To argue for academic freedom, we must first consider what academia is for. What is the inherent value of intellectual work produced from within the humanities? Bruno Latour’s article “Why has critique run out of steam?” provides a point of departure for Professor Berteke Waaldijk in the first seminar of the 2023/2024 Transmission…

    “What do you love,” Prof. Dr. Waaldijk asked. We — the attendants of her lecture on Academic Freedom — discussed. During this short heart-to-heart, I loved hearing what my newly-met colleague loved. Yet, how can we secure space for our loves outside of Waaldijk’s careful lecture? Or, as someone during the Q&A asked:…

  During this workshop, I had a discussion with one of my groupmates on whether we should be optimistic about blockchain technology being applied to progressive or leftist projects. He suggested that maybe we should first of all think about non-blockchain methods. In other words, before “feminist cryptoeconomics”, do we really need cryptoeconomics? My opinion…

  In her performance lecture, Evelyn Wan foregrounded three aspects of AI: 1) it is a medium with an imaginative nature because humans constitute in their imagination an intelligent presence based on informational patterns; 2) AI is part of digital culture that has always been necropolitical since the time of the telegraph as it has…

  In his lecture Ohad emphasized the dual nature of the political imaginary – It is both an analytical tool and a proposition. If we turn our attention from international politics to where we are – the campus, we will see that in the Netherlands, exactly by losing the political imaginary of the university, we…

    During the last seminar of TiM “Imagining Feminist Cryptoeconomics” Inte Gloerich and Ania Molenda gave a workshop on blockchains and how we could potentially reimagine them as something beyond capitalism. Currently, block-chaining affordances are used to create economic systems. The workshop session asked us to rethink what would happen if we changed the…

    In spring 2019 my brother lost his cancer battle. Without going deep into the emotions and consequences of the event that had become a life-altering landmark for me, I can certainly say that it put in a very skeptical light the speculations of even a remote possibility for the technology, present, past or…

    Laura Karreman concluded her lecture in the Transmission in Motion series with a couple of elements of the imaginary surrounding motion capture in performance that she had identified. One of these items was that motion capture can enable a kind of “saviour’s complex” toward dance and performance, trying to protect the art from…

    My writing of this blog post is overshadowed by a tragic anniversary: one year from the start of Russian invasion in Ukraine. The past twelve months have been a trying emotional journey through the mediated theatre of the largest European military conflict of the 21st century that had inadvertently became a prism for…

    When it comes to thinking about the future, I am a self-confessed techno-optimist, or to be more academically precise, a strong believer in what Jennifer Gildley (2017) called “integral futures” the incorporate “mixed methods, transcisciplinarity, complex bricolage” (95). As the seminar presenters Sonja Rebecca Rattay and Irina Shklovski noted when speaking about the…