This year’s conference went great — excellent papers and commentary, and great conversations in sessions and outside of them. To keep these conversations going, and to allow people who weren’t able to attend to reach out to people and ask them for their papers, we’re putting brief bios of the participants below.
Click Here to Meet The Conference Organizers
The Participants
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.
Marc Cheong is a Senior Lecturer in Information Systems (Digital Ethics) at the University of Melbourne, and Honorary Senior Fellow (at both Melbourne Law School and The Burnet Institute, Australia). 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.
Jordan Kokot is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at Boston University who specializes in the philosophy and ethics of technology, the philosophy of art, and the phenomenology of time. His current research is focused on the ethical, social, and phenomenological intersections of XR (extended reality) and AI technologies, and on the ethical dimensions of “synthetic phenomenologies. You can learn more about Jordan on his website: www.jdkokot.com
Catherine Fullarton is a Faculty Fellow in the Foundation Year Program at the University of King’s College, in Halifax, NS (Canada), and a Doctoral Candidate (ABD) in Philosophy at Emory University (Atlanta, USA). Her current research engages Aristotle’s ethics, Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, and feminist care ethics to propose a model of empathy as a form of ethical expertise. She is also the Partnerships and Community Relations Officer of the Canadian Bioethics Society / Société canadienne de bioétique (CBS/SCB). Her research interests are in the philosophy of health and illness, ethics (esp. Aristotelian ethics), phenomenology (esp. Merleau-Ponty), embodiment, and the philosophy of emotions.
Ioan Muntean has a steady interest in the philosophical aspects of computation (numerical simulations, machine learning, evolutionary computation) and machine ethics (especially models of artificial moral agency). He works also on the metacognitive aspects of scientific practice, especially in natural science. His other area of specialization is the philosophy of science with a focus on scientific unification, models, and explanation. More information can be found on his website: imuntean.net.
Daria Bylieva is an associate professor at Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University, Russia. She is interested in the internet as a new social space and in “Homo virtualis.” Her areas of research include Philosophy of computing and information, semiotics, and transhumanism.
Leighton Evans is an Associate Professor of Media Theory at Swansea University. He is the author of Locative Social Media (2015), The Re-emergence of Virtual Reality (2018) and the co-author of Location-based Social Media: Space, Time and Identity (2017) and Intergenerational Locative Play: Augmenting Family (2021).
Doruk Taskiran is a graduate student in the department of philosophy at Ryerson University. He holds a bachelor’s degree from U of T in Economics and Sociology and attended Ryerson University for another bachelor’s degree in philosophy. His main philosophical interest lies in Existential-Phenomenology with an eye towards understanding how genuine expression has the potential of existential transformation and healing. Outside of philosophy, he makes candles and runs an online candle store. He is a member of an art collective in Toronto and builds things out of bits of wood that he collects from the street.
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.
Joseph Aloi is the Agroforestry Network Coordinator for Future Generations University’s Appalachian Sustainable Development Learning Community. His work in agroforestry builds on years of work in Appalachian foodways, especially local-food-system building, food access, and food sovereignty. His doctorate is in Philosophy from the University of North Texas, the premier program for Environmental Philosophy, where his dissertation was on hermeneutics and environmental aesthetics. His published academic works touch on environmental ethics, economic transition, philosophy of technology, environmental justice, agrarianism, and the role of the forest in Appalachian foodways.
Jordan Liz is an Assistant Professor of the Department of Philosophy at San José State University, where his research focuses on biomedical ethics, philosophy of medicine and philosophy of race. His primary research focuses on contemporary genetic understandings of race and racial classifications; as well as studies on the genetic susceptibility of specific racial groups to certain diseases, such as cancer and diabetes. More recently, his research focuses on the impact of COVID-19 on racial minorities and other marginalized groups.
Lucy Osler is a philosophy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. She is working on the FWF-funded project ‘Antagonistic Political Emotions’ specialising in phenomenology, embodiment, online sociality, intersubjectivity, philosophy of emotions and psychopathology.
Jana Elena Koch is a graduate student at the University of Vienna. She wrote her Master’s thesis on the phenomenology of thinking, mainly focussing on Merlau-Ponty, William James, and the debate on cognitive phenomenology. At the moment, she is especially interested in philosophy of technology, postphenomenology, AI-based artifacts, communication and relations between human beings and technologies.
Agostino Cera received his PhD in philosophy (University of Naples Federico II), and is an assistant professor at Università Di Ferrara, 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 his work can be found at his academia.edu page: ferrara.academia.edu/AgostinoCera
Emilio Sierra García received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Saint Damasus and is a graduate in Theology from the same University. He is a collaborating professor at CEU San Pablo University (Madrid) Tutor at the School of Philosophy (Madrid). He is interested in contemporary aesthetics, hermeneutics and religious experience, phenomenological access to being, the mystery of evil and human suffering, and the unity and multidimensionality of human reason: expansion of reason as a theoretical of experience.
Beatriz Rayón Viña has a degree in Philosophy (University of Oviedo) and a Masters in Human Rights (UNED). She is currently a PhD student at the University of Oviedo, and her research deals with the topic of justice, its dimensions and different applications in practical issues. She is currently engaged in studying the issue of the digital divide and understanding how different conceptions of justice can address this problem. You can find her on email uo216817@uniovi.es or through https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Beatriz-Rayon
Federica Porcheddu received her PhD in Moral Philosophy from the University of Macerata in 2019. Her book Rethinking the third starting with Levinas. Transcendence and Reciprocity, was published by Mimesis last October. Since 2017 she has been the Italian referee for Cahiers d’études lévinassiennes and is now a member of the scientific committee. She is the secretary of the Italian Philosophical Society of Sassari, a member of the Art and Recognition group of the University of Perugia affiliated with the International Human-being Research Center IHRC), and is on the editorial board of the journal “Metaxy: philosophy, art and recognition.” In recent years, her interests have been focused on the philosophy of art and aesthetics, with particular reference to digital and new technologies, in order to understand how new technologies affect the concept of artwork and our aesthetic experience by improving, altering, or hindering the experience and enjoyment of it. She is currently working on a project for a laboratory of philosophy of the arts in collaboration with the University of Sassari. For any information or exchange of ideas please write to federica_porcheddu@libero.it
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.
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.
Christopher J. Gomez is a lecturer in the philosophy department at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. He received his PhD in philosophy from the Universidad Veracruzana. His research interests include philosophy of mind, phenomenology, artificial intelligence, and cognition.
Digital Worlds Workshop 