From Ontology to Politics?
In September 2021, Christian J. Emden, the Frances Moody Newman Professor and Department Chair, was one of the keynote speakers at the conference Materialities & Subjectivities, hosted by the Walter Benjamin Kolleg and the Graduate School for the Arts and Humanities of the University of Bern, Switzerland. His lecture, “From Ontology to Politics? New Materialism and/as Political Theory,” discussed whether new materialism and posthumanism can be regarded as political theories and whether their specific political claims can be justified.