Plasticity – A conversation on Malabou's term

Catherine Malabou's concept of plasticity has served as a clear source of inspiration behind Rosalind Goldberg’s performance The Field. After the performance on Friday, we welcome everyone to a conversation with Goldberg and the philosophers Kaja Jenssen Rathe (political philosophy and phenomenology) and Kjetil Horn Hogstad (pedagogical philosophy). During the talk, you will get an insight into three ways of applying Malabou's concept through meeting Kjetil Horn Hogstad (philosophy of education), Kaja Jenssen Rathe (political philosophy and phenomenology) and Rosalind Goldberg (choreography). The conversation will introduce different approaches to Malabou's concept and discuss how it can be applied in the face of art, feminism, gender, pedagogy and politics.

Kjetil Horn Hogstad is a philosopher in the field of pedagogy and a lecturer at the University of Oslo. Hogstad's doctoral thesis was on the subject of Malabou's plasticity, and his later works continue to focus on semiotic-materialist approaches to educational theory.

Kaja Jenssen Rathe is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Oregon, writing a dissertation in critical phenomenology on immigration and privacy. She is affiliated with the Center for Gender Research at the University of Oslo, where she is currently a visiting scholar. Her primary fields of research and interest are phenomenology and political philosophy, as well as feminist philosophy. Jenssen Rathe is a founding co-editor of Puncta – Journal of Critical Phenomenology, the Norwegian translator of Catherine Malabou's book What Should We Do with Our Brain?, and has written about Malabou's plasticity concept in the article "Relearning to think: Toward a biological conception of rationality."

Rosalind Goldberg works as a choreographer and is currently a research fellow at Oslo National Academy of the Arts. She graduated from the MA in choreography at HZT – Inter – University Center for Dance Berlin October 2014 and from Balettakademien in Stockholm 2007. Her work is built on an interest in the body’s biological and social construction and in methods for exploring the murky water where these reside. Her latest performance, The Field, is focused around the notion of practice as a way to construct different logic systems through which bodies could function.

The conversation will be in Norwegian and Swedish.

NB! Due to illness, Kjetil Horn Hogstad will unfortunately not be attending the conversation.

NB 2! Please bring your own face mask covering as this is mandatory in all situations where you are not sitting at a table.