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Alex Stingl

Alexander I. Stingl. (WIRL-COFUND Fellow)

Affiliate of Global Legal Studies Network (Fondation Maison des sciences de l’homme, Paris) and Paris Institute for Critical Thinking. He is a fellow of the Global Research Network (GRN). Author of Care Power Information (2020, Routledge) The Digital Coloniality of Power (2016, Lexington/Row­­man), Between Discursivity and Sensus Communis (2010, OPUS), and Aufklärung als Flaschenpost (2009, VDM), as well as co-author with S.Weiss and S.Restivo of Worlds of ScienceCraft (1st 2014, Ashgate, 2nd 2016, Routledge). In 2019, he was named the chair of the scientific committee for “Juridifying the Anthropocene”, which is directed by G.Lhuilier&B.Parance; the project is also part of the research « Environmental Justice : Science based decisions », directed by Lhuilier, which is supported by a grant by the Centre national de la recherche scientifique( CNRS) & Institut national des hautes études de la sécurité et de la justice (INHESJ) "L’action Recherches Interdisciplinaires en Sécurité-Justice" and is also contributing seminars and expertise for the Agence Developpmente Française and the Court de Cassation [French High Court]. He is the managing editor of the book series Decolonial Options for the Social Sciences [Lexington/Rowman]. Formerly with the University Erlangen-Nürnberg, University Kassel, Drexel University, College of Leuphana University. Awarded various fellowships and grants, including most recently the 2018/19 Independent Scholar Fellowship (ISF4) of the Independent Social Research Foundation. In 2017, he worked under the direction of Olivier Bouin and Marc Fleurbaey on the International Panel on Social Progress (IPSP).

Research Interests

The transnational policy network and scientific-legal discourse of “the Bioeconomy”; Extractive Studies and Environmental Humanities; Decolonial options for the social sciences; Sociology and the cognitive and neurosciences; Digital divisions and social (in)justice; Transmediality and popular culture.

In his current main area of research, the Bioeconomy is found situated in the interstices of biotechnological development, policy-making, and legal adjudications. Whereas policy-makers and politicians generalize and reduce all living entities to “biomass”, scientists look at highly individualized yet fuzzy categories, which jurists mediate through transnational (extractive) property law practices. Starting from the original question regarding the concept of justice the research focus for his WIRL-COFUND fellowship became, respective of the emergence of the co-constitutive intertwinement of the bioeconomy discourses with legal practices, transformed into one of jurisprudence that had to be answered before justice could be defined.

Current projects

  • In the main project's current phase, Stingl conducts research for
    1. several articles and two upcoming books on the Global Bioeconomy (currently under contract negotiation);
    2. He is in the process of co-developing with renowned artist, curator, and scholar Petra Maitz an exhibition of art thematizing and problematizing ecosystems, biotechnology, sustainability, and the extractive condition (homo extractiva);
    3. furthermore, he is organizing at least two symposia workshops in 2020 and 2021 in cooperation with the GLSN and Warwick, one to be held at Warwick the other at FMSH and following in the footsteps of a workshop organized by Stingl on “Transnational Law and Bioeconomy” that was conducted at FMSH in December 2018;
    4. a documentary film project on Bioeconomy is in the earliest planning stages.
  • Stingl is currently in the process of editing a working paper summarizing the results of his 2018/19 stay at FMSH, financed by the ISF4, which will be submitted in the fall to the CEM/FMSH working paper series.
  • Stingl is involved in placement cooperation with GLSN for this projet that includes work conducted on and for the FabLab Lex, developed by Lhuilier and team in the GLSN context.
  • Animals and Law, is a tentative project first thought up during the aforementioned December 2018 workshop with Clemens Driessen (U Wageningen) and Gilles Lhuilier, and Stingl is currently developing a draft for a research grant proposal.
  • Collaborating with an international group of researchers from the fields of Science&Technology Studies (STS) and International Relations (IR), Stingl has co-developed the project “From state effect to state affect”. The group was first invited with full funding by the German-American research relations foundation (SDAW) – upon an initiative spearheaded by Stingl with Nicholas Rowland (professor of sociology and faculty senator, Penn State) and Stefanie Fishel (lecturer in international politics, University of the Sunshine Coast, Australia) – to present their work at an international conference for the development of transatlantic research, and is now in the process of obtaining a seed grant to facilitate the development of a larger research grant, and began collaboration with another research group of scholars from the University of Virginia, Bard College Berlin, and the Wissenschaftskolleg Berlin that works on legitimacy and illegitimacy of Liberalism in democratic societies.
  • Stingl continues to work with Gilles Lhuilier and team on the project MICC (The Museum and the International Criminal Court), where he will play an active role as the designated epistemologist of the project (details on additional research funding pending).
  • For the project “Juridifying the Anthropocene”, created and directed by Beatrice Parance and Gilles Lhuilier, Stingl serves as chair of the scientific committee – members of the committee, at present, are: 1) Juno Salazar Parreñas (Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Ohio State University); 2) Clemens Driessen (Cultural Geography, Wageningen University); 3) Ariel Rawson (Geography, Ohio State University); 4) Samah Kariki (Social Brain Institute); 5); Eben Kirksey (Deacon U, Princeton U) 6) Macarena Gómez-Barris (Social Science and Cultural Studies, Pratt Institute, Brooklyn) - which will involve two output directions at the moment but is looking at what may be a bright future (similar to the International Panel on Social Progress [IPSP]): a) a workshop designed and conducted for leading members of the legal and finance team of the French international development Bank Agence Française Developpmente (AFD), b) a series of seminars on environmental justice for the French High Court of Appellations Court de Cassation. 
  • Together with Yvonne Foerster (LeuphanaU), Stingl in spring 2019 organized a symposion on neuroscience and the social sciences and humanities in collaboration with CEM/FMSH, PICT, and ISRF. This line of inquiry will be continued, including the development of a major grant proposal for a research team, which would be under the direction of Professor Foerster. In terms connecting with Stingl's research activities at CIM, IAS, and GLSN, two dimensions are important: a) neuroscientific evidence is increasingly playing a role in criminal trials, this affects legal studies in general but also, with reference to project MICC, will it play a role in the proceedings of the ICC in the future; b) with reference to bioeconomy, the role of cognition in living systems is an important field of study and informs – through concepts such as intelligence, sentience, suffering – legal protections for living organisms.
  • As a newly minted faculty member of the Paris Institute for Critical Thinking (PICT), Stingl will continue to be involved in various public activities that include the emerging connection between PICT and other organizations that Stingl helped initiate with the above mentioned event on neurosciences.
  • In January 2020, Stingl's new book Care Power Information will be published with Routledge. Stingl would be happy to conduct a book launch.
  • A manuscript on "What is the technoscientific object" continues to be in the works.
  • Stingl currently negotiates a short book that collects a series of talks he gave in 2018 and 2019 and could be published in fall 2019 under the working title Tender Empirics, Harsh Critiques, and Fabulous Speculations.
  • Stingl currently negotiates the publication of a finished manuscript of a book (with a foreword by Sal Restivo, professor of sociology and STS, founding member and former president of 4S, among other things) on the history of sociology in the context of the life sciences in the 19th and early 20th
  • As managing editor of the book series Decolonial Options for the Social Sciences, Stingl is acquiring book projects.
  • For and with a focus on Petra Maitz’s research and art, in relation to above mentioned exhibition, Stingl has co-developed a project proposal on exploring the “artisanal stance” for science communication.

Alex Stingl on the Web

  • www.alexstingl.wordpress.com

Recent and Forthcoming Short-Form Publications

  • “Climate Justice” In: Schneider, P. ed. Encyclopedia of the UN Sustainable Development Goal 16 - Peace, Justice and Strong Institutions. Springer
  • (2018) “Karl Jaspers’s US-American Student”, in: Studi Jaspersiani, Vol. 5
  • (2017) “Exercising epistemic authority and the deployment of persuasive technologies: The case
    of medical images” in: Vollmann/Nossek/Gather/Henking, eds.. Beneficial coercion in medicine?
    Foundations, areas of conflict, prevention' (publication following BMBF Klausurwoche, Bochum
    2016), Münster: Mentis
  • (2017)“Review of Wajcman/Dodd, eds. Sociology of Speed” in: Symbolic Interaction
  • (2016) ‘Sight beyond Sight: SciFi as Thinking together with Others’, Special Issue: Science and
    Science Fiction, Vol. 2, Bulletin for Science, Technology, & Society, Vol. 36/1: 3 - 27
  • (2016, with Sabrina M. Weiss) “Making Trouble: Mindfulness is Care and other lessons”
    Cordula Brand (Ed.): Dual-process theories in moral psychology. Interdisciplinary approaches to
    theoretical, empirical and practical considerations. Wiesbaden: Springer VS.
  • (2016, with Sabrina M. Weiss) ‘Whose Science, Whose Fiction?’, Special Issue: Science and
    Science Fiction, Vol. 1, Bulletin for Science, Technology, & Society,Vol. 35/3-4: 55 - 66
  • (2016) “"M. Joan Dawson. Paul Lauterbur and the Invention of MRI.," in: Isis (Journal of the
    History of Science Society) 107/3: 676-677.
  • (2016, edited by H.Gibson) “On dancing with the smarts: Cleanse and repeat!”, in: Somatosphere
    “Top of the Heap” Series
  • (2016) “Review Insurgent Encounters, Juris/Khasnabish, eds, Duke UP” in: Study of Radicalism
    Volume 10, Number 1, Spring 2016: 177-179 (2016) “Auf ein Marmelandeglas mit....” Interview in: Univativ (Journal by Leuphana University
    Students)
  • (2015) “The Rural Imaginary”, in: Bakker, J.I. ‘H.’ ed The Methodology of Political Economy:
    Studying the Global Rural–Urban Matrix, Lanham: Lexington
  • (2015) “Digital Divide” in: ten Have, H., ed., Encyclopedia for Global Bioethics. New York:
    Springer.

  • (2014) “Digital Fair-Ground: Explorations of the Patient Experience Between Social Justice and
    the Virtualization of Health and Illness” in: Current Perspectives in Social Theory (Harry Dahms,
    editor) Vol. 32: 53 - 91

  • (2014 with Sabrina M. Weiss) “Between Shell and Ghost: A hauntology of zombies in society”
    in: Dellwing, M. ed., Vergemeinschaftung in Zeiten der Zombie-Apokalypse, Wiesbaden:
    Springer VS

  • (2014) “Braining your life/Living your Brain: Cyborg Gaze and medical images.” in:
    Neuroscience and Media: New Understandings and Representations, Grabowski, M. ed.,
    London: Routledge

  • (2014) “Review of Heinz von Foerster (A. Muller & K. H. Muller, eds.) (2014). The beginning of
    heaven and earth has no name: Seven days with second-order cybernetics. New York: Fordham
    UP”, in: Bulletin of Science, Technology, and Society, online first

  • (2014) “Almost Great: A Review of Setlin, D. Imaging Illness ” in: Symbolic Interaction, Vol.
    37/3: 437–438

  • (2014 with Sabrina M. Weiss) “Mindfulness as/is Care: Biopolitics, narrative empathy and
    techno-scientific practices” in: Ie, Amanda, Langer, Ellen, Ngnoumen, Christelle, eds. Handbook
    of Mindfulness Research, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell.

  • (2013, with Sabrina M. Weiss) ”ADHD and its ecologies and agencies: Before and beyond the
    label” Krankheitskonstruktionen und Krankheitstreiberei. Dellwing, Michael, ed., Wiesbaden:
    VS Verlag

Alex
Contact

Institute of Advanced Study

Centre for Interdisciplinary Methodologies

University of Warwick

Coventry

CV4 7AL

Email: Alexander dot Stingl at warwick dot ac dot uk