Our second-year cohort members, Emily Martin and Quillan Qian, attended the online Summer School PHYSIS offered by the School of Materialist Research (SMR) in Greece. The topic for this year (2025) was about Nature/Artificial Reimagine, the key faculty and speakers included Dorion Sagan, John Ó Maoilearca, Thomas Nail, Katarina Kolozova, Joel White, and Claire Sagan. Its thematic framing—rooted in materialist philosophy, ontology, transformation, and the domain of matter—offered a kind of concentrated interdisciplinary.
For Quillan, this summer school was more like a recalibration rather than lecturing about matter. The program attempted to dwell within matter—its movement, agency, transformation, resistance. She was inspired by the lecture from Joe White entitled “An Introduction to Critical Epistemology,” engaging with how certain knowers, styles, or domains of knowing are marginalized—disqualified a priori as less rigorous, less “scientific,” or less legitimate.