Instructors

vivien sansour

Vivien Sansour, founder of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, is an artist, researcher and writer. She uses installations, images, sketches, film, soil, seeds, and plants to enliven old cultural tales in contemporary presentations and to advocate for seed conservation and the protection of agrobiodiversity as a cultural/political act. She works to bring threatened varieties “back to the dinner table to become part of our living culture rather than a relic of the past.” She has sprouted many projects out of the Palestine Heirloom Seed Library, including her co-founding of El Beir, Arts and Seeds studio in Bethlehem, the Traveling Kitchen project (https://viviensansour.com/).
Vivien currently teaches at Bard College and is an Experimental Humanities Collaborative Network (EHCN) Distinguished Artistic Fellow.

Gene ray

Gene Ray is Associate Professor in the CCC Research-based Master Programme at Geneva University of Art and Design (HEAD-Genève, HES-SO). He writes about planetary politics, critical theory and the aesthetics of post-1945 and contemporary memory politics. Author of Terror and the Sublime in Art and Critical Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 2011), he led the collective research projects The Anthropocene Atlas of Geneva (2016-18) and All Monuments Must Fall (2021). His new book, After the Holocene, the Commons, is forthcoming with PM Press.

Tom Western

Tom Western is a Lecturer in Social and Cultural Geography at UCL. His teaching and research centre on movements and migrations, cities and citizenships, relations and imaginations, activisms and anticolonialisms – usually working with methods that foreground sound and voice. He works primarily in Athens, Greece, where he is a member of the Syrian and Greek Youth Forum, who together run the Citizen Sound Archive – a space for amplifying citizenship work, youth activism, community mobilising, and collective research and knowledge production. Tom is writing his first book, titled Circular Movements: Writing Anticolonial Mediterranean Futures from Athens.

OLGA CIELEMĘCKA

Olga Cielemęcka is a feminist philosopher with a penchant for interdisciplinary research in environmental humanities and critical theory of society. Olga’s research is driven by a sense of curiosity about how we, humans, make sense of the rapidly shifting environments around us and their impact on various bodies and communities. She holds a PhD in Philosophy from University of Warsaw, Poland and currently is the Borders, Mobilities and Cultural Encounters research fellow at the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Eastern Finland. Olga’s current project examines the political and environmental impact of a fence on a Polish-Belarusian border that cuts through a nature-protected area. Olga’s work has been published in Somatechnics, Theory, Culture, & Society and Journal of Gender Studies, among others.

Jenny Marketou, is an interdisciplinary artist, born in Athens, Greece, lives and works in New York and Athens. She is a professor of New Media Art and Public Engagement at The New Schoo/Parsons in New York. She is known for her collective art practice, her large scale public floating ecosystems Rivering for the waterways in New York and for action- based opportunities and site specific projects in urban spaces that propose playful solutions to social problems through a variety of media and an open invitation for community engagement. Her recent institutional solo and group exhibitions were held as a floating installation at New York Harbor, Governors Island, NY(2022), The House of Challenging Orders, Vienna Art Week, Vienna (2022), Folk Fiction, One Minute Space, Athens, Greece (2022), The High Line, New York (2018) among others. Her book "Serious Games" was released on July, 2022 and “How Assemblies Matter: Organizing from Below” published by Naked Punch, 2014.

jenny marketou

Ismini Gatou

Ismini Gatou is an Athens-based researcher/creator. Her interests lie at the intersection of research and art and address issues of relationality, inhabitation and (im)mobility in public space. She adopts "tools" from sound/media studies, sensory/multimodal ethnography and affective methodologies, while experimenting with various media: field/voice recordings, sound compositions, interactive audio-mappings and locative media projects. She is currently completing her PhD at the University of the Aegean at the Department of Cultural Technology & Communication, with fieldwork on the America Square neighborhood (Athens), where she has created the sound-based locative project america². She is a Fellow of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Artist Fellowship Program ARTWORKS for 2022-23.

Anthrobombing

The research project "Anthrobombing: Narrative Experimentations for the Design of a Public Anthropology Platform" (2020-2022), conducted by anthropologists Alexandra Siotou and Alexandros Papageorgiou (with Penelope Papailias as faculty advisor), explored the conditions for disseminating knowledge outside academia and the possibilities of anthropology participating in public debate. We discuss our experiments with multimodal narrative techniques (stand-up comedy, cartoneras, improv theatre) and with new ways of description, analysis and publishing anthropological discourse in this recent article: “Reflections on Anthrobombing: Experiments in Performing, Publishing and Becoming with (Other) Publics”, Public Anthropologist, 4 (1): 78-101.