Virtual Colloquium: Debra Shaw – Vitruvian Mantology: Design for Future Bodies

In this week’s session of the Virtual Colloquium we will have Debra Shaw as our guest. Her talk is titled “Vitruvian Mantology: Design for Future Bodies”.

In this presentation I will introduce a concept that I call ‘Vitruvian Mantology’ which refers to the way that the template for the Roman camp, which conditions the form of many global cities (particularly those associated with the colonial powers) constructs both the mode in which we inhabit space and the format of the databases which are fundamental to information processing. I will explore how a critical posthumanist perspective can expose the relationship between built forms, ontological hierarchies and modernist epistemologies and propose techniques for re-orienting design practices towards more fluid concepts of embodiment.

Debra Benita Shaw is a Reader in Cultural Theory at the University of East London. She is the author of Women, Science and Fiction (2000), Women, Science and Fiction Revisited (2023), Technoculture: The Key Concepts (2009) and Posthuman Urbanism (2018). She has published extensively in the politics of technology and space from a critical posthumanist perspective and is also known as a literary critic specialising in science fiction.

For the speakers list of this semester and for information on registration, please have a look here.