Drones, Swarms and Becoming-Insect: Feminist Utopias and Posthuman Politics

Feminist theory, feminist and anti-racist politics, and restorative justice

Literary Practice Archaeologies and Utopias: Reassessing Kristeva's Relevance to Feminist

The predominance of patriarchally-based structures in Kristeva’s work sets up an uncomfortable dichotomy for feminist critics. Her 1979 essay ‘Le temps des femmes’ (translated as ‘Women’s Time’ in 1981) most explicitly articulates her own approach to feminism, addressing women’s troubled relationship to patriarchy in terms of time and space. Kristeva identifies three distinct positions in femin...

A feminist genealogy of posthuman aesthetics in the visual arts

This article aims to reassemble a feminist genealogy of the posthuman in the arts, with a specific focus on the visual works conceived by female artists after the rise of what has been retrospectively defined as first-wave Feminism. Starting with the main avantgarde movements of the first half of the twentieth century—specifically, Futurism, Dadaism and Surrealism—this genealogy analyses the se...

Flying insect swarms

What to do next? First I decided I would not be fulfilled doing noninvasive behavioural experiments — I need to go into the brain to be happy. I could have chosen computational work but I am an experimentalist at heart. Having that decided, the question was then which species? Where and how was I going to set my new boundary, a personal and arbitrary line without scientific grounding? This proc...

Hybrid Control for Large Swarms of Aquatic Drones

Maritime tasks, such as surveillance and patrolling, aquaculture inspection, and wildlife monitoring, typically require large operational crews and expensive equipment. Only recently have unmanned vehicles started to be used for such missions. These vehicles, however, tend to be expensive and have limited coverage, which prevents large-scale deployment. In this paper, we propose a scalable robo...