International conference Centre for Space Place and Society CSPS

Keynote speakers

Keynote speakers at the International Conference Centre for Space, Place and Society are
Katherine Gibson from Western Sydney University and Annemarie Mol from University of Amsterdam.

Keynote speakers

Katherine Gibson

Professor Katherine Gibson is internationally known for her research on rethinking economies as sites of ethical action. She trained as a human geographer with expertise in political economy and, with her collaborator for over 30 years, the late Professor Julie Graham, developed a distinctive approach to economic geography drawing on feminism, post-structuralism and action research. The diverse economies research program they initiated has become a vibrant sub-field of study within the social sciences. In the late 1990s the collective authorial voice of J.K. Gibson-Graham led the critique of capitalocentric thinking that was blocking the emergence of economic possibility. The End of Capitalism (As We Knew It): A Feminist Critique of Political Economy published in 1996, was republished in 2006 with a new Introduction and named a Classic in Human Geography by the leading journal Progress in Human Geography in 2011. Gibson-Graham's work on a post-capitalist economic politics has had a widespread readership among those interested in economic alternatives and has been translated into Chinese, Korean, Turkish, Spanish and French.

Annemarie Mol

Annemarie Mol

Annemarie Mol is Professor of Anthropology of the Body at the University of Amsterdam. Winner of the Constantijn & Christiaan Huijgens Grant from the NWO in 1990 to study “Differences in Medicine”, she was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant in 2010 to study “The Eating Body in Western Practice and Theory”, as well as the Spinoza Prize in 2012. She has helped to develop post-ANT/feminist understandings of science, technology and medicine. In her earlier work she explored the performativity of health care practices, argued that realities are generated within those practices, and noted that, since practices differ, so too do realities. The body, as she expressed it, is multiple: it is more than one but it is also less than many (since the different versions of the body also overlap in health care practices). This is an empirical argument about ontology (which is the branch of philosophy that explores being, existence, or the categories of being). As a part of this she also developed the notion of “ontological politics”, arguing that since realities or the conditions of possibility vary between practices, this means that they are not given but might be changed. Mol is the author of multiple books on these topics, including The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice and The Logic of Care: Health and the Problem of Patient Choice.