︎ Intensive Study Program Fall/Winter 2022-23

Update concerning application deadline: Please note that the application deadline for the Fall/Winter 2022-23 semester has been extended from August 25th to August 31st in order to give everyone a fair chance to apply after the summer holidays.

Update concerning additional faculty: Please note that a course taught by Adam Nocek with Joanna Zylinska, a course taught by Bogna Konior and a course taught by Daniel Sacilotto were added after the initial launch of the call. If you have already applied and wish to enroll in any of these courses as well, simply re-enter the application form and you will be able to add them.

The School of Materialist Research (SMR) is proud to announce its official call for enrolment for its Fall/Winter semester (2022-23) of online Intensive Study Courses (ISC) offered by the following illustrious faculty: Julia Kristeva with Miglena Nikolchina, Patricia Reed, Thomas Nail, AbdouMaliq Simone, Patricia MacCormack, Paul Reynolds, Agon Hamza, Adam Nocek with Joanna Zylinska, Bogna Konior and Daniel Sacilotto. As always, our faculty will focus on their own research, and will cover such topics as: Marxist Theory, Ahuman theory, queer materialism, parahumanity,  technology, art, literature, urbanism, the work of Hegel and much, much more.

Registration for all courses is now officially open and all interested applicants can find the link to apply at the end of this page. The courses themselves will begin in the Fall of 2022, and last throughout the Winter. The deadline for applying has been extended until August 31st, 2022, and all applicants will be informed of their status by September 5th, 2022.

Please note that if you are interested in applying for scholarships/financial assistance that there is a distinct section in the application form specifically for this. Please be sure to fill out this section if you need aid, or, unfortunately, you will not be eligible for assistance. The number of scholarships available are limited, and are based on merit, motivation, and academic excellence in line with the research priorities of SMR. Students who are applying from the Global South will receive an automatic fee waiver of 50% off, but are also more than welcome to apply for scholarships as well. To see if your country qualifies as Global South check here. The deadline for applying for scholarships is the same as the general application (see more details below).

Below, you will also be able to find important information on the ISC, including general requirements, information on fees, waivers, and scholarships, and the type of certificates we offer.

SMR’s Intensive Study Courses are sponsored by the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University and the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje.

Information on Courses/Speakers:

Julia Kristeva with Miglena Nikolchina

Title of Course: Survival of the Human in the Flux of Language

Description of Course: Part of the course will focus on discussions of Dostoevsky’s opus, exploring the question of “anthropological acceleration” which will be mainly covered by Prof. Kristeva. The concept of “human acceleration,” as discussed by Kristeva in the context of this course, dovetails with the question of the Machine (and God, approached from the perspective of human existence) subject of theoretical exploration in Prof. Nikolchina’s latest book, entitled: “God with Machine: Subtraction of the Human.”

Patricia Reed

Title of Course: Planetary Spatiality: Figuring Embeddedness in Structures of Entanglement 

Description of Course: The invention of a referent “monohumanist human” driving long-Modernity, coemerged with a particular figuration of space to embed, conceptually localize and justify its techno-geopolitical activities/mobilities. In this course we’ll depart from this historic geometric, representational and philosophical nexus, under the premise that “planetarity” (practices of inhabitation at planetary dimensions) necessitates a refiguration of the space of human embeddedness, inseparable as it is from the geological and geographical. Correspondingly, in altering the spatial frameworks for planetary forms of coexistence, we will also examine the ramifications upon human sensibility and sense-making, as well as entangled agencies. 

Thomas Nail

Title of Course: The Philosophy of Matter, Death, and Extinction

Description of Course: This course will examine various philosophical conceptions, as well as the role of death and matter in a spectrum of writers stretching from Lucretius to Bataille. Likewise, it will have a special focus on environmental catastrophe and extinction centered around his own work in Theory of the Earth (2021), honing in on the annihilatory effects of the Anthropocene.

AbdouMaliq Simone

Title of Course: Black Urbanism: Life at the Extensions

Description of Course: Through the lens of Black and Southern urbanisms, this workshop considers how processes of re-composition, repair, and refusal that produce repeatedly mutating re-arrangements of social life might be used as a method to generate new questions about the spatial and temporal dimensions of urban change

An entire substrate of  transitional  constellations of effort, provisioning, care, and regulation operate in tandem, and sometimes in conjunction, with more conventionally organized social and political institutions. Not simply as a parallel world or a reiteration of the well-worn binaries dividing formal and informal, or separating explicit from tacit, but as a series of catalytic operations that run underneath the discernible infrastructures of urban life—operations that often are not detectable unless they are being re-arranged. While such arrangements might be understood as compensatory and adaptive, they are also conspicuously abductive. Rather than the corollary of deliberate actions, these are operations offering hypothetical propositions for how things might take place or indeed might already be taking place.

Whereas the work and effects of institutions, with their genealogies, remits, and competencies, are to a large extent specifiable according to their operating norms and the various regulatory frameworks that govern their operations, the dispositions of arrangements—what they do, what they actually bring about—are not readily definable or clear, enacting a form of performative ambiguity. Involving workarounds, collaborations, exchanges, and agreements that exceed the familiar protocols of interaction among households, local authorities, markets, civil institutions, brokers, and service providers, arrangements entail the enactment of caring, provisioning, regulating, mapping, and steering as the purview of more provisional, incessantly mutating forms that fold in bits and pieces of discernible institutions. In fact, arrangements assume the faint figuration of a stable entity, whose definitional boundaries stretch and contract to such an extent that it becomes difficult to discern exactly what is in or out. Arrangements are not structural movements, but rather, move through the sinews of structures. This is why they are propositional, not in terms of the advocacy of a specific scenario or resolution, but an opening up, a disruption of the available analytical vernaculars, and a figuration of sense and action whose time is only arriving now.


Patricia MacCormack

Title of Course: Fuck the Anthropocene or Activism for the End of the Anthropocene

Description of Course: How can we be human differently, more ethically, or even, with absence? This course introduces Ahuman Theory. It will explore the role of art, philosophy and activism in unthinking and unlearning the human, perhaps even unbeing human in the world, as a radical ecological ethics toward new futures of Erath life beyond anthropocentrism.

Paul Reynolds

Title of Course: Thinking a Marxist Approach to Sex and Sexuality

Description of Course: This short course seeks to explore aspects of a Marxist approach to sex and sexuality, as a critical, open-ended, and trans-disciplinary space for debate that ‘sutures’ some of the aspects of post-structuralist and discursive approaches to sexuality against a radical framework that is underpinned by a materialist approach. The course focuses on the contemporary politics of sex and sexuality. It initially surveys the three main strands of Marxist works on sex and sexuality through Engels Bernstein and Kollontai through to Floyd, Drucker and Lewis. It then focuses on how political economy organizes critiques of the contemporary terrain of sexual politics today. From there, there is some consideration of specific concrete focuses – in this case children and older people, before looking at two current strands of critique – critical sexual literacy and a queer materialism.

Agon Hamza

Title of Course: Reading Hegel (Centered on the newly co-authored book by Agon Hamza, Slavoj Žižek and Frank Ruda)

Description of Course: Agon Hamza will be teaching a course directly related to his newest book, Reading Hegel (2022), co-written alongside Slavoj Žižek and Frank Ruda. In so doing, it will focus on a certain resuscitation of Hegel, in order to insist on the radical importance, and even continued novelty of his thought against a myriad of critiques from all angles. Far from avoiding the more controversial elements within Hegel’s system (religion, the state, absolute-knowing etc), this course will tackle them head on, revealing new and potent interpretations

Adam Nocek and Joanna Zylinska

Title of Course: AI and Madness

Description of Course: TBA


Bogna Konior

Title of Course: Angels, AIs, Cyberfeminism

Description of Course: 
In Zeroes and Ones: Digital Women and the New Technolculture (1997), Sadie Plant recovered the ‘analog’ roots of cyberspace in a philosophical study of weaving from ancient time to Ada Lovelace and early computing. In parallel, in this seminar, we will study the work of Catholic female mystics as proto-thinkers of cyberfeminism, specifically around the questions of inhuman causality and virtual sex. Through a selection of original mystical writings and more recent cyberculture theory, we will reclaim their contribution to philosophy of technology, and present them as paradigmatic thinkers for the era of machine erotics & posthuman internet.

Daniel Sacilotto

Title of Course: Materialism and Eschatology: A Genealogy of Modern Thanatropism

Description of Course: 
This seminar explores how modern philosophy conceives of different eschatological narratives in exploring methodological conditions to realize a materialism that traverses the aftermath of the critical turn and its anti-realist consequences. Radicalizing the tenets of Kant’s attempt to think of the conditions of all possible experience as the limits of cognition in a philosophy of finitude, we shall see how different thinkers sought to traverse the idealist or “correlationist” results of transcendental idealism, in order to think of the material conditions that present a limit to life, and even to materiality itself.

Time of Course: June 2023


Julia Kristeva with Miglena Nikolchina

Title of Course: Survival of the Human in the Flux of Language

We are happy to announce there are free slots for our most recent addition to the Fall 22/Spring 23 semester, and you are welcome to apply for it separately or combine it with the other courses already offered in Spring 2023. The course is taught by Julia Kristeva with Miglena Nikolchina , and is entitled: Survival of the Human in the Flux of Language. The application deadline for this course is Feb 01, 2023, and you can find the application form here. Below you will also be able to find the full description of their course.

Description of course:

Part of the course will focus on discussions of Dostoevsky’s opus, exploring the question of “anthropological acceleration” which will be mainly covered by Prof. Kristeva. The concept of “human acceleration,” as discussed by Kristeva in the context of this course, dovetails with the question of the Machine (and God, approached from the perspective of human existence) subject of theoretical exploration in Prof. Nikolchina’s latest book, entitled: “God with Machine: Subtraction of the Human.



Further Information About the ISC:

Deadline for Applying: August 31st, 2022.

Deadline for Admission Notification (this also includes the deadline for being informed of your scholarship status): September 5th, 2022.

Requirements for Acceptance: Graduate level preparation for the courses - the applicants do not necessarily need to have the formal level of education that is equivalent to second and third cycle university study programs; in case they do not, the motivation letter and the short bio should suffice to assess their ability to follow the course. Applicants will be able to fill out all of this information in the Application Form below.

Credit Information: ECTS/US credit certificates of up to 4/2 credits are offered by SMR which is a digital informal study platform of European and US accredited higher education institutions, one of which holds an Erasmus + Charter for Excellence of European Higher Education Institutions and one of which is a US accredited HE institution. Applicants should also note that the precise “grading” format for each of the individual courses will vary from course to course, and may require, for instance, in addition to attendance, the submission of short papers, reading and other assignments. Upon the successful completion of your chosen program of courses, students will receive a certificate for up to 4 ECTS (2 US credits).

Certificates and Fees: For all students: a fee per course is 400 EURO for PhD holders, junior and senior faculty, and postdocs, and 220 EURO for students and those who are unemployed. For those who wish to audit the courses, and who are thus not eligible to receive a credit certificate, all courses will cost 50 EURO per individual course. Scholarships and waivers are also available to participants, see the sections below.

Scholarships: All applicants, regardless of geographic location, are eligible for scholarships. Scholarships are limited and are granted based on merit, motivation and academic excellence in line with the research priorities of SMR. In the case of receiving a scholarship, the applicant will not be subject to any fees whatsoever. In the application form below you will see a separate section at the end of the form which must be filled out if you wish to be eligible for a scholarship. If this section is not filled out, we will, unfortunately, not be able to consider you as a scholarship candidate.

Automatic Partial Fee Waiver for Global South Applicants. Please note that all applicants from the Global South will automatically receive a 50% off waiver for their course fees. Likewise, please note that if you are from the Global South that this does not make you ineligible for scholarships. To apply simply fill out the section in the application form below. You can check the official status of your country to see if you qualify as a Global South Country here.

General Fee waivers: Applicants may apply to any amount of courses they wish, but should be aware that each course is paid for separately, and that payment for one course does not grant them access to any of the other courses. That being said, there is a fee waiver system in place to encourage and allow applicants to enroll in multiple courses. Participants who take at least two courses will receive 25% off from the total fee from the total amount of courses they have applied for. Participants who take three or more courses will receive 50% off from the total. Please also note that if you are applying from the Global South that this waiver is in addition to the automatic 50% waiver, and does not replace it. Update for clarificataion:  This general waiver does not apply to courses which are audited as they are already at a reduced fee.

Payment: Payment instructions will be sent to all successful applicants at the same time they receive their acceptance letters. If anyone is financially unable to make the payment, please contact us directly, and we will do our best to make sure we work it out together. Likewise, all applicants are eligible to pay on installment plans if they are otherwise unable to cover the fees. If you wish to pay on installment plans, please be sure to check the relevant box in the application form.

How to Apply: Interested applicants can find the full application form here, as well as at the very bottom of this page. All application forms must be filled out in full and sent in by August 31st, 2022, in order to be considered valid. If you have any enquiries please send them to all of the following email addresses:

schoolofmaterialistresearch@gmail.com

zach.d.dejong@gmail.com

info@isshs.edu.mk

CPT@exchange.asu.edu

About SMR: The School of Materialist Research is an international platform, founded by the Center for Philosophical Technologies at Arizona State University, the Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities, Skopje, the Department for Architecture Theory and Philosophy of Technics at TU Vienna, which, in cooperation with the Critical Inquiry Lab at the Design Academy Eindhoven, functions as a global online school combining education, research, and mentorship to advance academic study at the intersection of the social sciences and humanities (SSH) and the STEM sciences.

Application form