Participants

Salima NAït Ahmed

Centre Marc Bloch

Salima Naït Ahmed taught philosophy six years in France before starting a PhD at Jules Verne's University of Picardy in Amiens (France). She is currently conducting her research at the Centre Marc Bloch of Berlin, a Franco-German Research Center for the Social Sciences.

Her work discusses the "woman question" in the writings of the German philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, against the background of the debates within the first generation of the Frankfurt School. 
She tries to understand the way human forms of life are determined by gender in the present capitalist context, leading to the adornian description of a typical feminine alienated form of life.

SANDRA LAugier

Centre de philosophie contemporaine de la Sorbonne

Sandra Laugier is a French philosopher, who works on moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophy of language, gender studies, and popular culture. She is a full professor of philosophyat the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and a Senior member, emeritus (2012-2023) of the Institut Universitaire de France. She currently serves as the deputy director of the Institut des sciences juridique et philosophique de la Sorbonne (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne/CNRS). In 2014, she received the title of the Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur. In 2022, she was awarded the Grand Prix Moron by the Académie française.

Laugier has held several positions at the Centre National de le Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), including Deputy Director of the Division for Humanities and Social Sciences (INSHS) from 2010 to 2017. One of the founders of the Institut du Genre at the CNRS, Laugier served as its President from 2012 to 2018 and as the President of the Scientific Council from 2018 to 2022. She has also served as an expert for the European Commission and as a panelist for the European Research Council (ERC).

Laugier is the author of numerous publications on ordinary language philosophy (Ludwig Wittgenstein, John L. Austin), moral philosophy (moral perfectionism, ethics of care), American philosophy (Stanley Cavell, Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson), democracy and civil disobedience, gender studies, popular culture. She is the French translator of most of Stanley Cavell’s work.

Laugier has taught at various universities around the world, including as a Visiting Professor at the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell University (2023), Visiting Professor at the University of Toronto (2022), Boston University (2019) and at Sapienza University of Rome (2019), a Visiting Research Fellow at the Max Planck Institute (Berlin), Distinguished Visiting Professor at Johns Hopkins University, Visiting Professor at Fudan University (Shanghai), Visiting Professor at Pontifical University (Lima), and Visiting Professor “Chaire invitée” at the Facultés Saint-Louis (Bruxelles).

Since 2019, she has been the principal investigator of the ERC programme Demoseries devoted to the philosophy of TV series.

Laugier is the editor of the book series: Problèmes et Controverses (Vrin with Franck Fischbach), La vie morale (Vrin), Ethics of care (Peeters), TV-Philosophy (University of Exeter Press with Robert Sinnerbrink and Martin Shuster) and Philoséries (Vrin with Sylvie Allouche).

She is the member of Editorial/ Scientific Board of Archives de Philosophie, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, Iride, Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, and Multitudes.

Anne Gonon

Doshisha University

Anne Gonon is a sociologist, professor in the Graduate School of Global Studies at Doshisha University in Kyoto (Japan).She has published a number of papers on vulnerability and human security in times of disasters, especially after Fukushima nuclear plant accident.

ALYSON COLE

CUNY (Queens College & The Graduate Center)

Alyson Cole is Professor of Political Science, Women’s & Gender Studies, American Studies, and Liberal Studies at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her work bridges political theory and American politics/culture, linking central questions of political thought—especially formulations of justice, the nature of victimization, vulnerability, and precarity, and the possibilities of resistance—with an examination of political ideologies, rhetoric, and law/policy-making, emphasizing gender, sexuality, and race.

Cole’s scholarship has been translated into French, Japanese, Spanish, Swedish, and Turkish, and her books include: The Cult of True Victimhood: From the War on Welfare to the War on Terror (Stanford University Press, 2006), Derangement and Liberalism (Routledge Press, 2019), and How Capitalism Forms Our Lives (Routledge Press, 2020). Cole currently serves as co-editor of Polity, Journal of Political Science and of philoSOPHIA: A Journal of transContinental Feminism.

GLENN BURGER

CUNY (QUEENS COLLEGE & THE GRADUATE CENTER)

Glenn Burger is Distinguished Professor of English at Queens College and a consortial faculty member in the Ph.D. Program in English and the Certificate Program in Medieval Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center. His research interests include medieval gender and sexuality, affect and emotion studies, Chaucer and late medieval/early modern English literature and culture.

Burger has edited the fourteenth-century crusade history, Hetoum’s A Lytell Cronycle (University of Toronto Press, 1988). He has co-edited (with Steven Kruger) Queering the Middle Ages (University of Minnesota Press, 2000), (with Holly A. Crocker) Medieval Affect, Feeling, and Emotion (University of Cambridge Press, 2019), and (with Rory Critten) Household Knowledges in Late Medieval England and France (University of Manchester Press, 2019). He is author of Chaucer’s Queer Nation (University of Minnesota Press, 2003) and Conduct Becoming: Representing Good Wives and Husbands in the Later Middle Ages (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017). His current book project is Chaucerian Affect: Questioning Masculinities in The Canterbury Tales.

SUSAN BUCK-MORSS

CUNY (THE GRADUATE CENTER)

Susan Buck-Morss is an interdisciplinary thinker and a prolific writer of international reputation. Her most recent book, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), offers a fundamental reinterpretation of Hegel's master-slave dialectic by linking it to the influence of the Haitian Revolution. Her books The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno, WalterBenjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (Macmillan Free Press, 1977) and The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (MIT Press, 1989) have been translated into several languages and have been called "modern classics in the field." Other publications include Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and Critical Theory on the Left (Verso, 2003), Dreamworld and Catastrophe: The Passing of Mass Utopia in East and West (MIT Press, 2000), and numerous articles.

BE STONE

CUNY (RHODES COLLEGE)

Be Stone is Assistant Professor of Politics and Law at Rhodes College. As an American studies dissertation fellow, Stone received their Ph.D. in Political Science from The Graduate Center, City University of New York. Stone’s scholarship has been published in Social Sciences, and they are currently working on a book manuscript tentatively titled Addiction in U.S. Political Culture.

Clara Han

Johns Hopkins University

Clara Han is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. Her books include Life in Debt: Times of Care and Violence in Neoliberal Chile (2012) and Living and Dying in the Contemporary World (2015, co-edited with Veena Das). She is currently preparing two book manuscripts: Echoes of a Death follows the reverberations of a single death in a low-income neighborhood in Santiago, Chile; Through the Eyes of a Child (co-authored with Andrew Brandel) is an experiment in biography and ethnography which explores the ways in which catastrophe and the corrosions of kinship appear in childhood memory. 

Veena Das

Johns Hopkins University

Veena Das is Krieger- Eisenhower Professor of Anthropology at the Johns Hopkins University. Her most recent books are Affliction: Health, Disease Poverty (2015), Four Lectures in Ethics (2015,co-authored), Living and Dying in the Contemporary World (co-edited with Clara Han). Her forthcoming book is entitled, Textures of the Ordinary: Anthropological Essays: Wittgensteinian Traces). Das is an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Academy of Scientists from Developing Countries and is the recipient of Honorary Doctorates from the University of Chicago, University of Edinburgh, Bern University, and has been unanimously elected to receive an honorary doctorate from Durham University in June 2018. She has received the Ghurye Award, the Anders Retzius Gold Medal, and the Nessim Habif International Prize , in additional to Distinguished Alumna Awards from Indraprastha College, and from Delhi School of Economics.

Paola Marrati

Johns Hopkins University

Paola Marrati is Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at Johns Hopkins University with a joint appointment in the Department of Philosophy and is affiliated to the Department of Anthropology. From 2007-2011 she was director of the Program for the Study of Women, Gender, and Sexuality. Before joining the faculty at Johns Hopkins in 2003, she held the Chair of Philosophy of Art and Culture in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and was director of the research program “Concepts of Life in Contemporary French Philosophy: Genealogies and Transformations” at the Collège International de Philosophie in Paris. She is currently member of the Scientific Board of the Center for the Study of French Contemporary Philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris.

Perig Pitrou

Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Perig Pitrou is a researcher in the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Laboratoire d’Anthropologogie Sociale, Paris.  He is the author of Le chemin et le champ. Sacrifice et parcours rituel chez les Mixe de Oaxaca (Mexique) and the  co-editor of the book La noción de vida en Mesoamérica (CEMCA-UNAM, 2011). In 2013-14, he conducted the research programme ‘Of Living Beings and Artefacts: The Interrelation of Vital and Technical Processes’ (Fondation Fyssen). He is now Deputy Director of the interdisciplinary programme ‘Domestication and Fabrication of the Living’ (CNRS-PSL).

MARKUS ARNOLD

UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

Markus Arnold is Associate Professor of French and Francophone studies at the University of Cape Town (UCT) and Director of UCT’s School of Languages and Literatures. His research interests comprise comparative and Francophone literatures of the Global South (notably Indian Ocean), postcolonial theory, cultural studies, and text-image relations. He was Visiting Professor at the Sorbonne-Nouvelle (Paris 3) in 2021, held a research fellowship at the Maison Francaise of Oxford (MFO) in 2022, and is a member of several research projects related to migration, such as “Thanatic Ethics” and "Spaces of Precarity."

Arnold’s publications include the monograph La littérature mauricienne contemporaine (2017), the co-edited books L’image et son dehors (2017) and Borders and Ecotones in the Indian Ocean (2020), and a co-edited special issue on African literary and artistic manifestos (2021). He is editor of French Studies in Southern Africa and part of UCT’s “2030 Future Leaders Programme.”

MARA BOCCACCIO

UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

Mara Boccaccio is a lecturer at the University of Cape Town, where she is head of the Italian Section of the School of Languages ad Literatures. She was educated at the Scuola Normale Superiore (Pisa) and took her PhD in Italian Studies from the University of Pisa.

She has published a monograph on Massimo Bontempelli and has a book on Alda Merini nearing completion. Her recent research directions encompass Jhumpa Lahiri and the translanguaged occasion, Chandra Candiani and Buddhism in occidental canons, and she carries a lifelong interest in Italian poetry. She is a poet herself.

anita de melo

UNIVERSITY OF CAPE TOWN

Anita de Melo is a senior lecturer in Portuguese and Lusophone literatures at the University of Cape Town. Her current research focuses on postcolonial ecocriticism, child studies and literary animal studies. Recently she has co-authored the edited volume Literary Connections Between South Africa and the Lusophone World (2022).

Photography: © Élodie Daguin

myriam bahaffou

Picardie Jules Verne University / University of Ottawa

Myriam Bahaffou is a PhD candidate at Picardie Jules Verne University and University of Ottawa in Philosophy and Feminist Studies. She teaches Political Philosophy, Environmental Philosophy and Critical Animal Studies. She works on the modern construction of humanity, its significations and negociations by feminized, racialized and disabilized minorities; she also explores the possible modes of reappropriations of animality, and more broadly the philosophical implications of promoting the "subhuman." She uses an ecofeminist, decolonial, and post-humanist framework, focusing on the complex processes of animalization and humanization. Her whole work aims to contribute to the emergence of situated knowledges in the field of Vegan Studies, especially in France.

She participated in many international symposiums (UQAM, 2023; ULiège, 2023; African Research Matters, 2022; ENS Lyon, 2022), and give conferences, worksphops, lectures about ecofeminism, political and decolonial ecology, intersectional veganism, and links between activism, art and academia. She prefaced the pioneer ecofeminist book Feminism or Death by Françoise d'Eaubonne (Verso, 2022) and a major translation regarding Ecofeminism and Vegan Studies in France, L'écoféminisme en défense des animaux (Cambourakis, to be published).

Igor Krtolica

Université de Picardie-Jules Verne, CURAPP-ESS

Igor Krtolica is a Lecturer of philosophy at the University of Picardie-Jules Verne in Amiens, France. He is specialized in French contemporary philosophy, especially in Gilles Deleuze. In 2015, he published a introduction to Gilles Deleuze : Gilles Deleuze (Paris, PUF, 2015; reed. 2021), and a book on Deleuze and Guattari’s political philosophy: Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, philosophie des devenirs-révolutionnaires (Paris, Amsterdam, 2024, forthcoming).

His current researches focus on binding together natural philosophy and political philosophy, therefore questioning the articulation between the “vital” and the “social,” as well as biology and culture. On this topic, he directed an issue of the journal Rue Descartes: “L’humanité, une espèce (pas) comme les autres?”, Rue Descartes, 2022/1, n°101 (english translation soon available on Cairn international), trying to examine in what non-anthropocentric sense philosophy and science (evolutionary biology, paleoanthropology, ethology, etc.) can state that humanity is both an animal species like others and a unique one among others (for better or for worse).

Karel Plaiche

University of Cape Town / Université de La Réunion

Karel Plaiche is the author of a doctoral thesis and several publications on the representation of armed conflict and mass violence in sub-Saharan fiction and non-fiction texts. She is a lecturer in French and Francophone literatures at the University of Cape Town (South Africa) and a research associate at the Laboratoire de recherche sur les espaces Créoles et Francophones EA7390 (Université de La Réunion, France).

Her work focuses on post-colonial and contemporary literary and artistic creations in which the cultural imagination has been shaped by crises and violence. It concentrates on literature that question experiences of suffering and violence, as well as logics of domination, from a multidisciplinary perspective.

Karel currently works on “necropoetic” texts which address the precariousness of life as well as living in spaces of affliction marked by political violence by discussing, in particular, notions of life, necropolitics (Mbembe), location, displacement, identity and belonging which appear to be key contemporary issues in Francophone African literatures.