Creativity and Emergent Educational-Futures Network (CEEN) Seminar - Professor Patricia McCormack (Anglia Ruskin University)

She will put forward an entirely new term and trajectory while still taking up the key philosophies and theories that have preceded it. This paper argues for a new way of thinking that doesn't dissolve into nihilism and despair but actively embraces a refusal of identity politics, deep ecology, and the apocalypse as an optimistic beginning in order to suggest vitalistic, perhaps even optimistic ways to negotiate some of the difficulties of thinking and acting in the world. It collapses activism, artistic practice, and affirmative ethics; introduces some radical contemporary ideas; and addresses specifically modern phenomena like intersectional identity politics in relation to ethical debates and pedagogical implications. Through doing so, Professor MacCormack navigates the ways in which we must compose the human differently – specifically beyond nihilism and post- and trans-humanism, and outside of human privilege – in order to actively think and live viscerally, with connectivity (actual not virtual), with passion and grace (particularly in relation to pedagogy), toward a new world.  

This lecture seminar is supported by the Creativity and Emergent Educational Futures Network and the Centre for Research in STEM Education in the Graduate School of Education at University of Exeter.

Patricia MacCormack is Professor of Continental Philosophy at Anglia Ruskin University. She is the author of Cinesexuality (2008) and Posthuman Ethics (2012), the editor of The Animal Catalyst: Toward Ahuman Theory (2014) and the co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Cinema (2008), Deleuze and the Animal (2017) and Ecosophical Aesthetics (2018). She publishes extensively in the posthuman, queer theory, animal studies, horror film, and Continental Philosophy.

Colleagues and students from across and beyond University of Exeter are welcome to attend. Please email Kerry Chappell to reserve a place.