Luce Irigaray (Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique, France)

Luce Irigaray (PhD, Linguistics, Philosophy, University of Paris VII, certification, Ecole Freudienne de Paris) is Director of Research in Philosophy at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique. Originally a student of the famous analyst Jacques Lacan, Irigaray's departure from Lacan in Speculum of the Other Woman, where she critiques the exclusion of women from both philosophy and psychoanalytic theory, earned her recognition as a leading feminist theorist and continental philosopher. Her subsequent texts provide a comprehensive analysis and critique of the exclusion of women from the history of philosophy, psychoanalytic theory and structural linguistics. In addition to establishing this critique, Irigaray offers suggestions for altering the situation of women in Western culture. Mimesis, strategic essentialism, utopian ideals, and employing novel language, are but some of the methods central to changing contemporary culture. Irigaray's analysis of women's exclusion from culture and her use of strategic essentialism have been enormously influential in contemporary feminist theory. Irigaray's work extends beyond theory into practice. Irigaray has been actively engaged in the feminist movement in Italy. Her contributions to feminist theory and continental philosophy are many and her complete works present her readers with a rewarding challenge to traditional conceptions of gender, self, and body. Many of her works have been translated into English, including most notably An Ethics of Sexual Difference (Cornell, 1993), Between East and West (Columbia, 2002), Marine Lover of Friedrich Nietzsche (Columbia, 1991), Sexes and Genealogies (Columbia, 1993), Speculum of the Other Woman (Cornell, 1985), and This Sex Which Is Not One (Cornell, 1985).

Karen Barad (University of California Santa Cruz, USA)

Karen Barad is Professor of Feminist Studies, Philosophy, and History of Consciousness at the University of California at Santa Cruz. Barad's Ph.D. is in theoretical particle physics and quantum field theory. Barad held a tenured appointment in a physics department before moving into more interdisciplinary spaces. Barad is the author of Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning (Duke University Press, 2007) and numerous articles in the fields of physics, philosophy, science studies, poststructuralist theory, and feminist theory. Barad's research has been supported by the National Science Foundation, the Ford Foundation, the Hughes Foundation, the Irvine Foundation, the Mellon Foundation, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Barad is the Co-Director of the Science & Justice Graduate Training Program at UCSC. Barad received an honorary doctorate from Gothenburg University in 2016, and is on the faculty of the European Graduate School.

Tiziana Terranova (University of Naples, Italy)

Tiziana Terranova is Associate Professor in Cultural Studies and Digital Media at the University of Naples L'Orientale, where she is a member of the Centre for Postcolonial and Gender Studies and co-founder of the Technoculture Reearch Unit. She has widely published on the subject of network culture and digital media, including her book Network Culture: Politics for the Information Age (Pluto Press, 2004) and numerous articles for journals, edited collections, newspapers and websites. She has also extensively lectured on the subject of digital media including plenary lectures at the International Communciation Association, the Transmediale festival, the Bergen Triennale, and recently at Congreso Futuro 2019 and the Nobel Prize Dialogue in Santiago, Chile. She is currently working on two books: a revised collection of her essays on algorithms, financialisation and cognitive capitalism for Semiotext(e); and a new book for Minnesota University Press (Hypersocial: a genealogy of digtal social networks).

Svetlana Slapsak (Institutum Studiorum Humanitatis, Slovenia)

Svetlana Slapšak is a retired professor of the anthropology of the ancient world, anthropology of gender, and Balkanology. She was dean of the postgraduate Institut studiorum humanitatis (ISH) in Ljubljana. She has taught at universities in Europe and North America. She has published a large number of studies, essays, and prose works. Biblioteka XX. vek has published other works by her: Female idols of the Twentieth Century (2001), Female idols of the ancient world (2006), Ancient mythurgy – Women (2013), Flying pillau (2014) and Kupusara (2016). She has received the “Miloš Crnjanski” award (1990), the award of the American PEN Centre (1993), the award of the International Helsinki Committee (2000), the “Helen” award (2001), the “Mirko Kovač” award (2016), the Golden Sunflower award (2017), and the MIRA prize of the Women’s Section of the Slovenian PEN Centre (2017).

Jelisaveta Blagojević (Faculty of Media and Communications, SINGIDUNUM University, Serbia)

Jelisaveta Blagojević teaches at the Faculty of Media and Communications, Singidunum University (Belgrade) and has served as the university’s dean of academic affairs since 2006. She has also worked at the Belgrade Women’s Studies and Gender Research Center as a coordinator and lecturer since 2001. Since 2003 she has been a visiting lecturer at the Gender and Politics Program at the Political Science Faculty, Belgrade University. She has taught as a visiting lecturer at universities across Southeast Europe.

She has published three books: Politics of the Unthinkable: Introduction to Antifascist Life (2014); Hieroglyphs of Jealousy (2008); Zajednica onih koji nemaju zajednicu [Community Without Community], (2008), and many more book chapters and articles. Her research interests include contemporary (political) philosophy, media studies, queer studies, and gender studies.