Symptoms of the Planetary Condition

Dr Mercedes Bunz is Senior Lecturer in Digital Society at the Department of Digital Humanities, King’s College London. She came to London in 2009 to work as the technology reporter of The Guardian. Her research explores how digital technology transforms knowledge and power. Her last book is Communication (meson press & University of Minnesota Press 2019), with Finn Brunton and Paula Bialski, which discusses how contemporary communication puts us not only in conversation with one another but also with our machinery. Before that, she published The Internet of Things (Polity 2018) written with Professor Graham Meikle.

Birgit Mara Kaiser is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Transcultural Aesthetics at Utrecht University. Her research interests are aesthetics and affect, Deleuzian and (new) materialist literary criticism, postcolonial and transnational literature. Recent publications include Figures of Simplicity. Sensation and Thinking in Kleist and Melville (2011), Postcolonial Literatures and Deleuze (2012, ed. with L. Burns), “Diffracted Worlds – Diffractive Readings: Onto-Epistemologies and the Critical Humanities” Parallax (2014, ed. with K. Thiele), Singularity and Transnational Poetics (2015, ed.). She currently works on a book project on Cixous, Guattari and the production of subjectivity. With K. Thiele, she is founder and coordinator of Terra Critica.

Kathrin Thiele is Associate Professor in Gender Studies and Critical Theory at Utrecht University. Her research expertise lies in feminist and continental philosophies, theories of difference(s), and posthuman(ist) studies. Most recently she edited “Diffracted Worlds – Diffractive Readings: Onto-Epistemologies and the Critical Humanities” Parallax (2014, ed. with B. M. Kaiser), Doing Gender in Medien-, Kunst- und Kulturwissenschaften: Eine Einfuhrung (2016, ed. with R. Buikema) and Doing Gender in Media, Art and Culture: A Comprehensive Guide to Gender Studies (2017, ed. with R. Buikema and L. Plate). With B. M. Kaiser, she is founder and coordinator of Terra Critica.