Keynote Speakers

Mel Chen

Mel Y. Chen is Associate Professor of Gender & Women’s Studies at U.C. Berkeley and Director of the Center for the Study of Sexual Culture. Mel is also an affiliate of the Center for Race and Gender, the Institute for Cognitive and Behavioral Science, the Center for Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society, and the Haas Disability Studies and LGBTQ Citizenship Research Clusters.

Their research and teaching interests include queer and gender theory, animal studies, critical race theory and Asian American studies, disability studies, science studies, and critical linguistics. Chen’s 2012 book, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke University Press, winner of Alan Bray Award from Modern Language Association’s GL/Q Caucus), explores questions of racialization, queering, disability, and affective economies in animate and inanimate “life” through the extended concept of “animacy.” 

Keller Easterling

Keller Easterling is an architect, writer and professor at Yale. Her most recent book, Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space (Verso, 2014), examines global infrastructure as a medium of polity. A recently published e-book essay titled Medium Design (Strelka Press, 2018) previews a forthcoming book of the same title. Medium Design inverts an emphasis on object and figure to prompt innovative thought about both spatial and non-spatial problems.

Jennifer Gabrys

Jennifer Gabrys is Chair in Media, Culture and Environment, a post she began in October 2018. Previously, she was Professor in the Department of Sociology at Goldsmiths, University of London, where she continues to have an affiliation as honorary Visiting Professor. She has also been a visiting Research Fellow at the Digital Cultures Research Lab in the Centre for Digital Cultures, Leuphana University of Lüneburg, Germany.  In her research, Gabrys addresses a number of crucial interfaces between digital technology, citizen data, environmental media, and emergent forms of political engagement. She is currently completing a monograph, Citizens of Worlds, and a pamphlet, How to Do Things with Sensors, which document and analyse her research with Citizen Sense by investigating theories and practices of citizenship, action and engagement with digital technologies and environmental problems.

Derek McCormack

Derek McCormack is Professor of Cultural Geography at Oxford University. His work is informed by a wide-ranging engagement with philosophy and social theory and is characterized by a commitment to creative approaches to methodology and writing. His research has made significant contributions to the development of a number of important conceptual agendas within the discipline, particularly around the relations between non-representational theory, affect, and materiality. He is the author of Atmospheric Things: On the Allure of Elemental Envelopment.

Greg Seigworth

Gregory J. Seigworth is Professor of Communication Studies in the Department of Communication and Theatre, Millersville University. In 2010, Greg co-edited The Affect Theory Reader with Melissa Gregg. He convened the first two international affect conferences: #affectWTF in 2015 and #capaciousAIMS in 2018. In 2019, Greg hosted the first week-long summer school -- SSASS -- for affect studies. He has conducted graduate student workshops and short courses on the matter of affect around the world: Iceland, Canada, England, Germany, Denmark, Finland, the United States. Greg co-edits the open-access online journal Capacious: Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry with Mathew Arthur and Wendy Truran.