The Performance Research Group at King’s College London presents The Anomalous, Meeting, a seminar series bridging the Arts and Humanities and the Social Sciences. Curated by Penny Newell, the series brings together scholars from various disciplines hoping to begin conversations around and about anomalies, in theory and in practice.

For info on the full series, see: http://www.kcl.ac.uk/artshums/depts/english/research/rescentres/perf.aspx

Thursday 12th March (7-8.30pm): Anomalies and Political Ecologies: Seb Franklin (KCL) and Steffen Böhm (Essex)

This session responds to theoretical and diagrammatic representations of social and economic organisation, in order to set out a contemporary politics of anomalies. Steffen Böhm will draw on extensive research examining the politics of social organisation, in order to sketch an understanding of the anomalous as the necessary ingredient for capitalist reproduction and expansion. Seb Franklin will draw on his research into the aesthetics and politics of digitality by responding to book illustrations depicting Western networked societies, in order to ask whether and how anomalies are foreclosed within the computational logic of socioeconomic systems.

Seb Franklin works on issues relating to the aesthetics and politics of the digital, with a particular focus on the ways in which digitality is represented and critiqued in literature, theory, film, and computational media. His first monograph, titled Control: Digitality as Cultural Logic, is under contract with the MIT Press, and his writing on critical theory, literature, cybernetics, and media has appeared in CTheory, Cultural Politics, Textual Practice,Women's Studies Quarterly, and World Picture.

Steffen Böhm is Director of the Essex Sustainability Institute and Professor in Management and Sustainability at the University of Essex. His research focuses on political economies and ecologies of organization, management and the environment. He was a co-founder of the open-access journal ephemera: theory & politics in organization, and is co-founder and co-editor of the new open-access publishing press MayFlyBooks as well as Interface: A Journal for and about Social Movements. He has published four books: Repositioning Organization Theory (Palgrave), Against Automobility (Blackwell), Upsetting the Offset: The Political Economy of Carbon Markets (Mayfly), and The Atmosphere Business (M​ayfly). The new book Ecocultures: Blueprints for Sustainable Communities is forthcoming with Routledge.