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Adam Kleinman and guests
The Three Plagues: Conversations from New York
Episode 3
With Dorion Sagan, Astrid Schrader, and Martha Kenney

Ep. 1 on Paranoia TV starting 30.9.
Ep. 2 on Paranoia TV starting 7.10.
Ep. 3 on Paranoia TV starting 14.10.

In English

Credits

Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ’20

Supported by the Embassy of the United States of America in Vienna

The impact of the pandemic has been especially striking in the USA. Moreover, it seems like the entire country is experiencing not one but three simultaneous viruses: COVID-19 comes along with a flare-up of endemic racism, which in turn relies upon viral images and memes circulating both on- and offline to thrive. The Three Plagues takes an in-depth look at these ongoing upheavals. In three hour-long episodes, program host Adam Kleinman and invited guests will trace various “etiologies” of this triplicate affliction, drawing upon the collective experience of several months of lockdowns, protests, and their related viral images and stories.

Shifting to both a cosmic and microscopic scale, the final installment will deconstruct and reconsider the microbial world with philosophers and theorists Astrid Schrader and Martha Kenney as well as author Dorion Sagan.

Bio

Martha Kenney (1984, Harvard, USA) is a feminist science studies scholar whose research examines the poetics and politics of biological storytelling. Her latest project on environmental epigenetics uses speculative fiction to interrupt dominant biological narratives and imagine more radical ecological futures.  She lives in San Francisco.

Dorion Sagan (1959, Madison, USA) is a celebrated writer, ecological philosopher, and author or coauthor of twenty-five books, which have been translated into fifteen languages. As an ecological theorist he has been at the forefront of bringing our growing understanding of symbiosis as a major force in evolution into the intellectual mainstream and rethinking the human body as a “multispecies organism.”  With Carl Sagan and Lynn Margulis, his parents, he is coauthor of the entries for both “Life” and “Extraterrestrial Life” in the Encyclopedia Britannica. He lives in Poughkeepsie, NY. 

Astrid Schrader is a sociologist and philosopher. She works at the intersections of feminist science studies, human-animal studies, new materialisms, and posthumanist theories. Schrader’s work explores questions of responsibility, care and agency in scientific knowledge production, new ontologies, the relationship between anthropocentrism and conceptions of time, and questions of environmental justice. She lives in Bristol. 

Adam Kleinman (1978, New York, NY) is an independent curator and writer as well as the Lead Curator for North America at Kadist. He lives in New York.

Credits

Commissioned and produced by steirischer herbst ’20

Supported by the Embassy of the United States of America in Vienna

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