Pia Paul is a PhD student in the Rhetoric Department at UC Berkeley. Trained as a historian of science, she now works at the edges of disciplinary inquiry, examining the political and epistemic implications of postwar psychobiological concepts of organicist growth and self-organization. Pia is particularly interested in the ideological inflections of regeneration, freedom, and control in such theories of organicist growth—frameworks that continue to shape definitions of subjectivity and determinism in the human sciences. On a broader level, her research engages...
Simon(e) van Saarloos is a writer, artistic collaborator and curator. They are the author of Against Ageism. A Queer Manifesto (2023); Take ‘Em Down. Scattered Monuments and Queer Forgetting (2021) and Playing Monogamy (2019) as well as several books in Dutch. Their writing has appeared in multiple co-edited volumes and academic journals such as Performance Philosophy Journal, Postmodern Culture, Porn Studies Journal and Trans Studies Quarterly. They also write fiction and theater. Van Saarloos is currently writing a new book for AK Press, titled Trans...
Pia Sazani is an artist, educator, and researcher living in Oakland, California. They are interested in the collocation of the speculative mode and religious affect in contemporary literature, art, theory, and popular culture attempting to think the future.
With poet Sam Creely, they co-edit the chaplet series DanceNotes, which publishes experiments in dance notation. Read more at isitadancenote.com
My research revolves around the relation between legible and illegible in visual experiences. A particular interest is the problematic idea of time- or culture-specific object, wherein emerge questions of repetition and singularity, representational technologies, transhistorical hermeneutics, and the margin of writing. BA, MA, the University of Chicago
Jae-Min joined the Rhetoric department after working as a paralegal for the Natural Resources Defense Council. She is interested in exploring how bodies materialize through biopolitical, racial, environmental, and economic systems. Specifically, she hopes to study legal texts and speculative fiction that center non-“normative” bodies and open up radical imaginations of our current/future worlds. Jae-Min graduated from Bowdoin College, where she majored in Political Theory and minored in English.
