We were so pleased with how well the conference went, and the excellent conversations both during and after the formal presentations. That was only possible because of the high quality of attendees and presenters. To keep that conversation going, here are short biographies for our presenters if you’d like to follow up with them about their talk (particularly if you missed it!) They’re listed in order of their presentations.
Organizers
Michael Butler is a Lecturer in the Philosophy department at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He researches the self using the tools of classical phenomenology and contemporary cognitive science. Currently he is concerned with the effects of digital technology on our embodied sense of self in space. His work has appeared in journals such as Continental Philosophy Review and Sartre Studies International and as chapters in books on Jean-Paul Sartre’s environmental philosophy, and the concept of self in phenomenology and cognitive science.
Ian Werkheiser is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley, Director of the Center for Ethics and Collaboration at UTRGV, and Director of the minor in Medical Humanities at UTRGV. His work focuses on environmental philosophy (particularly environmental justice), philosophy of technology, social epistemology, and food studies. He’s particularly interested in the ways that the tools of environmental philosophy can be applied to digital and augmented environments.
Presenters
Eugene Kukshinov is a PhD candidate at Temple University, who focuses on media psychology research in terms of media immersion, media identities, or other subjective experiences. This psychological avenue sometimes coexists (or intersects) with critical scholarship (as in terms of examining hegemony in Russia).
Cristiano Vidali is a PhD student in Philosophy, Epistemology, Human Sciences at the University of Cagliari, in cotutelle with the University of Rouen Normandie. Winnder of the “Mimesis Prize 2019″ in Philosophy (Youth Section), he now cooperates with the chair in Moral Philosophy and Philosophical Anthropology at the University of Milan. He is a subject expert (“cultore della materia”) on Phenomenology and Phenomenology of Experience at the “Vita-Salute San Raffaele” University of Milan, where he also participates as a member of PERSONA (Laboratory for Research in Phenomenology and Sciences of the Person).
Josh Dohmen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Mississippi University for Women. His published research has used feminist epistemology as well as thinkers in the continental tradition (especially Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault, and Judith Butler) to understand and propose ways to resist the injustices faced by disabled persons and incarcerated persons. His articles have appeared in Hypatia, Res Philosophica, the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Disability, and Janus Head. More recently, Josh has become interested in the philosophy labor, the philosophy of technology, and narrative accounts of identity. Indeed, his paper in the workshop is an attempt to gain insights about selves as social media and smartphones users from the works of Hilde Lindemann, Adriana Cavarero, and Hannah Arendt. You can reach Josh at jdohmen@muw.edu. In addition to philosophy, he’d be happy to discuss baking bread, playing the drumset, or the yoga poses you’re working on.
Tailer Ransom is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Georgia Southern University. He received his PhD in Philosophy and a graduate certificate in cognitive science from the University of Memphis in 2019. He specializes in Phenomenology, Philosophy of Cognitive Science, and Marxist Critical Theory with a specific focus on a critical analysis of embodied habit as the foundation of agency, emerging out of the transactive dialectic of organism and environment.
Marc Cheong is a Senior Fellow (at Melbourne Law School) and Digital Ethicist (Research Fellow in Digital Ethics) at the Centre for AI and Digital Ethics (CAIDE), University of Melbourne. He is interested in the intersection of technology (big data, social media, etc) and philosophy (existentialism, ethics, epistemology, and Experimental Philosophy). He is especially interested in the analysis of contemporary social media from an existentialist lens, which has not been as actively researched since the days of de Beauvoir, Sartre, et al, by challenging the contemporary notion of authenticity on social media.
Dylan Trigg is an FWF Senior Researcher at the University of Vienna, Department of Philosophy. He has previously held several positions, including: Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellow at the University of Memphis, Department of Philosophy & University College Dublin (2014-2017); Irish Research Council Fellow at University College Dublin (2012-2014); CNRS/VolkswagenStiftung Postdoc at Les Archives Husserl, École Normale Supérieure (2012-2013); and CNRS/VolkswagenStiftung Postdoc at Centre de Recherche en Epistémologie Appliquée (2011-2012).He is the author of several books including “Topophobia: a Phenomenology of Anxiety” (2017); “The Thing: a Phenomenology of Horror” (2014); and “The Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny” (2012). His research interests include phenomenology, embodiment, and aesthetics.
Francesco Striano, PhD at the Northwestern Italian Philosophy Consortium (FINO) – University of Turin, is currently a learning support teacher in high schools in Genoa and, in parallel, a scientific collaborator (“cultore della materia”) in theoretical philosophy at the University of Turin. He graduated from the University of Genoa (B.A. in Philosophy and M.A. in Philosophical Methodologies). During his PhD Programme he was a visiting student at the Humboldt University of Berlin and the University of Paris III – Sorbonne Nouvelle. His main interests range from the philosophy and ethics of technology to media theory (with particular reference to media archaeology) and cybernetics in relation to the study of screens and visual interfaces, as well as the thought of authors such as Günther Anders and Gilbert Simondon.
Agostino Cera, PhD in philosophy (University of Naples Federico II), currently is an Adjunct Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Basilicata (Italy); an Adjunct Professor of Phenomenology of the Image at the Academy of Fine Arts of Naples (Italy); and Research Fellow at the Department of Humanities of the University of Naples “Federico II”
(Italy). His research interests include: Continental Philosophy between XIX and XX Century (especially German philosophy: Löwith, Heidegger, Anders, Nietzsche); Philosophy of Technology; Philosophical Anthropology; Anthropocene; and Philosophy of Film. Further information on my work in my academia.edu page: https://accademiadinapoli.academia.edu/agostinocera
Ioan Muntean With a dual degree in philosophy and applied physics, I am a philosopher and a scientist. My research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of science, philosophy of computation, metaphysics, and applied ethics. In philosophy of science I work on unification, explanation and model-based science. In philosophy of physics I investigated space-time models, the philosophical assumptions of quantum gravity (string theory and especially string dualities). I have research interest in the metaphysics of time and causation. I specialized in the philosophical aspects of cognitive sciences, computation and numerical simulations, machine learning, and evolutionary computation. I teach and conduct research on topics that have a major impact on our world and on how we pass it to future generations: philosophy of computation and information (mainly AI), philosophy of emerging technologies, foundations of space-time theories (including quantum gravity), as well as topics such as ‘laws of nature’, ‘models’, ‘perspectival realism’, ‘trust’, and ‘unification’. I have recently been investigating computational ethics (or ‘machine ethics’) and models of artificial moral agency based on machine learning. I have tackled the ethical implications of emergent technologies and the practice of contemporary science.
Jeff Morrisey is a lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His research centers on the philosophy of art in German idealism and Deweyan pragmatism. He focuses especially on the way materiality and different media (like painting and architecture, as well as, more recently, money and technology) mediate our lived reality and our experience of our social relations and of ourselves.
Alessandro De Cesaris is post-doc research fellow at the University of Turin (Italy) and scientific collaborator at the Collège des Bernardins (Paris, France). His research interests focus on media philosophy and anthropology of technology, Classic German Philosophy and metaphysics. He got his PhD in 2017 with a dissertation – that will be published in Italian – on the notion of Singularity in Hegel’s Logic. His current research project focuses on the socio-technical imaginaries related to the so-called Digital turn.
Joey Aloi is the Food Hub Marketing Specialist for KISRA’s Paradise Farms. He holds a doctorate in Philosophy from the University of North Texas, where he studied environmental Philosophy. As a researcher, Aloi tends to practice field philosophy at the intersection of Philosophy with Environmental and Appalachian Studies. His dissertation, “Participation in the Play of Nature,” is a Gadamerian approach to environmental aesthetics. He is also the President of the Board of Directors for the West Virginia Food and Farm Coalition.
Brad Warfield is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His teaching and research interests lie in 20th-Century Continental Philosophy, Ethics, Africana Philosophy, Philosophy of Technology, and Theories of the Self, especially the dialogical self. He has 13 years of university teaching experience. Before coming to UTRGV, he taught at Salisbury University, the University of South Florida, Hillsborough Community College, and the University of Tampa.
Don Beith, Assistant Professor at the University of Maine. I approach philosophy as a search for meaning, particularly through the study of how our lives become meaningful in organic development, habit formation, cultural and institutional life, and our ecological embeddedness in nature. You can read about this in The Birth of Sense, my recent book about the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. I am currently working at the intersection of environmental philosophy, medical ethics, the philosophy of technology and existentialism. Questions of how our medical and environmental senses of “health” should involve deeper reflections on our existential and spiritual well-being animate my current research. Teaching philosophy inspires me. Before coming to Maine, I taught at Algoma University, Bishop’s University, McGill University and the University of British Columbia. I am also passionate about hiking, cycling, chess, taekwondo, live music and exploring new places.
Digital Worlds Workshop 