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Keynote: Karen Barad

A program of
Drift: Art and Dark Matter

Wednesday, September 28
6pm–8pm
Online on Zoom 

Register on Eventbrite

Looking through art to astrophysics and back, Drift: Art and Dark Matter suggests that taking an interdisciplinary approach to our cosmos might lead us to new understandings of our universe and its multifarious forms of interrelated matter. As Drift’s four artists explore ethical and epistemological proposals informed by and in response to the concepts and practices of astroparticle physics—striving always to articulate our enmeshment with our environments, our co-production of reality and knowledge with the subjects we ostensibly “study,” and the potentials of sensory experience—their work embraces an array of theoretical perspectives long plumbed by physicist-philosopher Karen Barad.

On September 28, Distinguished Professor Karen Barad from the University of California, Santa Cruz will speak to touch and alterity in a talk entitled “On Touching the Stranger Within—Material Wonderings/Wanderings.”

About the Speaker

Karen Barad is Distinguished Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad’s Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. Barad’s research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad is the Co-Director of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at UCSC.

Title and Page Image:Nadia Lichtig, Dust (Reinigungsarbeiten) 5/5 (detail), 2020, photogram on paper. Collection of the artist. Photo: Paul Litherland.

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