Peta Hinton is Honorary Lecturer in the School of Social Sciences (Sociology and Anthropology) at the University of New South Wales and Affiliated Fellow with the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. Primarily based in Berlin, her work joins discussions in the fields of feminist politics, sexual difference feminisms and new materialisms through a critical investigation of the way these intervene and formulate programs for social justice, political change, ethical relation and critique. Her current projects include a targeted analysis of conceptions of life, futurity, and relation underscoring these approaches through new materialist provocations and permutations on the nature of death and nothing (ICI Project – ‘A Sociality of Death’ 2013/15; ‘Ontologies of Nothing’ 2017/18), and a collaborative exploration, ‘Abandonment’ (with Xin Liu, University of Tampere), that unites our gender and critical race studies expertise to investigate how new materialisms in the mode of abandonment approach issues of race, difference, and social diversity in critical and methodological terms. A key aim of this project is to locate and build upon new materialist responses to diversity as these inform and transform feminist, postcolonial and decolonial political imaginaries and interventions. Her participation in the COST Action IS1307 ‘New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter” has been instrumental for developing these research pursuits and connecting (to) feminist and new materialist inquiry across the EU and beyond. Preparations towards a co-edited volume on methodologies and new materialisms arising from COST activities will constitute part of the research she undertakes with the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies, Freie Universität, where her efforts will concentrate on the Abandonment project in the form of publication, collaboration, and presentation of this work.

About

Peta received her Ph.D. in Sociology with the University of New South Wales and lectured in this program before commencing her postdoctoral studies with the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry in 2013. Since her doctoral engagements she has researched and worked in a gender studies context, taking up with sociological problematics occupying contemporary feminist analyses to pursue a fresh perspective on questions of agency, identity, relation, political organization, methodology and critique. She received an Erasmus Mundus Third Country Scholar visiting scholarship with the Netherlands Research School of Gender Studies, Utrecht, in Spring 2012 and in recent years has been a visiting scholar at TEMA Genus, Linkoping University and Gender Studies at Karlstad University, Sweden. From 2014-16 she lectured in Gender Studies at Utrecht University, and she is currently a sessional lecturer with the Institute for Media and Cultural Studies, Heinrich-Heine-Universität, Düsseldorf, teaching in the gender studies stream. She has published in Hypatia, Somatechnics, Women: A Cultural Review, and Australian Feminist Studies, and her book chapter 'A Sociality of Death: Towards a New Materialist Politics and Ethics of Life Itself' appears in the volume What if Culture Was Nature All Along (ed. Vicki Kirby, 2017, Edinburgh University Press). She has co-edited the journal special issues ‘Feminist Matters: The Politics of New Materialism’ (Women: A Cultural Review, 2014) and 'Quantum Possibilities: The Work of Karen Barad' (rhizomes, 2016) along with a volume in the AtGender ‘Teaching With Gender’ series, Teaching With Feminist Materialisms (2015).

Contact

E-Mail: peta.hinton@fu-berlin.de

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