Talk | Containment and leakage: towards a general containerology
| Dates: | 14 June 2023 |
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| Times: | 11:30 - 13:00 |
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| What is it: | Talk |
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| Organiser: | School of Environment, Education and Development |
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| Who is it for: | University staff, External researchers, Adults, Current University students, General public |
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| Speaker: | Stylianos Zavos, Olli Pyyhtinen |
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In this talk, we explore containment as an ontological condition. We begin by situating its presence, spanning from the life-giving vessel of the womb to the numerous container technologies that render human and more-than-human worlds thinkable, knowable and liveable.
Inspired by – but not limited to – our ongoing work on waste, and drawing from science and technology studies, Sloterdijk’s spherology, Simondon’s philosophy of individuation, and Deleuzoguattarian geophilosophy, we suggest that containers need to be examined not only as passive volumetric entities, but also in terms of their capabilities.
We do so in three successive analytical moves: first, we examine containment as a crucial spatial configuration of ordering; containers hold together in place what would otherwise fluctuate in perpetuity.
Second, and since the occasion of leakage disrupts – with the potential to upend – any established order, we argue that containment and leakage, closely linked to the ideas of interiority and exteriority, need to be understood as mutually presupposing each other.
Finally, and moving beyond prevailing negative conceptualisations and practices that render it synonymous with management and control, we outline an affirmative take that equally considers containment as an affective, expressive, and intimate process of sympoiesis whereby interiorities and exteriorities have a provisional character instead of a permanent, fixed, and oppositional one.
Book here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/containment-and-leakage-towards-a-general-containerology-tickets-642112785627
Speakers
Stylianos Zavos
Biography: Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the WasteMatters project. Before joining the team at Tampere University, he was Research Associate at SASSI (https://susinfra.com/sassi), where his doctoral interests addressing the sociomaterial nexus of design, governance and inhabitation in architectural humanities were broadened towards waste and infrastructure studies. His transdisciplinary research, while broadly situated within the social sciences, borrows from contemporary philosophical currents and feminist technoscience. He recently co-edited (with Deljana Iossifova, Alexandros Gasparatos, Yahya Gamal and Yin Long) Urban Infrastructuring: Reconfigurations, Transformations and Sustainability in the Global South (2022).
Olli Pyyhtinen
Biography: Professor of Sociology at Tampere University, Finland, and the founder of Relational Studies Hub. He is currently Principal Investigator for the research projects WasteMatters (https://projects.tuni.fi/wastematters/), DECAY (https://projects.tuni.fi/decay/) and GIFTS/PRESENTS/PRESENCE (https://projects.tuni.fi/gift/), funded by the European Research Council, the Academy of Finland and KONE Foundation. His research intersects social theory, philosophy, science and technology studies, economic sociology, and the study of art. He is the author of More-than-Human Sociology (2015), The Gift and Its Paradoxes (2014), The Simmelian Legacy: A Science of Relations (2018) and Simmel and the Social (2010), and co-author of Disruptive Tourism and its Untidy Guests (2014) and Tervetuloa jäteyhteiskuntaan! (2019; ‘Welcome to the Society of Waste!’).
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1.27
Humanities Bridgeford Street
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