This episode of Spotlights features Clayton Crockett, Professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religion and the Director of the interdisciplinary Religious Studies program at the University of Central Arkansas. He has authored or edited a number of books at the intersection of theology, philosophy, science, and politics, including Religion, Politics and the Earth (with Jeffrey Robbins); The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion; Derrida After the End of Writing; and Radical Political Theology. We discuss his most recent book, Energy and Change: A New Materialist Cosmotheology (Columbia University Press, 2022), which develops a concept of energy as both physical and spiritual, integrating understandings of energy from a wide range of sources, such as thermodynamics, ecology, new materialist philosophy, political economy, Chinese traditions, Amerindian traditions, Vodou, process theology, and more. Learn more about the book on the publisher’s website.

This video gives a brief introduction to New Materialism, a theoretical movement that focuses on the relationship between humans, technology and the environment, critically questioning the category of human as well as the separation between object and subject.

Philosopher Rosi Braidotti of Utrecht University in the Netherlands delivered the 2017 Tanner Lectures on Human Values this spring at the Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center. Her talks are jointly titled “Posthuman, All Too Human.” The first, “Memoirs of a Posthumanist,” took place on Wednesday, March 1; the second, “Aspirations of a Posthumanist,” on Thursday, March 2. Professor Braidotti was joined by Professors Joanna Radin (History of Medicine, History) and Rüdiger Campe (German, Comparative Literature) for further discussion on Friday, March 3.

Jane Bennett delivers a talk at Binghamton University entitled “Anxiety, Whitman, Sympathy”. Bennett is the author of, among other books, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke University Press, 2010). She is renowned for her work on nature, ethics and affect. Her more recent work shifts from the human experience of things to things themselves. Bennett argues that political theory needs to do a better job of recognizing the active participation of non-human forces in events. Toward that end, she theorizes a “vital materiality” that runs through and across bodies, both human and non-human.

Karen Barad offers a keynote lecture at the 8th Annual Feminist Theory Workshop at Duke University. Barad is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness, University of California at Santa Cruz. Her lecture titled, “Re-membering the Future, Re(con)figuring the Past: Temporality, Materiality, and Justice-to-Come,” explores the conception of time through the lens of quantum physics.

Jane Bennett (Political Science, Johns Hopkins) delivers their talk, “Systems and Things: A Materialist and an Object-Oriented Philosopher Walk into a Bar…” at the Center for 21st Century Studies (UW—Milwaukee) on May 4, 2012, during The Nonhuman Turn Conference.

Manuel De Landa speaks about the importance of Gilles Deleuze in the 21st century and the fundamentals of materialism in a seminar entitled Gilles Deleuze and Science at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland. Questioning the role of structuralism and the postmodern position in philosophy, De Landa argues for a view of a materialist world autonomously removed from the concepts of our own mind. His challenge, he says, is to remove a transcendental plane from material objects, that is to remove the concept of essence from the world, without giving rise to a metaphysical position. Towards this, De Landa used the analogy of the battlefield as an example of the social material space to illustrate a plane of existence of extreme materiality. Public open lecture for the students and faculty of the European Graduate School EGS Media and Communication Studies department program Saas-Fee Switzerland.