Jack Halberstam (Columbia University, USA)

Jack Halberstam is Professor of Gender Studies and English at Columbia University. Halberstam is the author of six books including: Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters (Duke UP, 1995), Female Masculinity (Duke UP, 1998), In A Queer Time and Place (NYU Press, 2005), The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011) and Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012) and, most recently, a short book titled Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variance (University of California Press). Places Journal awarded Halberstam its Arcus/Places Prize in 2018 for innovative public scholarship on the relationship between gender, sexuality and the built environment. Halberstam has a book coming out in 2020 titled: Wild Things: The Disorder of Desire (Duke University Press) and is now finishing a second volume on wildness titled: The Wild Beyond: Art, Architecture and Anarchy.

Gavin Butt (Northumbria University, UK)

Gavin Butt is a scholar of modern and contemporary art whose work contributes to the fields of art history & visual culture, performance and queer studies, and popular music studies. Trained as a fine artist and art historian, he is a writer, curator and filmmaker. He is currently completing a book 'Being in a Band: When the Leeds Art Experiment Went Pop' which focuses on a crisis of legitimacy for modern art education in the 1970s and 1980s and groups that came out of art school, including Scritti Politti, Gang of Four, Fad Gadget, Delta 5, Three Johns and Soft Cell. He is co-editor (with Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun) of Post-Punk Then and Now, Repeater, 2016. He is also working towards completion of a second book, 'Anti-Gravitas' exploring the challenges to cultural seriousness presented within queer art and performance. He is co-author (with Irit Rogoff) of ‘Visual Cultures as Seriousness,’ Sternberg, 2013. In 2013 he made his first feature length documentary film, co-directed with journalist Ben Walters - Not a Dream.

Butt was the co-director of Performance Matters (2009-2013), a creative research project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. He was lead curator in the second themed year of the project, Trashing Performance. He is also author of Between You and Me: Queer Disclosures in the New York Art World 1948-1963 (Duke 2005) and editor of After Criticism: New Responses to Art and Performance (Blackwell 2004).

Susanna Paasonen (University of Turku, Finland)

Susanna Paasonen is professor of Media Studies. After finishing her PhD in Media Studies in Turku in 2002 she acted as lecturer in Media Culture at University of Tampere (2003), as an Academy of Finland postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Women's Studies in Turku (2004-5), as senior research associate in Digital Culture at University of Jyväskylä (2005-7), as Collegium researcher at the Collegium for Advanced Studies at University of Helsinki (2007-10) and as professor of Digital Culture at Jyväskylä (2010-11) before starting in her current post in August 2011. She was the first recipient of the Finnish Academy of Science and Letters' Jutikkala Award in Humanities in 2011. Paasonen has broad teaching experience in media studies, cultural studies, digital culture and gender studies. She is currently in charge of postgraduate studies at the department of Media Studies, classes on media and networks, as well as theme courses connected to social media, sexuality, affect and pornography. With an interest in studies of popular culture, affect, sexuality, and media theory, Paasonen is e.g. the author of ‘Carnal Resonance: Affect and Online Pornography’ (MIT Press 2011) and ‘Many Splendored Things: Thinking Sex and Play’ (Goldsmiths Press 2018), co-author of ‘Not Safe for Work: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media’ (with Kylie Jarrett and Ben Light for MIT Press, forthcoming), as well as co-editor of ‘Pornification: Sex and Sexuality in Media Culture’ (with Kaarina Nikunen and Laura Saarenmaa, Berg 2007), ‘Working with Affect in Feminist Readings: Disturbing Differences’ (with Marianne Liljeström, Routledge 2010) and ‘Networked Affect’ (with Ken Hillis and Michael Petit, MIT Press 2015). Her current book-length projects focus on boredom and distraction in social media, on feminist tactics and humour in social media (with Jenny Sundén), and on the notion of objectification (with Feona Attwood, Alan McKee, John Mercer and Clarissa Smith).

Jenny Sundén (Södertörn University, Sweden)

Jenny Sundén is Professor of Gender Studies at Södertörn University in Stockholm. Her work is situated in the intersection of digital media studies and gender and sexuality studies, with a particular focus on bodies, desires, sexual politics, and technologies. She is currently working on questions of digital fragility and its consequences for queer theory and queer lives, as well as on feminist uses of humor in social media as forms of resistance. She is the author of Who’s laughing now? Feminist tactics in social media (MIT Press, forthcoming, with Susanna Paasonen), and Gender and sexuality in online game cultures: Passionate play (Routledge, 2012, with Malin Sveningsson).

Ljubomir Danailov Frckovski (FON University, North Macedonia)

Ljubomir Danailov Frchkoski (1957) is a Dean at the Faculty of Legal and Political Studies (FON Univeristy, Skopje, Macedonia), and a full-time professor at the same Faculty in Public International Law, International Law for Human Rights, Political Theories I & II, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of Law, and Negotiation in Identity conflicts. As a guest lecturer he was widely engaged in Europe and North America; and as a visiting professor was lastly engaged on the International Relations and Negotiations, International Human rights Law program at the Russian Presidential Academy of National Economy and Public Administration (May 2018), and before in Italy for more than 7 years on the second cycle study/master program of the International Institute for European Studies (IUIES) and also at Università degli studi Internazionali di Roma. Besides being dedicated to issues of human rights, the scientific focus of his late work is on political philosophy and psychoanalysis. He has been also politically involved in some periods during the Macedonian independence, and he is one of the writers of the Macedonian Constitution from 1991. He is the author many books, including ‘Human Rights and Psychoanalysis’ (2019), ‘Restless Nationalism’ (2016), and ‘Negotiation in Identity Conflicts’ (2012).