Keynote speakers

The keynote speakers are Ashley Shew (Virginia Tech, USA), Caroline Hummels (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands) and Robert Rosenberger (Georgia Institute of Technology) and Christopher Preston (University of Montana, USA). Read more about their backgrounds on this page.

Keynote speakers

  • Ashley Shew (Virginia Tech, USA)

    Ashley Shew, Associate Professor of Science, Technology, and Society at Virginia Tech, works on philosophy of technology at its intersection with animal studies, disability studies, and emerging technologies. She is current co-editor-in-chief of Techné, the journal of the Society for Philosophy and Technology, author of Animal Constructions and Technological Knowledge (2017), and co-editor of three volumes: Spaces for the Future (with Joseph C. Pitt, 2017), Reimagining Philosophy and Technology, Reinventing Ihde (with Glen Miller, 2020), and Feedback Loops: Pragmatism About Science and Technology (with Andrew Garnar, forthcoming). Her current research prioritizes narratives her fellow disabled people tell about their minds and bodies in how we should think about the future of technology. 

  • Caroline Hummels (Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands)

    Caroline Hummels is professor Design and Theory for Transformative Qualities at the department of Industrial Design at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/e). Her activities concentrate on designing and researching transformative practices with a focus on being-in-the-world theories, embodied interactions, technology-in-becoming, participatory sensemaking, aesthetics, and social resilience. Her recent quest aims at developing with her team a design-philosophy correspondence, in which not only postphenomenology informs design practice, but also design practice is used to philosophise and to explore, analyse, inform and build postphenomenological concepts (i.e., design-informed postphenomenology). 

    Caroline is founder and member of the steering committee of the Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction (TEI) Conference, editorial board member of the International Journal of Design, and member of the Dutch Design Week sounding board. Moreover, she has given a large number of keynote speeches, invited lectures and workshops at conferences, international universities and for industry and governmental institutes worldwide.

  • Robert Rosenberger (Georgia Institute of Technology, USA)

    Robert Rosenberger’s research centers on the development of the postphenomenological framework of concepts. He advances these ideas through the exploration of case studies on a variety of topics including: the driving impairment of smartphones; the practices of image interpretation in space science and neurobiology; the immersion of e-reading; the social implications of phantom vibration syndrome; the educational potential of computer-simulated frog dissection; the utopianism hype around autonomous cars; and the politics of public-space artifacts, such as park benches, surveillance cameras, and fire hydrants. Rosenberger’s polemic against anti-homeless design is entitled Callous Objects: Designs Against the Homeless. His edited volumes include Postphenomenological Investigations (co-edited with Peter-Paul Verbeek), Philosophy of Science: 5 Questions, and the forthcoming Postphenomenology and Imaging: How to Read Technology (co-edited with Samantha Jo Fried).  He is an Associate Professor of Philosophy in the School of Public Policy at the Georgia Institute of Technology. More information on his personal website.

  • Christopher Preston (University of Montana, USA)

    Christopher J. Preston is professor of philosophy at the University of Montana in Missoula.  Raised in the UK and living in the western U.S., his writing examines the relationships between humans, nature, wildlife, technology, and society. His award-winning book The Synthetic Age: Outdesigning Evolution, Resurrecting Species, and Reeningeering Our World (MIT Press 2018) is translated into four languages. His other work includes Saving Creation: Nature and Faith in the Life of Holmes Rolston, III (Trinity University Press 2009), and Grounding Knowledge: Environmental Philosophy, Epistemology, and Place (University of Georgia Press 2003). He has edited two books on the ethics of climate engineering. Many of his interests appear in his blog on website The Plastocene.

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