by ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry
Parallel to its ongoing research colloquium, the ICI Berlin organizes public events on a wide range of topics. Its core project draws input from and is reflected in an accompanying lecture series.
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1/10/2024
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March 20, 2025
Originally applied to preserve a materialist worldview that extends beyond physics and chemistry, the notion of levels of organization is one of the most recognizable ideas in biology. Although sometimes (erroneously) used interchangeably, the relationship between ‘levels’ and ‘scale’ presents an exciting (and relatively unexplored) area in theoretical biology and the history and philosophy of science. Here, Brooks will address this lacuna by clarifying how the two notions can inform and enhance one another. To this effect, he links up the idea of levels of organization with the insight that putative levels (e.g., cells, tissue, and ecosystems) exhibit distributed clustering that extends across scale ranges rather than particular part-whole demarcations. This ‘local maxima’ approach suggests that levels should be seen as a spectrum, where attributing discrete identity (as a particular type of, e.g., cell, tissue, ecosystem) is distributed across distinct and moderately localized or regional resolutions in time and space. Daniel S. Brooks is a professor for theoretical philosophy at the University of Wuppertal. His research interests span the history and philosophy of the life sciences (particularly developmental biology, ecology, and neuroscience), concept usage in science, naturalized epistemology, methodology in philosophy of science, and existentialism. He has held multiple research fellowships, including at the Konrad Lorenz Institute, Ruhr-University Bochum, and the University of Minnesota. His current project focuses on a systematic investigation and analysis of the concept of levels of organization in contemporary and historical biological thought. His edited volume on levels, titled Levels of Organization in the Biological Sciences and co-edited with James DiFrisco and William C. Wimsatt, appeared in 2021 at MIT Press. More info can be found at www.danielsbrooks.com. Full video: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/daniel-s-brooks/
August 14, 2024
In Africa, a combination of cultural and religious practices, repressive laws instituted during the colonial period, and homophobic nationalisms have ensured that individuals who identify as queer experience their difference in private spaces and at the margins of societies. African people who identify as queer navigate different forms of social silence and this has an important impact on how they toggle between invisibility and visibility and ultimately how they experience embodiment and relationality. Given such a situation, Gibson Ncube explores queer lived experiences in Africa through the lens of the body in films. The body in films is a powerful model for understanding the complexities of identity, desire, and gender within diverse African communities. By examining how queer individuals navigate their physical selves in relation to societal norms, it is possible to gain insight into the intersectionality of gender, sexuality, and cultural contexts. Drawing mainly on the work Ncube did in the book Queer Bodies in African Films (2022), he contends that the filmed body as a model serves as a canvas upon which societal expectations and personal expressions of gender and sexual identities collide. By zooming in on the body, Ncube is interested in how the filmed queer body is invested with multiple and often intersecting discourses and narratives. It is inscribed with more than just desire, eroticism, and sexuality. It is as a disruptive figure whose materiality calls for a rethinking not just of how gender and sexual identities are performed and staged but also how they are constructed and embodied. Thus, considering the body as a model allows for a rich understanding of the multifaceted tapestry of queer lived experiences in Africa. Gibson Ncube lectures at Stellenbosch University (South Africa). He has held fellowships supported by the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study, the National Humanities Center (USA) and Leeds University Centre for African Studies (UK). He is currently an AfOx Visiting Fellow at Oxford University. He has published widely in the fields of comparative literature, gender and queer studies as well as cultural studies. He co-convened the Queer African Studies Association (2020-2022) and was the 2021 Mary Kingsley Zochonis Distinguished Lecturer (African Studies Association, UK). He currently sits on the Editorial Boards of the following journals: Journal of Literary Studies, the Canadian Journal of African Studies, and the Nordic Journal of African Studies. He is currently the Assistant Editor of the South African Journal of African Languages and the French Book Review Editor for the Canadian Journal of African Studies.
February 6, 2024
Full video: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/teresa-fankhaenel/ Theodore Conrad was an architect and master craftsman. His miniatures of Plexiglas and aluminum modelled a post-war landscape of glass-and-steel skyscrapers, sprawling business campuses, and domestic mid-century modernism from the 1930s onward. With the help of electrified tools and cameras, a vision of a world in Kodachrome arose long before it existed. Architectural modelling — long before the digital turn — became a powerful tool for testing, constructing, rendering, and selling novel architectural ideas. Teresa Fankhänel is an associate curator at the Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University and editor-in-chief of the Architectural Exhibition Review. Her recent exhibitions include African Mobilities (2018), The Architecture Machine (2020–21), Built Together (2021), Shouldn’t You Be Working?(2023), and Andrea Canepa: As We Dwell in the Fold (2023). Among her interests are the use of technology and media for architectural design, and the history, theory, and practice of architecture exhibitions. She was a curatorial assistant for the exhibition The Architectural Model (Deutsches Architekturmuseum, 2012) and has published two books on models: The Architectural Models of Theodore Conrad (2021) and An Alphabet of Architectural Models (2021). She is co-editor of the book Are You A Model?, a collection of new research on analog and digital models, which will be published in 2023.
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