Keynote speakers

Anna Hickey-Moody

Anna Hickey-Moody is the Director of the Arts and Humanities Institute at Maynooth (2024-2029) and the inaugural Senior Academic Leadership Ireland (SALI) Professor of Intersectional Humanities. Her work explores intersecting angles of difference and disadvantage through philosophical and creative approaches. Anna came to Maynooth in 2023 to develop interdisciplinary research culture exploring intersectionality. Anna has written 4 critically acclaimed books including ‘Unimaginable Bodies’ (2009), the first book to examine disability through Deleuze’s work and ‘Deleuze and Masculinity’ (2019), as well as numerous essays and edited volumes working with Deleuze. Anna has also co-written another 4 well-cited books. Her most recent research grant is from Enterprise Ireland, to develop intersectional approaches to understanding energy cultures across Europe.  

Chantelle Gray

Chantelle Gray is a South African philosopher whose interests span anarchism and anarchist pedagogy; critical algorithm studies; queer theory and gender studies; experimental and exploratory studies in music; and Continental philosophies. The interdisciplinary nature of her work allows her to ask critical questions about how to take care of humans and their ecologies in the digital age. She is the author of Anarchism after Deleuze and Guattari: Fabulating Futures (2022), and the co-editor of Deleuze and Anarchism (2019). 

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1061-4463

Héléne Frichot

Architectural theorist and philosopher, writer and critic, Hélène Frichot (PhD) is Professor of Architecture and Philosophy, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, Melbourne School of Design, University of Melbourne, Australia. Previously, she was Professor of Critical Studies and Gender Theory, and Director of Critical Studies in Architecture, KTH Stockholm, Sweden. Her recent publications include Creative Ecologies: Theorizing the Practice of Architecture (Bloomsbury 2018) and Dirty Theory: Troubling Architecture (AADR 2019). She has collaborated on editing many anthologies including: Infrastructural Love: Caring for Our Architectural Support Systems (Birkhauser 2022); Architectural Affects After Deleuze and Guattari (Routledge 2021); Ficto-Critical Approaches (Bloomsbury 2020).

Bernd Herzogenrath

Bernd Herzogenrath is professor of American Literature and Culture at Goethe University of Frankfurt/Main, Germany. He is the author of An Art of Desire: Reading Paul Auster (Rodopi, 2001), An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach (Dartmouth College Press, 2010),and editor of two books on Tod Browning, two books on Edgar G. Ulmer, and two books on Deleuze and Ecology. Other edited collections include Film as Philosophy (University of Minnesota Press, 2017), The Films of Bill Morrison (Amsterdam University Press, 2017), Practical Aesthetics (Bloomsbury 2020), New Perspectives on Academic Writing (Bloomsbury, 2022), concepts: a travelogue (Bloomsbury 2022), and A Sound Word Almanac (Bloomsbury 2023. He is (together with Patricia Pisters) the main editor of the media-philosophical book series thinking|media with Bloomsbury, and, together with Tim Ingold, the main editor of two series devoted to the topic of ‘education’ (Bloomsbury, and Routledge).

He is also a husband, father, son, friend, and he loves life and a good beer.

Liselott Mariett Olsson

Liselott Mariett Olsson is Professor in Pedagogy and Head of Research at the Department of Childhood, Education and Society, Malmö University in the south of Sweden. Her research takes place at the intersection of everyday life events in early childhood education and care (ECEC) and philosophical and pedagogical perspectives. More specific research interests include equity, inclusion and early childhood literacy; aesthetics, ethics and politics in ECEC; continental philosophy and educational theory as well as ethnographically inspired methods and artistic and educational site-specific methodologies. She is the author of Movement and Experimentation in Young Children’s Learning – Deleuze and Guattari in Early Childhood Education and Care (2009), and recently, Becoming Pedagogue – Bergson and the Aesthetics, Ethics and Politics of Early Childhood Education and Care (2023) at Routledge. She is also co-editor with Professor Michel Vandenbroeck for the book-series Contesting Early Childhood at the same house.

Olsson has recently been involved in an EU funded research- and innovation project called Smooth Educational Common Spaces – Passing through enclosures and reversing inequalities (SMOOTH 2021-2024) that aimed to critically examine, understand and creatively contribute to equitable and inclusive education through an exploration of the emerging paradigm «The Commons». Results in this project point towards the potential of “aesthetic literacy events” (playful explorations of language with support in various aesthetic tools and expressions) to contribute to equity, inclusion and children’s narrative competencies. These results are the starting point for a new project, financed by the Swedish Research Council, called From proof-of-concept to scale in the study of aesthetic literacy events for equitable and inclusive early childhood education and care – Design of a research program.

Further keynote speakers will be announced.