key notes

Professor Gay Hawkins
Institute for Culture and Society
Western Sydney University
Sydney, Australia

Gay Hawkins is a research professor in social and cultural theory at one of Australia’s leading humanities research centres: The Institute for Culture and Society at Western Sydney University. In 2012 she was elected to the Australian Academy of Humanities. She works in the areas of materiality, ethics, and environments. In 2006 she published The Ethics of Waste which explored the material force of waste in our everyday ethical lives. For the last ten years her research has focused on plastic as a political material: how it has emerged as the definitive expression of carbon economies, its role in various forms of toxic embodiment: human and animal, and its ethical complexities as an extremely valuable and destructive material. In 2013 she published with co-editors Mike Michael and Jennifer Gabrys Accumulation: the material politics of plastic (Routledge). In 2015 she published with co-authors Kane Race and Emily Potter Plastic Water (MIT) an international study of how PET plastic and water became inextricably connected in the rise of bottled water markets.

Title of keynote speech: Ethical Blindness: plastics, disposability and the art of not caring

Associate Professor Maria Puig de la Bellacasa
University of Leicester
the United Kingdom

I am an Associate Professor at the University of Leicester, UK. I work at the crossing of science and technology studies, feminist theory and the environmental humanities. My most recent book Matters of Care. Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds (University of Minnesota Press, 2017) initiates a conversation between feminist materialist tradition of critical thinking about practices of care and debates on more than human ontologies and ecological futures. I have also previously published two monographs on feminist knowledge politics (L’Harmattan, 2013 & 2014). My current research concentrates on the ongoing formations of ecological cultures in distraught naturecultural worlds, looking in particular at how connections between scientific knowing, social, community movements, and artistic interventions contribute to transformative ethics, politics and justice. In my work, I also look for and try to nurture interstitial spaces of knowing and doing that counter dispiritedness within seemingly hegemonic and destructive technoscientific regimes. For instance, I research everyday forms of care in minoritarian eco-social movements such as permaculture and their co-related material spiritualities, or explore how caring affections towards non-human beings can be encouraged by scientific knowledge that deepens a sense of ecological interdependence.

Title of keynote speech: Obliged by the soil. Notes towards an ethics of breakdown

University Lecturer Alberto Altes Arlandis
Umeå University, Arkitekt högskolan
Sweden

Alberto Altés Arlandis is an architect and researcher. He studied architecture in Valladolid, Barcelona and Delft, and critical theory at the Independent Studies Program in Barcelona (MACBA). In 2016 he received his PhD from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) with the dissertation ‘Delaying the Image: Towards an Aesthetics of Encounter’, in which he approaches film as a form that thinks and as an apparatus of spatial critique, exploring ‘the encounter’ as a slow, caring and open form of practice. Since 2011 he has been assistant professor at Umeå School of Architecture, where he co-founded and co-directed the Laboratory of Immediate Architectural Intervention, to make and explore architecture as a performative, relational and vitalist practice that unfolds in the making of the world in/through ‘intraventions’. He will now move on to a Post-Doctoral Research Fellowship at the architecture theory chair of TUDelft, where he will continue exploring the notions of fragility, affinity and care, and the power of choreography, dance and love, to inform a more sensitive, responsible and engaged approach to ‘worlding’ practices and pedagogy. He has coedited ‘Intravention, Durations, Effects: Notes of Expansive Sites and Relational Architectures’ (2013, Spurbuch Verlag) and ‘The Power of Experiment’ (2016, Arteria and the Lisbon Architecture Triennale), and he is also founder of LandLab Arkitektur AB.

Title of keynote speech: Delay&Care: Toward Responsible 'Worlding’ Action

Professor David Fennell
Department of Geography and Tourism Studies
Brock University
Canada

Professor David Fennell’s main research focus is ecotourism and tourism ethics, which he has explored for many years. He is the author of Tourism Ethics, Ecotourism: An Introduction (a general text on ecotourism), Ecotourism Programme Planning (a text which examines the strategic programme planning model applied to ecotourism), and co-editor of Ecotourism Policy and Planning. Dr. Fennell is the founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Ecotourism. He is an active member on editorial boards of many academic journals. He teaches ecotourism and outdoor recreation at Brock University, Canada.

Title of keynote speech: Walking tourism’s “Narrow” Roads: On Human Nature, Insularity, and the Moral Imperative in Advancing Tourism Research & Practice

Professor Lotta Viikari
Faculty of Law, University of Lapland
Rovaniemi, Finland

Professor Lotta Viikari has published especially in the areas of space law, international environmental law, and law of the sea. Her publications include three monographs of which The Environmental Element in Space Law: Assessing the Present and Charting the Future (Studies in Space Law, Vol. 3, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, Leiden/Boston, 2008) has been awarded the Social Science Book Award of the International Academy of Astronautics in 2009 and the Finnish Lawyers´ Society Award for the best legal PhD dissertation in Finland in 2007.

Professor Viikari is the National Point of Contact in Finland for the European Centre for Space Law (ECSL).

Title of keynote speech: Ethics in/of Space

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