Eco-immunology and Superweeds

This article explores immunity outside the contours of a human body and biopolitical framework in the plant science material-discursive object of the superweed with its resistance and tolerance to herbicides. Instead of categorically assuming all forms of immunity and immune systems taking place within the abstract category of the (human) body, the article attends to how the figure of the superweed as an analytical and synthesizing focal point comes to populate and be populated by the concept of immunity. At large, the author claims that the material dimension of the superweed can be seen as an extension or supplement to notions of the individual, autonomous, and bounded human body, yet this material dimension can also come to undermine even its own subject position. By unshackling or unlocking the concept of immunity from its human body ‘point of origin’, new ontological grounds for human and non-human political ecologies can be imagined, with a different form of embodiment, which is neither negative, nor affirmative

Research Collaborations: A guide for early career researchers by early career researchers

The League of European Research Universities (LERU) organises a summer school each year at one of the member universities on a different theme, inviting PhD students from Europe’s top research-intensive universities. This year’s LERU summer school was organised around the theme of collaboration in research, with the aim of developing a guidebook for early career researchers including tips and advice for successful collaborations

Blended support of undergraduate interdisciplinary research

This paper discusses blended support for undergraduate students to perform interdisciplinary research in teams. Interdisciplinary research is a complex process that consists of multiple steps and requires collaboration with people from different backgrounds. This paper presents research done at Liberal Arts and Sciences, Utrecht University (LAS), where students learn to do interdisciplinary research as part of the core curriculum. Considering the complexity of doing interdisciplinary research, it is important that students are guided in this process. Blended support that combines technologymediated guidance and face-to-face meetings would be of use to help students become more independent interdisciplinary researchers. This paper explores preferences in blended support, based on a survey and interviews with second and third year students and with undergraduate research supervisors at LAS, UU. Results indicated that there are different activities during the interdisciplinary research process where technology-mediated support would be of value. However, students and supervisors especially value meeting face-to-face when doing interdisciplinary integration. This should be taken into account when designing a blended framework for support of undergraduate interdisciplinary research

A Living Community: Theorizing Immunity from the Autoimmune

This article proposes a theorization of immunity from an embodied autoimmune perspective. Arguing through what it identifies as the limitations in current clinical immunology explanations and politico-philosophical theories of immunity, the article seeks to embody, rather than metaphorize, the theoretical stakes of current immune theory. As a counterargument to dominant theorizations of immunity that pathologize or metaphorize the autoimmune bodily experience, the article forwards a more spacious, material, and affirmative theorization of the body. As the author supplements existing immune theory with their own emergent and embodied theory, they develop an autoimmune methodology based on their experience of living with an autoimmune disease. Part personal narrative, part speculative autoimmune theory, the article ultimately calls for a practice of self-care aimed at coming to tolerate the disagreeing community of the autoimmune body as it challenges normalized notions of what self and other, immunity and community, ease and disease mean

Past-Present-Future and the 2019-20 Coronavirus Pandemic

Invited contribution to the special issue ‘Lockdown Theory

Critical Concepts for the Creative Humanities

This concise, precise, and inclusive dictionary contributes to a growing, transforming, and living research culture within both humanities scholarship and professional practices within the creative sectors. Its format of succinct starting definitions, demonstrations of possible routes of further development, and references to new and revisited concepts as “conceptual invitations” allows readers to quickly uptake and orient themselves within this exciting methodological field for didactic, scholarly and creative use, and as a starting point for further investigation for future contributions to the new canon of critical concepts