Bram Ieven: i was trained as a philosopher and literary theorist at the catholic university leuven, the queen's university belfast, and leiden university, where i received my phd in 2007. my phd was published as machinic deconstruction: literature / politics / technics (leiden university press, 2007). in 2007-2008 i taught philosophy of art at the provinciale hogeschool limburg (hasselt), at the department of fine and applied arts. i am currently teaching at the department of literary studies at utrecht university and i am an editor for the belgian literary journal yang. my research focuses on militancy as a figure that bridges the relation between theory and practice, and on a study of the status of the concept (both practical and theoretical) in the humanities.

 whether i am thinking about the nature of concepts (what is a concept, does it have any material reality, and if so how does it attain this reality?), or about political or artistic militancy  (what does it mean for art or theory to become militant, how does militancy traverse the gap between theory and practice?) - the necessity of technique, strategy, and material praxis in theory is always a formative figure of my work. teaching philosophy to students in graphic design and fine arts has been a decisive experience for me, since it has given me an awareness of those forms of art that are ubiquitously present in every day life, but that nevertheless (and precisely because of their pervasiveness) usually go unnoticed. what i know best is philosophy of technology (from heidegger to deleuze to stiegler) and political philosophy (from lenin to rawls to rancière and back again).