presentations

         2025 

• ‘This Abject Stranger’: Cruising Spinoza
  London Conference in Critical Thought
  20 – 21 June 2025
  Birkbeck, University of London
   
  

• What the Contact Body Can Do:
  Risk, Affect, Freedom
  Contact Improvisation & Power
  23 June 2025
  
  with Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, Keith Hennessy; invited by Larret en mouvements Saint-Saud-Lacoussière, Dordogne
  
  

• Spinoza contra Affect Theory: Somatophilia and its Discontents 
  Society for European Philosophy
  7 – 9 July 2025
  King’s College London
  

• Beyond the Reification of Desire: Queer-Materialism in the Service of Antifascist Praxis
  Nordic Summer University
  21 – 28 July 2025
  Tähtelä, Jyväskylä

• Contact as Property
  Critical Legal Conference
  4 – 6 September 2025
  University of Exeter
  

• respondent to Anouchka Grose, ‘Come Back Marcuse, All is Forgiven’
  ‘Hope/Less - Exploring Psychoanalytic Uses of Utopia‘
  25 October 2025
  Goldsmiths, University of London
  
  I was invited by writer and psychoanalyst Anouchka Grose to collaborate on an improvised, unscripted public dialogue about utopianism and political affect in Contact Improvisation and sex-positive festivals, such as Touch & Play.
  
  

  
  OLDER CONFERENCE & SEMINAR PAPERS (selected)
  
  2023
  

• ‘Wetlands Know No Genders, Know No Nations:
  For an Ecofeminism Beyond Borders’
  Paul Mellon Centre Symposium: Resist, Persist: Gender, Climate and Colonialism 
  Barbican Centre 
  
  It is commonly known, and often caricatured, that certain pacifist, spiritual and maternal tendencies within liberal ecofeminism obfuscate neocolonial regimes of power, whilst also perpetuating cisnormative, and at times trans-exclusive, presuppositions of womanhood. What if we were to think of an ecofeminism beyond the border of the gender binary, beyond the unproblematised distinction between nature and culture, beyond the imaginary of the landed borders of the nation-state, and beyond ecofeminism’s myopic construction of its own epistemic borders?
  
  2019 

• ‘Pan-World Living’ 
  Symposium (invited paper)
  ‘Imagining Radically Different Futures: The Dialectic of Sex and Feminist Utopias Today’
  City of Women Festival, Ljubljana
  
  with Sophie Lewis, Katja Cicigoj, Victoria Margree, Pia Brezavscek and Anamarija Sisa
  
  2018

• ‘See It. Say It. Sorted’
  Reading the Enemies seminar series 
  (invited paper) 
  MayDay Rooms 
  
  This paper invites an ethical reflection on contemporary critical approaches in the humanities and their relationship to epistemic violence and intellectual intimacy. While foregrounding the material and institutional constraints placed upon us as young scholars to read, cite and name our enemies, I also wish to propose a reading that itself does violence to the hostility invoked by ‘See It, Say It, Sorted’. (The full abstract and paper can be downloaded here.)
  
  2017  

• ‘Disabling the Fire Alarm:
  For a Benjaminian Chronopolitics of Self-determination and/in Contingency’ 
  London Conference in Critical Thought 
  
  While acknowledging the centrality of kairós in Benjamin’s philosophical conception of history, in this paper I shift the parameters of the discussion and suggest a new means of conceptualising the relationship between chronos and kairós – and between historical continuity and rupture, and self-determination and contingency. Through attending to the historicity of quotidian time, and its constitutive relationship to the exceptional time of Jetztzeit, this paper sketches a chronopolitics against romanticised conceptions of revolutionary rupture and against Benjamin’s flirtation with Schmittian sovereignty, in a mode of being-in-history itself politically urgent for our own post-2016 predicament. (The full abstract and paper can be downloaded here.)
  

• ‘A Singular Avant-Garde:
  Reflections on Comparativism and the Chronopolitics of ‘Cultural Area Studies’, 
  Uneven and Combined Development: Modernity and Modernism 
  FAHACS, University of Leeds
  
  This paper engages with the question of uneven and combined development through a discussion of the theoretical problem-category of ‘the avant-garde’.  Occupying a liminal position between sociological field, periodising category, and artistic genre, the category of the avant-garde articulates some of the key problems that underpin ongoing debates on the singular character of modernity, while also highlighting the contested epistemological terrain of what may be termed ‘cultural area studies’. (The full abstract and paper can be downloaded here.)