Oseminars is a virtual roundtable and an ecological center for participatory educational events. We are committed to making alternative educational offerings available in the Global South; reduce the ecological damages of the travel industry; facilitate online seminars during the COVID-19 pandemic; and provide a participatory space for intercultural, multi-lingual, and translocal encounter among speakers and participants.
Bizlerin de dahil olduğu erkekliğin toplumsal inşası nedir, bu kurulum içinde biz nerede durmaktayız, erkekliğimizin hangi noktalarından yarar ya da ayrıcalık sağlamaktayız, hangi noktalarından zarar görmekte ya da zarar vermekteyiz? Tarihsel geçmişi çok güçlü bir ataerkilliğe dayanan bu toplumsal erkeklik inşası içerisinde var olan bizler, hegemonik ve hiyerarşik olmayan eşitlikçi bir toplumsal çizgiye doğru nasıl yaklaşabiliriz, nasıl değişebiliriz veyahut yaklaşabilir miyiz değişebilir miyiz gibi kendimize dair dertlerimiz, sorularımız, sorgularımız var.
Most people believe sports to be an apolitical field free from deep societal problems such as racism. They praise sports hierarchies, access and success criteria for being meritocratic and color blind. However, people of color, who are discriminated against based on their race and ethnicity, know that such a position …
Debt destroys solidarity. Because we are all drowning in debt we can’t support one another, let alone our own children, in the simplest and most basic ways. But this is an ancient problem—we don’t need loans because we’re poor, we need loans because there are creditor classes who own wealth hordes. Inequality is the effect of an illusion, a kind of optical illusion: what is actually an effect of the breakdown of social life (the very existence of a creditor class) is taken as the cause of social life itself (lending as “investment”), and since there is no access to society, or life, outside of one’s ability to take loans, to be creditworthy, this illusion is self-confirming. If you can’t depart from meeting the demands of the creditors in order to live, you help others at the direct cost of your life. The only solution is to break the power of the creditors…
This seminar is about the “impossibility” of a general debt strike in the sense that it seems impossible to most people—unrealistic, terrifying, hopeless, insane—and that the psychic and even religious bondage that submission to the creditors carries with it is what makes a strike impossible. So the debt strike is not metaphysically or physically impossible. It’s ideologically uncomfortable and logistically challenging. It feels impossible.
The seminar is about what holds us back. Why haven’t we used debt strikes already? There are tactical difficulties with it—getting enough people to do it, altogether, at the same time, so that the repressive apparatus of the state cannot pick off isolated individuals. (From an interview. Read the entire interview below)
Date: Saturday, March 21, 10am-2pm (EST- Eastern Time Zone)
Registration and Cost: Made free in solidarity with everyone in need of inspiring interaction in this time of the COVID-19 crisis
Facilitator: Joshua Ramey is a writer, teacher, and activist who studies political economy and anti-capitalist political theory. He holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from Villanova University (2006) and is currently Visiting Assistant Professor in the Interdisciplinary Concentration in Peace, Justice, and Human Rights at Haverford College. He is the author of The Hermetic Deleuze: Philosophy and Spiritual Ordeal and Politics of Divination: Neoliberal Endgame and the Religion of Contingency.
Join live streaming
The seminar’s virtual meeting will be on the Zoom application. Your meeting ID number is 454373612. Please type this number on your Zoom application or click this link to join the meeting. As explained in this instructional video, the link would direct you to install its application if you do not already have it. You can also use this link to directly download the app or visit Zoom’s website.
Please join the online seminar room 15 minutes before the set seminar time. All times are according to the Eastern Time Zone (EST).
View seminar recording
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This is an edited section of the four and a half-hour long seminar with extensive participation and discussion.
As early as The Descent of Man, Darwin recognized how human cultural evolution seemed to suppress the effects of natural selection. Indeed, as human evolution developed, it progressively freed itself from the pressures of natural selection, creating its own unnatural world to inhabit, with its own artificial selective constraints: the technosphere. But this raises an interesting conundrum. For, in nature, wherever the pressures of natural selection get more lax, evolution is poised to produce more variety as extravagant mutations are passed through the sieve of selection. An oft-cited example of this are the birds of paradise, who evolved their great variety of evolutionarily-expensive extravagances in contexts of relative freedom from natural selective constraints (islands with few mammalian predators, abundant resources, etc.). In particular, they developed an explosion of non-survival related erotic kinks, which sexually-selected for features like colourful plumage and complex precoital performances, in turn leading to reproductive isolation between different groups: speciation. So it is interesting to observe that when humans, with their technosphere, suppressed the effects of natural selection to a degree greater than any other animal in the history of life on earth, the very opposite happened: we stopped speciating. Why have we Modern Humans, ever since we lived among Neanderthals and Denisovans, not spontaneously speciated again into unimaginable biological forms and posthuman monsters? In this seminar, Alexander Wilson guides us through a speculative account of aesthetics and culture in terms of evolutionary dynamics, and attempts to answer the question (a nod to N. Katherine Hayles): How did we not become posthuman?
*** Given the topic’s relevance to the circumstances we face with COVID-19, we will also look at the relation between “hominization” as a branch of the “tree of life” of cellular biological evolution, in its contrast with the evolutionary dynamics of VIRUSES, which are sometimes considered to inhabit the negative spaces between the branches of this putative tree.
Facilitator: Alexander Wilson is a Canadian researcher in philosophy of science, technology, and aesthetics conversing with cultural studies, environmental humanities, and media theory. He is author of Aesthesis and Perceptronium: On the Entanglement of Sensation, Cognition, and Matter(University of Minnesota Press, 2019). He has held a postdoctoral research position in communication and culture at Aarhus University, Denmark, as well as an assistant professorship in intermedia at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada, and is currently affiliated to Institute of Research and Innovation, Paris, France. Also an accomplished artist, he has created installations, films, music, and works for the stage. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Visit his personal website.
Date: Saturday, March 28, 10am-2pm (EST- Eastern Time Zone)
Registration and Cost: Made free in solidarity with everyone in need of inspiring interaction in this time of the COVID-19 crisis
The seminar’s virtual meeting will be on the Zoom application. Your meeting ID number is 305343899. Please type this number on your Zoom application or click this link to join the meeting. As explained in this instructional video, the link would direct you to install its application if you do not already have it. You can also use this link to directly download the app or visit Zoom’s website.
Please join the online seminar room 15 minutes before the set seminar time. All times are according to the Eastern Time Zone (EST).
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