Roundtable and Workshop: In Good Company: On the Social Life of Thought

Ruminations is a feminist collective that approaches theory as an embodied, relational, and everyday practice. Drawing on thinkers like Michel de Montaigne and bell hooks, the group meets monthly in domestic spaces to read, eat, and think together. This roundtable discussion explores how knowledge can emerge not in isolation, but through conversation, care, repetition, and shared meals. Challenging the boundaries between scholarship and daily life, Ruminations offers a model of collective theorizing that values slowness, intimacy, and the textures of lived experience.

Following the discussion will be a workshop that blends Fitzmaurice Voicework® with the ethos of Ruminations, inviting participants to explore voice as a site of relational knowing, vulnerability, and embodied thought. Through breath, tremor, and conversation, we cultivate a slow, collective practice where theory and lived experience intertwine. Please be prepared to move and wear comfortable clothing.

Bios: 
Stacey Moran is an Assistant Professor in the School of Arts, Media and Engineering and the Department of English at Arizona State University. Her research sits at the intersection of feminist theory and technoscience, design studies, and critical pedagogy. She has published widely on feminism and technology, technoscientific design, and the rhetorics of materialist philosophy. Her current monograph, The Stranger Within: Barad Beyond Barad—now under review with a university press—extends new materialist inquiry by reimagining the limits and possibilities of Baradian thought. Moran is a member of the Center for Philosophical Technologies, directs a summer design school in the Netherlands, and collaborates with the School of Materialist Research. She also maintains a creative practice exploring the entanglements of design, mythology, and material practice.

Micha Espinosa is an international teaching artist and voice/acting specialist in culturally inclusive pedagogies. She has given more than 100+ masterclasses in voice and liberation practices and trained over 300+ designated teachers of Fitzmaurice Voicework. In addition, Professor Espinosa has given over 50 conference presentations and been a guest on various podcasts, including Folger Shakespeare, In a Manner of Speaking, and the Theatre of Others. Professor (B.F.A., Stephens College; M.F.A. Acting, U.C. San Diego),  Arizona State University; Artistic Director of Fitzmaurice Voicework® (FV®), trainer for the FV® Teacher Certification; award-winning editor of Monologues for Latino Actors, Scenes for Latinx Actors, and Latinx Actor Training.

Cala Coats is Associate Professor and Director of the Art Education Program at Arizona State University. Her research and teaching explore intersections of ethics and aesthetics through embodied and place-based inquiry, public pedagogy, and creative experimentation. She is interested in the power of learning through everyday encounters and curriculum design as research creation, emphasizing the potential for collective change through the awareness of ecological and transdisciplinary interconnections. Dr. Coats recently published New Materialisms and Embodied Encounters in Education: Curiosity's Vital Potential (Bloomsbury), and she has contributed to a range of other publications on artistic social collaboration and interdisciplinary inquiry, affective attunement as connective force, histories of creative activism in intentional communities, and radical indeterminacy through choice-based learning. 

Meredith Hoy is Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Media Theory (Art History) and Intermedia/Expanded Arts (Studio Practice) in the Herberger Institute for Design and the Arts at Arizona State University. Hoy’s interdisciplinary research and creative practice consider intersections of technological, ecological, scientific, and social systems. Her first monograph, entitled From Point to Pixel: A Genealogy of Digital Aesthetics, was published by the University Press of New England in 2017 in the series Interfaces: Studies in Visual Culture. Her current book project is a collection of speculative writings that explore limitations, possibilities, and permeable borders between narratives, knowledges, kinships, relationalities, and textual landscapes of image/object/sound.