LAST DAYS FOR SEMINARS FLASH SALE / 20% OFF!

The Institute for Postnatural Studies is excited to present its Spring 2025 seminar series, a space for critical reflection on the shifting boundaries between nature and culture. Through three distinct seminars, we will navigate pressing ecological questions and explore speculative approaches to more desirable futures.

Alongside these seminars, our space will continue to support research projects and residencies that engage with ecological fragility, fostering new theoretical and artistic perspectives.

We believe that thinking emerges from a deep engagement with the present, attuned to the complexities of geopolitics, the intersections of ethics and aesthetics, and the ever-evolving landscapes of ecology.

CYBERWITCHES AND FEMINIST TECHNOLOGIES

Feminist theory seminar, coordinated by Carmen Leal Hines
With Luciana Parisi, Feminist Internet / Andrew Mallinson, Cy X, Morgane Billuart and Carmen Lael Hines

6 online sessions
Every Monday from 19:00 to 21:00 GMT+1
21st April - 26th May
250€ registration fee*
*20% discount for students IPS alumni - 200€
Register now on our website 
Inquiries can be directed to [email protected]

Cyberwitches and Feminist Internet is a seminar series designed to place feminist theory in close dialogue with technology, cyberspace, and the political formations that shape social media and its aesthetic universes. Approaching feminism as plurality and spatiality, we will discuss what a feminist approach to internet theory entails. How can we engage with topics related to artificial intelligence, UX design, cybernetics, and the digitalization of consumption through gender and sexuality studies?

Focusing on the figure of the cyberwitch, we will discuss gender as a technology and an essential component of capitalist history—and, therefore, our platform-capitalist present. Much like the internet itself, internet theory is an evolving and largely undefined field. It relates to questions of what forms and forges the digital world—from heat, water, and sand to cables running through the ocean. It also refers to the impact of new technologies on global politics, democracy, and social relations. Digital platforms and the softwares that drive them shape not only how we live together, but the vocabularies and aesthetics behind how we imagine what it means to live together.

The purpose of this course is to think about the internet and new media through queer and feminist approaches to digital culture. We will collectively explore new vocabularies for cyber-theory, platform studies, and the dissolution of binaries between hardware/software, artificial/real, and simulated/organic.

Addressing Afrofuturist, cyber, xeno, glitch, and uncategorized feminism(s)—with guests from the wide web of intersectional feminist activism and technology studies—we will consider feminist approaches to artistic practices, both online and offline.

What does it mean to become cyberwitches in digital landscapes shaped by capitalist forms of production? How can cyberwitch networks shape open-source commons? Finally, how can queer feminism(s) help us imagine new forms of the digital?

More info

BLUE ECOLOGIES ~ SALTY

Coordinated and led by guest faculty member Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano
With Natasha Ginwala, Nicole Starosielski, Tom Mustill and Maureen Penjueli and Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano

6 online sessions
Every Wednesday from 19:00 to 21:00 GMT+1
23rd April - 28th May
250€ registration fee*
*20% discount for IPS alumni - 200€
Register now on our website 
Inquiries can be directed to [email protected]

Blue Ecologies is a four-part seminar led by guest faculty Juan Pablo Pacheco Bejarano, exploring the ecosocial, technological, and historical dimensions of water. How does water shape thought, history, culture, and perception? Each edition engages this question through a different form of water—salty, sweet, frozen, and vapor—unfolding its material, speculative, and political possibilities.

The first seminar, salty, dives into maritime thinking and sensing. As the ocean faces increasing acidification, heat, noise, and extraction, it also receives renewed attention from scientific, artistic, critical, and corporate research. How do we tune into the messages carried by the waves amidst these pressures? How can we relate to the ocean as a subject, a living archive, and an agent of change?

From deep-sea infrastructures, interspecies communication, and shipping routes to coral regeneration, wet mythologies, and toxicity, we will explore how seawater mediates relationships between humans, more-than-humans, and histories of extraction. Drawing from blue humanities, hydrofeminism, oceanography, decoloniality, speculative fiction, and artistic practices, we will tune into the sea’s resonant frequencies, imagining alternative narratives on ecosocial justice and planetary survival.

Challenging terrestrial perspectives, this seminar invites you to embrace the voluminous, humid churning of maritime lifeworlds—to dampen your senses and humidify your thoughts.

More info

NEW ECOLOGIES: DECENTRALIZING THE HUMAN THROUGH CONTEMPORARY PRACTICES

With Gabriel Alonso and Yuri Tuma

6 online sessions
Every Tuesday from 19:00 to 21:00 GMT+1
22nd April - 27th May
250€ registration fee*
*20% discount for students and IPS alumni - 200€
Register now on our website 
Inquiries can be directed to [email protected]

This seminar will examine the glossaries that characterize new ecologies, analyzing inter-species articulations, cultural productions, ecological awareness, and the challenges of artistic, design, research, and curatorial practices in today’s climate crisis. From a broad approach to contemporary ecologies that defy rigid categorizations, we will deepen in the genealogies of the Postnatural, as a thinking tool and political subject. By looking into the terminologies related to the ecological crisis, we will unfold different approaches, both theoretical and material, and investigate other modes and perspectives that decolonize and expand our understanding of the environment. Through virtual visits and collective experiments, this seminar will also explore postnatural landscapes and technologies, such as the botanical garden, and revisit theories from Ecofeminism that invite decentralizing the human through contemporary practices.

The idea of a romanticized nature as a background scenario or neutral framework where human activity takes place is no longer valid. It must be replaced by a broader and more complex reflection. In this online course, Nature will be explored as one of the main cultural constructions of modernity, focusing on contemporary perspectives that address environmental and ecological issues, and help foster interspecies relationships between humans, non-humans, matters, and technologies. Through a series of online sessions and lectures, we will explore the entanglements between art, philosophy, and the environment proposing successive decentralizations towards a non-human-centered perspective.

More info

As we step into Spring 2025, we invite you to join these conversations and expand the ways we engage with nature, technology, and ecological thought. Through each seminar, we seek to create a space for collective inquiry, experimentation, and speculation—one where new vocabularies and imaginaries can emerge.

Registration is now open, and spots are limited. Find more details on our website or reach out to us at [email protected] for any questions.

We look forward to learning, unlearning, and thinking together.