This workshop will involve an engagement with Professor Nikolas Rose’s recent publication, ‘Against Posthumanism: Notes Towards an Ethopolitics of Personhood’ (co-authored with Professor Thomas Osbourne).

The paper, which will be circulated to invited participants prior to the event, challenges the epistemological foundations of posthumanism from the point of view of a vitalist emphasis on personhood. Following Professor Rose’s introduction to the paper and three short responses to it, participants will have the opportunity to partake in a discussion of the argument and explore its ethopolitical implications.

Workshop Schedule

12:30 – 12:35 Welcome 

12:35 – 12:45 Professor Nikolas Rose: Brief introduction to paper 

12:45 – 1:15 Discussant: Maria Hynes 

1:15 – 1:45 Discussant: Helen Keane 

1:45 – 2:15 Discussant: Nina Sellars 

2:15 – 3:00 General Question and Discussion Time

Please note that the registrations for this event are now closed.

Nikolas Rose is a Distinguished Honorary Professor in the Research School of Social Sciences of the Australian National University and an Honorary Professor in the Institute of Advanced Studies at University College London. He was a Professor of Sociology at Kings College London from 2012 until his retirement in April 2021. He was founding Head of the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at King’s and Co-Founder and Co-Director of King’s ESRC Centre for Society and Mental Health. He was previously Martin White Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Political Science and Director of the LSE’s BIOS Centre for the Study of Bioscience, Biomedicine, Biotechnology and Society. He is founder and Editor-in-Chief of BioSocieties: an interdisciplinary journal for social studies of the life sciences. His books include The Politics of Life Itself (Princeton University Press, 2006), Neuro (with Joelle Abi-Rached, Princeton University Press, 2013), Our Psychiatric Future (Polity Press, 2018) and The Urban Brain: Mental Health in the Vital City (with Des Fitzgerald, Princeton University Press, 2022). His forthcoming book Questioning Humanity: Why does biology matter to the human sciences, with Thomas Osborne, will be published in 2024.