, 2005. In his master’s thesis, focusing on Plato's Timaeus, he studied the place of the soul within the scientific explanation in Plato’s natural philosophy.
Marta Figlerowicz is studying for a B.A. in English and American Literature and Language at Harvard University. She has published articles analyzing the narrative structure of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko (New Literary History, 2008) and the influence of the Polish Romantic poet Cyprian Kamil Norwid on the Yiddish Modernist Abraham Sutzkever (Prooftexts: A Journal of Jewish Literary History, 2007). Her recently completed senior thesis examines the roles of vision and sound in the novels of Thomas Hardy.
Mark Green is a doctoral candidate in Philosophy at Stony Brook University. He divides his research unequally between phenomenological analyses of perceptual acts, Greek epistemology and metaphysics and ancient and medieval theories of music. Apart from his studies he enjoys playing his string bass, woodworking and growing and preserving vegetables. Though he loves living on the North Fork of Long Island, he regularly misses the mountains of his native Washington State.
Dan Hirschman is a PhD student in Sociology at the University of Michigan. His interests include economic sociology, science studies, and social theory. His main substantive interest is in the history and sociology of economics. His current project examines the emergence of the macroeconomy as an object of knowledge in the 20th century. Drawing on the work of Michel Callon, he focuses on how government statistics framed new economic objects and made possible new calculative agencies at the macroeconomic level.
G. Craig Hobbs’ work addresses themes at the intersection of nature, culture, and technology in the mediums of video, sound, and interactive programming. Hobbs’ research focuses on issues of embodiment, affect, time, and space in new media art. He is currently developing open-source tagging tools and playback software for use in live cinema, locative media, and installation environments. Hobbs holds a BFA from California Institute of the Arts, and is completing his MFA in the Digital Arts and New Media Program at University of California, Santa Cruz.
Adam Kaasa is an MPhil/PhD candidate in the Cities Programme at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focus is on transnational discussions of modernism and the resulting articulation of citizenship practice in the built environment, specifically working around the transatlantic architectural and political scene of Mexico in the early twentieth century. At the LSE he is a Programme Associate for the Urban Age Programme, an investigation into the future of cities, and runs the NYLON seminars in London, a branch of the Culture Project directed by Richard Sennett (LSE) and Craig Calhoun (NYU).
In 2007, Jenny E. Sabin and Peter Lloyd Jones initiated LabStudio (Erica Swesey Savig, Andrew Lucia, Mathieu C. Tamby, Jenny E. Sabin, and Peter Lloyd Jones), a hybrid research and design unit based within the Institute for Medicine & Engineering & the School of Design at The University of Pennsylvania. Within LabStudio, architects, mathematicians, materials scientists and cell biologists are actively collaborating to develop, analyze and abstract dynamic, biological systems through the generation and design of new tools. These new approaches for modeling complexity and visualizing large datasets are subsequently applied to both architectural and biomedical research and design. The real and virtual world that LabStudio occupies has already offered radical new insights into generative and ecological design within architecture, and it is providing new ways of seeing and measuring how dynamic living systems are formed and operate during development and in disease. Overall, the Mission of LabStudio is to produce new modes of thinking, working and creating in design and biomedicine through the modeling of dynamic, multi-dimensional systems with experiments in biology, applied mathematics, fabrication and material construction.
Kelan J. Steel Lowney is working on his PhD in Sociology at the University of California, San Diego. His interests include the sociology of knowledge, classical and contemporary social theory, and political sociology. He received his Masters Degree in Sociology from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, with a thesis juxtaposing Gilles Deleuze’s image of thought with Michel Foucault’s concept of power/knowledge. His current research investigates the boundedness of discourse in the production of “missing” information as objects of knowledge.
Rebecca Warne Peters is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University, affiliated with the Graduate Program in Development through the Watson Institute for International Studies and with the Population Studies and Training Center. She holds the Master of Public Health degree from Emory University in addition to the Master of Arts in Anthropology from Brown. She has recently completed 15 months of field work in Angola, funded by Fulbright IIE. Her ethnographic field research investigated internationalism in development projects, the good governance movement in international aid, and the professional trajectories of humanitarian workers.
Joana Pimenta is a Ph.D. candidate in Media Studies, specializing in Film Studies, at the New University of Lisbon, writing a dissertation on the integration of digital media on film; and researcher for the project “Film & Philosophy: mapping an encounter” at the Institute for Philosophy of Language, Lisbon. Currently, and during the 2008/09 academic year, she is a Visiting Fellow at Harvard University, affiliated with the Department of Visual and Environmental Studies.
Ulrich Salaschek was born in 1979 in Hannover, Germany. He earned an associate degree in Business Administration/E-Commerce at Heidenheim University of Cooperative Education in 2002. Studies in Social Psychology/Anthropology and Educational Science in Bochum and Berlin (Bachelor of Arts in 2006) have been followed by a fast-track Ph.D. program at the faculty of Philosophy and Education of Ruhr-University Bochum. In his research he focuses on the influence of neurosciences on concepts of man. He has been a fellow and scholarship holder of Ruhr-University Research School since 2007.
Jarek Sierschynski is a Ph.D Candidate in Learning Sciences in the Department of Education, University of Washington, Seattle. His research interests concern questions about what he views as locations of language and environment. The definition of language as a biological faculty has implications for its understanding beyond the body. Language can not only be viewed in terms of neurochemical and computational processes but also as a biological structure. By questioning internal-external distinctions and examining the nature of biological structures responsible for language, his current work attempts to shift notions of language as a component of the mind/brain into the environment.
Paul Ugor is currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of English and Film Studies at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada. His scholarly interests are in African literature and cinema, postcolonial theory, youth culture studies, and the Nigerian video film tradition, popularly known as Nollywood. His ongoing doctoral dissertation is entitled “Youth Culture and the Struggle for Social Space: the Nigerian video film.” His most recent publications includes “Censorship and the Content of Nigerian Video Films” published in Postcolonial Text (2007) and “Imaging the Invisible, Naming Suffering: Lincoln Clarkes, Photography and the Women of Downtown East Side Vancouver” which appeared recently in the West Coast Line (53: 2007) in Burnaby BC, Canada. His other essay “Contemporary Hollywood and the Persistence of the Empire: Archetypes of Monstrosity, Nostalgia and Post-Imperial Voyeurism in Hallmark’s King Solomon’s Mines” is forthcoming in a book of essays Perennial Empire: Empire building Yesterday and Today edited by Silvia Nagy-Zekmi and Chantal Zabus, and published by Lexington Books, USA.