PHuN: Learning + Trust

The Third Annual Post-Human Network Syposium, Exhibition, and Undergraduate Colloqiuem (2020)

#PHuN, #critical-theory, #posthumanities, #cybernetics, #symposia, #conference, #organization, #post-human-network

collaboration with: Jonathan Bratt, Nathanial Mengist

February 20-22, 2020

Call for Papers

In an age of technological growth, globalization, and neoliberalism, the ways we build trust are being dramatically transformed. Simultaneously, funding for education has become subject to market- and data-driven directives, neglecting the needs of vulnerable communities and ecologies. How do we learn to trust and trust in learning when our communities and connections are increasingly distant, ephemeral, and mediated? How do we avoid falling to game-theoretically governed social, economic, and informatic relations? What aspects of trust are under-considered in efforts for learning and change? Where are the flows of trust in above/below-ground networks (institutions, organizations, grassroots movements, communities of practice, etc.)? What’s left to learn, if anything, from posthumanism? Is trust even a useful conceptualization of relations anymore?

PHuN (post-human network) invites submissions and proposals for papers, demos, workshops, media, artistic and practice-driven works to their 4th annual meeting. Topics could include but are not limited to:

  • Trustful learning, trustful organization, trustless learning, trustless organization
  • World building and world making, RPG, role-playing, games, reality coding
  • Sartorialism, textiles, weaving, cooking and baking as trust-based art
  • Philosophical and pedagogical optometry (is hindsight 2020?)
  • Currency and blockchain as game theoretical trustless systems
  • #metoo, whisper networks, consent
  • bad faith, dissensus
  • Cults of toxic masculinity, nice guys, neckbeards, and edgelords
  • Legal apparati, critical legal theory, sovereignty, and political theology
  • Big science and radical empiricism (are they incommensurable?)
  • Social media, cryptography, and the future of the secret
  • Surveillance, big tech, self surveillance, and privacy
  • Paranoid readings, Psychotherapy, Transference
  • Deep Fakes and New Media
  • Debt, guilt, and potlatching; learning as debt, and student debt
  • Alternative schooling, public and radical pedagogies
  • Propaganda, public opinion, manufacturing consent, chill effects
  • Education, nationalism, and identity
  • Anti-blackness & indigenous erasure in posthuman discourse
  • Connectivity hypotheses and forces of subjectification
  • Clarke’s Law, black boxes, and models faith in incomprehensible technology
  • Craft, work, and technical knowledge
  • Collaborative story-telling, ARGs, MMOs, and virtual relations
  • Prometheanism, climate change, climate education, and giga-engineering
  • Trust and belief in the (post)human being
  • Interspecies learning, post-humanities learning, symbiosis and mutual aid
  • Anarchist pedagogies; mutualisms, communalisms, cooperatives and learning
  • Yelp reviews and anonymous crowd sourcings of value
  • The marketplace of ideas as a model of peer-review
  • Trust and faith, fidelity and religion, truth and courage
  • Automation, machine learning, algorithmic faith, golems
  • Paperclip problems, machinic anxiety, Roko’s Basilisk and Modern Life
  • Vaporware, faketech and venture capital confidence schemes
  • Demons, angels, and trustworthy aliens
  • Trust in non-state governance and social media
  • The project of the university and its ecclesiastical origins
  • Process theology, Whitehead’s cosmology, and theory of education
  • Espionage, agents provocateurs, infiltration, and spycraft
  • Steerspeople, trimtabs, helmsmen, Charon, and biopower
  • Crises of faith, leaps of faith, confronting others as trustworthy
  • Trust and “letting go” in the midst of mystical experience
  • Non-techno-determinist models of transhumanism and body-hacking
  • Transgressive art, scholarship, and expression.
  • Anthropologies and etymologies of trust
  • Conspiracy theories, hyperstitions, and worldmaking

Program

Thursday, February 20

5:00-8:00 RPG & Game Night @ Matthews Center

  • Cody Jones / “The Shahab-al-Hiri Roach, an RPG by Jason Morningstar”
  • Rosemary Jones / “Blank Spaces: Trust in Exploring Identity”
  • Tianhang Liu, Patrick Hoffman, Ivan Mendoza / “Conductor” Playspace

Friday, February 21

8:45-9:00 Welcome + Coffee @ Center for Philosophical Technologies + Digital Arts Ranch

  • Jonathan Bratt and Garrett Johnson

9:00-10:45 Panel 1 | Pedagogies of World-making, Worlding, and Otherworlds @ CPT DAR

  • Angela Sakrison :: “From One Dung Hill of Inert Ideas into Another: Adopting Whitehead’s Aims of Education in Community-Based Curriculum Redevelopment”
  • Alwyn Merry Mouton :: “Gatherlings”
  • Hannah Tardie :: “Fetishism and the Motherboard: Lexicons of the Otherworldly"
  • Adam Nocek :: respondent

11:00-12:00 Workshop / CPT DAR

  • Anani M. Vasquez :: “Becoming-Penguin-Teacher: Trusting in the Ecology of the Lesson-Event”

1:30-3:15 Panel 2 |Posthuman Identity, More-than-Human Trust @ CPT DAR

  • Rosemary Jones :: “Blank Spaces: Trust in Exploring Identity”
  • Mira Petrillo :: “News or Group Justification? Social Epistemologies in the Posthuman News Landscape”
  • Nat Mengist :: “Believe in Black Feminisms: World Building, Timeline Jumping, and the Possibility of Posthuman Learning”
  • Grisha Coleman :: respondent

3:30-5:15 Panel 3 | Beyond New Media: Another World is Possible @ CPT DAR

  • Maxx Naoyuki Yamasaki :: “Practical Approaches to Fictional Technologies”
  • Ioan Butui :: “In Google We Trust: Reimagining Epistemic Agency”
  • Garrett Johnson, Will Hallett, Brandon Mechtley :: “Towards an Ethico-Aesthetic New Media Pedagogy”
  • Lauren Sarah Hayes :: respondent

5:30-6:30 Opening: Learning and Trust Art Exhibition @ CPT DAR

  • Paula Carralerro Bierzynska
  • Chelsea Davies
  • Will Hallett
  • Nat Mengist
  • Alwynn Merry Mouton
  • Hannah Tardie
  • Maxx Naoyuki Yamasaki

Saturday, February 22

9:00-10:45 Panel 4 | Public Technics of Education: Scaling Trust and Trusting Scale @ CPT DAR

  • Anisha Uppugonduri :: “Physics Education/Epistemics and Paranoid Network Dynamics”
  • Jo Ann Oravec :: “Emergence of Technologically-Supported Lie and Cheating Detection in Educational Contexts: The New Academic Polygraphs”
  • Kim Adams and John Linstrom :: “Public Drive: Land-Grant Institutions and Access in American Education”
  • Cala Coats :: respondent

11:00-1:00 Undergraduate Consortium / CPT DAR

  • Fair-style presentations from students from Arizona State University’s Digital Culture Program
  • Respondants from undergraduate students from the University of Washington’s Comparative History of Ideas Program
  • Facilitate by Nat Mengist and Garrett Johnson

1:00-2:30 Lunch / CPT DAR

2:30-3:45 Workshop / MCIS

  • Muindi Fanuel Muindi and Yfla Lund Muindi / “The Gift and the Ledger”; responsive media space design by Brandon Mechtley and Garrett Johnson

4:00-6:00 Closing Session: PHuture of PHuN, Where PHuN Goes to Tie-Dye / CPT DAR

Organizers' Bibliography

Baier, Annette. Moral Prejudices. Bang, Megan, and Ananda Marin. “Nature–Culture Constructs in Science Learning: Human/Non-Human Agency and Intentionality.” Journal of Research in Science Teaching. Bang, Megan, and Shirin Vossoughi. “Participatory Design Research and Educational Justice: Studying Learning and Relations Within Social Change Making.” Cognition and Instruction. Beer, Stafford. Designing Freedom. Braidotti, Rosi. “Posthuman Humanities.” European Educational Research Journal. Brekke, Jaya Klare. “Disassembling the Trust Machine: Three Cuts on the Political Matter of Blockchain.” PhD Thesis, University of Durham. Case, Nicky. “The Evolution of Trust.” Curtis, Adam. The Trap: What Happened to Our Dream of Freedom? Dewey, John. Experience and Education. Fanon, Franz. The Wretched of the Earth. Friere, Paolo. Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Giroux, Henry. “Public Pedagogy and the Politics of Resistance: Notes on a Critical Theory of Education Struggle.” Educational Philosophy and Theory.
Gore, Jennifer. The Struggle for Pedagogies. Land, Susan, and David Jonassen.Theoretical Foundations of Learning Environments. Lave, Jean, and Etienne Wenger. Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation. Littman, Walter. Public Opinion. Malzacher, Florian, Ahmet Ögüt, and Pelin Tan, editors. The Silent University: Towards a Transversal Pedagogy. Maturana, Humberto and Francisco Varela. Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Understanding. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. Meranze, Michael, and Christopher Newfield. “Remaking the University.” Morgenstern, Oskar and John von Neumann. Games and Economic Behavior.
Moten, Fred and Stefano Harney. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study.
Pask, Gordon. Conversation, Cognition and Learning. Pedersen, Helena and Barbara Pini. “Educational Epistemologies and Methods in a More-than-Human World.” Educational Philosophy and Theory. Quinn, Jocey. “Theorising Learning and Nature: Post-Human Possibilities and Problems.” Gender and Education (2013). Rose-Antoinette, Ronald. “if the earth is the pedagogy….” Inflexions. SenseLab. “The Go-To How-To Guide to Anarchiving.” Siddiqui, Jamila. “Restyling the Humanities Curriculum of Higher Education for Posthuman Times.” Curriculum Inquiry. Von Foerster, Heinz. Understanding Understanding. Whitehead, Alfred North. The Aims of Education.