No Outsides: Metal in an Era of Contagion

June 6–9 2023, Concordia University, Montreal /Tiohtià:ke, Canada

Six decades from its counter-cultural inception, what remains of metal’s relation to the outside forces of extremity, abolition and transformation? The 2023 ISMMS conference, which will be hosted by an interdisciplinary team of scholars, students and artists, will explore this question through a series of talks, artistic interventions, panels and workshops. Oriented toward the question of metal study’s relationship to the outside in an era of contagion, this conference will explore questions related to themes of urgency and emergency, extremity and enclosure, contagion and containment, plurality and polarization, queerness and ecological outsides, and futurity and fatality.

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CSSE 2023: Reimagining Science and Education in the Anthropocene

CSSE Conference - May 27-June 1, 2023 - York University - Toronto, Canada

This symposium invites a transdisciplinary discussion about reimagining education in the geologic and political times often referred to as the Anthropocene (a term that is uneven in its affects and has its own politics and history). It brings together the work of educators and researchers from many different locations and disciplines in an effort to meet the CSSE 2023 call for reimaginings and reconfigurations of education for justice and the flourishing of all life.

Jessie Beier — Black Hole Sustainability

In this presentation/provocation, I will respond to the questions posed, and then pose a few more, via a short speculative study of what I call “black hole sustainability.” My own take will approach the tensions raised by the Anthropocene, and more specifically the affirmative relaunching of post-Anthropocene educational futurity, by situating the panel questions in relation to education and the problem of sustainable futures. In a move to enact a resituating of (science) education, I bring the (purported) problem of educational futurity in contact with the computational imaging of a black hole so as to develop a weird pedagogy of endurance — a black hole sustainability - that might be capable of upending education’s unquestioned salvation narratives so as to navigate horizonless futures. Taking off from this example, I will raise questions about the potentials, but also limitations, of speculative practice in and as educational research.

CSLP Kicks Off the 'Lathe Cut Conversations'

“On April 17, 2023, several members of the CSLP – Annabelle Brault, Martin Lalonde, and Owen Chapman – joined Horizon Postdoctoral Fellow Jessie Beier in the CSLP’s Research-Creation room to spend a few hours in recorded conversation about the interrelationships between performance and learning.”

READ MORE HERE >>>

LISTEN TO AN EXCERPT HERE >>>

From left to right: Annabelle Brault, Jessie Beier, Owen Chapman, Angus Tarnawsky & Martin Lalonde pose with the fruit of their labour

Emergency Signals: Hearing Energy, Listening For Repair @ ReVerb: Echo-Locations of Sound and Space

The SpokenWeb Research Network is hosting the 2023 SpokenWeb Research Symposium on the theme of "Reverb: Echo-Locations of Sound and Space" at the University of Alberta, in Edmonton, Canada from May 1-3, 2023. The conference theme — "reverb" — invites participants to reflect on how sound is situated, transformed, and territorialized through physical, cultural, historical, and political spaces.

Session 9a: Emergency Signals: Hearing Energy, Listening For Repair

Tuesday, May 2, 2;45-4:15 MDT; Panelists: Jessie Beier (Concordia U), Sourayan Mookerjea (U Alberta), Mark Simpson (U Alberta)

The Energy Emergency Repair Kit (E.E.R.K.) is a collaboratively-authored research-creation intervention that explores myriad ecological, cultural, and political resonances of the three concepts named in its title: energy; emergency; repair. The E.E.R.K combines image, text, and sound to riff on the idea of a repair manual—that staple genre of self-help and self-making—while exploring energy emergency and energy emergence in several entangled registers. The panel presentation will introduce the various sonic dimensions and dynamics of the E.E.R.K. so as to explore the import of sound for the reckoning of energy and its emergencies.

For more information and to register for the symposium, visit the conference website here.

Landscape of Hate Residency @ 4th Space

2022, August 8-19// Landscape of Hate Artist Residency @ 4th Space, Concordia University, Montreal. 

Landscape of Hate performances include a combination of original compositions of electronic music, audio samples, social media feeds, soundscapes and video projections. The lyrical materials are derived from data collected from the Internet, research interviews and other public sources.

This event features artists Jessie Beier, Annabelle Brault, Owen Chapman, Nik Forrest, Veronica Mockler, José-Luis Cortés Santander, and Vivek Venkatesh, with production assistance from Marek Detière-Venkatesh, Nathan-Gabriel Guerrette, Catlin W. Kuzyk, and Mairin Miller.

Ahuman Pedagogy Book // Out Now!

“What the world needs now, in the Anthropocene, is an Ahuman Pedagogy, one that de-centers the hu-man, and challenges the eco-political and aesthetic situation of education today. This is an important book, because it is a machine of/for change…plug in!”

—Bernd Herzogenrath, Professor, Goethe University Frankfurt, Germany, and editor of Film as Philosophy and Sonic Thinking: A Media Philosophical Approach

“This is shock therapy for business-as-usual education, and a maze: As one door slams in my face, another one opens next to it. All contributions in this remarkable volume will not appeal to everyone, but they certainly won’t leave anyone unaffected. Together, they redirect education to confront its own premises in impossible times.“

—Helena Pedersen, Department of Pedagogical, Curricular, and Professional Studies, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and author of Schizoanalysis and Animal Science Education


This book brings together a collection of multi-disciplinary voices to discuss, debate, and devise a series of ahuman pedagogical proposals that aim to address the challenging ecological, political, social, economic, and aesthetic milieu within which education is situated today. Attending to contemporary calls to decenter all-too-human educational research and practice, while also coming to terms with the limits and inheritances through which such calls are made possible in the first place, this book aims to interrogate, but also invent, what the editors call an ahuman pedagogy. Organized in three main sections—Conjuring an Ahuman Pedagogy, Machinic Re/distributions, and Non-pedagogies for Unthought Futures—this multi-disciplinary experiment in ahuman pedagogies for the age of the Anthropocene offers an experimental—albeit always speculative and incomplete—series of pedagogical proposals that work to unthink and counter-actualize educational futures-as-usual.

Beier, J. & jagodzinski, j. (Eds.). (2022). Ahuman pedagogy: Multidisciplinary perspectives for education in the Anthropocene. London/New York: Palgrave MacMillan.