Dr. Michelle Bastian is currently a Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Socio-Cultural Change at the University of Manchester and from February 2013 will be a Chancellor’s Fellow at the University of Edinburgh, in the Edinburgh College of Art. She is an interdisciplinary scholar whose approach draws on continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, anthropology and sociology. Her work focuses on the role of varying conceptions of time in social practices of inclusion and exclusion. This includes work on human communities, particularly feminist challenges to traditional notions of community, as well as a focus on ‘more-than-human’ communities. She is particularly interested in exploring how concepts of time and community are shifting in the context of climate change, resource depletion and mass extinctions. Currently, she is working on a variety of Arts and Humanities Research Council funded projects.

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Dr. des. Friedrich K. Krämer studied Philosophy and Musicology at the University of Hamburg as well as Choir Conducting at the Hamburg University of Music and Theatre. He graduated as a Magister Artium with a thesis on the relation between time and temporal consciousness in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Following an employment as Scientific Assistant at the Musicology Department of the University of Heidelberg where he worked for the German Research Foundation (DFG) project Motet Database (14^th and 15^th Century), he joined the graduate program (Pro*Doc) Human Life funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF). In 2012 he finished his PhD (Philosophy) at the University of Berne with a dissertation thesis on Time and Personal Identity. His research interests include Philosophy of Language, Metaphysics, Logic and Meta-Philosophy.

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Temporalities and notions of progress and innovation formed in Western modernity have been instrumentalized to structure developments and ordering things. But past and present transformations are too complex and ambivalent to be adequately explained by monocausal and linear narratives of change. In the course of reflecting time and timing, the key concepts of modernist and economic notions of linear historicity as well as a strict sequentiality of stasis and change have been questioned. The modern conception of History has become just one possible manifestation within a plurality of histories conditioned by socio-cultural particularities. We are no longer interested only in the history of timetables, calendars, time markers or clocks – taking and making linear time and space as human universals – but in post-isms, pre-isms and ana-chronisms, react-ivations and revivals, devolutions, constant flows and nonlinear dynamics – in short, in timing trans/formations in the era of globalization, bio- and necropolitics and asymmetrical power relations. The Winter School 2013 analyses, discusses and challenges both modernist and postmodernist epistemologies as well as scientific paradigms of development and change from a historical, sociological, cultural and philosophical perspective.

Invited guests and the focus of their lecture

Prof. Dr. Rosi Braidotti (Philosophy, University of Utrecht)
Biopower, Necropolitics, Anthropocene, technology and human evolution

PD Dr. Antje Flüchter (History,  University of Heidelberg)
Pre-modern and modern European-Indian encounter and perception, transformations of knowledge archives, non-linearity, modern narratives of linearity

PD Dr. Stefan Herbrechter (Cultural Theory, University of  Coventry)
Postisms, postmodern theory, critical posthumanism, constructions of the future

PD Dr. Michael Kempe (History, Leibniz-Forschungsstelle Hannover)
Normative timing, spirality of time, possible and parallel worlds, chance, apocalypse, fall and decline, allochrony and repetition of time

When: 10 –15 February 2013
Where: Schloss Münchenwiler near Berne, Switzerland
Languages: English (main), German, French
ECTS: 6 | Costs: 500.- Swiss francs (travel and accommodation [double room] covered by organizer)

Application deadline: 20 October 2012

Official flyer

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