Rosi Braidotti

Rosi Braidotti (born 28 September 1954) is a contemporary philosopher and feminist theoretician.

Born in Italy, she studied in Australia and France and works in the Netherlands.

Braidotti, who holds Italian and Australian citizenship, was born in Italy and moved to Australia when she was 16, where she received degrees from the Australian National University in Canberra in 1977 and was awarded the University Medal in Philosophy and the University Tillyard prize.

Braidotti then moved on to do her doctoral work at the Sorbonne, where she received her degree in philosophy in 1981.

Braidotti is currently Distinguished University Professor Emerita at Utrecht University, where she has taught since 1988.

She was professor and the founding director of Utrecht University's women's studies programme (1988-2005) and founding director of the Centre for the Humanities (2007-2016).

She has taught at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands since 1988, when she was appointed as the founding professor in women's studies.

This is evidenced in the philosophical agenda set in her first book Patterns of Dissonance: An Essay on Women in Contemporary French Philosophy, 1991, which gets developed further in the trilogy that follows.

In the next book, Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Difference in Contemporary Feminist Theory, 1994, the question is formulated in more concrete terms: can gender, ethnic, cultural or European differences be understood outside the straitjacket of hierarchy and binary opposition?

In 1995 she became the founding Director of the Netherlands research school of Women's Studies, a position she held till 2005.

Thus the following volume, Metamorphoses: Towards a Materialist Theory of Becoming, 2002, analyses not only gender differences, but also more categorical binary distinctions between self and other, European and foreign, human and non-human (animal/ environmental/ technological others).

The conclusion is that a systematic ambivalence structures contemporary cultural representations of the globalised, technologically mediated, ethnically mixed, gender-aware world we now inhabit.

The question consequently arises of what it takes to produce adequate cultural and political representations of a fast-changing world and move closer to Spinozian notions of adequate understanding.

Braidotti is a pioneer in European Women's Studies: she founded the inter-university SOCRATES network NOISE and the Thematic Network for Women's Studies ATHENA, which she directed till 2005.

She was a Leverhulme Trust Visiting professor at Birkbeck College in 2005–6; a Jean Monnet professor at the European University Institute in Florence in 2002-3 and a fellow in the school of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton in 1994.

The ethical dimension of Braidotti's work on difference comes to the fore in the last volume of the trilogy, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics, 2006.

Here she surveys the different ethical approaches that can be produced by taking difference and diversity as the main point of reference and conclude that there is much to be gained by suspending belief that political participation, moral empathy and social cohesion can only be produced on the basis of the notion of recognition of sameness.

Braidotti makes a case for an alternative view on subjectivity, ethics and emancipation and pitches diversity against the postmodernist risk of cultural relativism while also standing against the tenets of liberal individualism.

Throughout her work, Braidotti asserts and demonstrates the importance of combining theoretical concerns with a serious commitment to producing socially and politically relevant scholarship that contributes to making a difference in the world.

Braidotti's output also included several edited volumes.

Her work has been translated in a total of 19 languages and all the main books in at least three languages other than English.

In 2022, Braidotti published Posthuman Feminism, a text that helps establish a theoretical foundation for posthuman feminism, an alternate strand of posthumanism that seeks to move beyond Enlightenment humanism, embrace the nonhuman, and imagine how technology is changing our lives while still centering social justice issues of gender, race, and class.

She has been awarded honorary degrees from Helsinki (2007) and Linkoping (2013); she is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities (FAHA) since 2009, and a Member of the Academia Europaea (MAE) since 2014.

Braidotti was the founding Director of the Centre for the Humanities at Utrecht University (2007-2016), and is currently Distinguished University Professor at Utrecht University.

Braidotti serves, or has served, on the advisory board of many academic feminist journals, including differences, Signs, Women's Studies International Forum, and Feminist Formations.

Braidotti's publications have consistently been placed in continental philosophy, at the intersection with social and political theory, cultural politics, gender, feminist theory and ethnicity studies.

The core of her interdisciplinary work consists of four interconnected monographs on the constitution of contemporary subjectivity, with special emphasis on the concept of difference within the history of European philosophy and political theory.

Braidotti's philosophical project investigates how to think difference positively, which means moving beyond the dialectics that both opposes it and thus links it by negation to the notion of sameness.

She is a founding member of the European Consortium for Humanities Institutes and Centres (ECHIC), 2008; in 2010 she was elected member of the Board of the Consortium Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) and in 2014 a member of the Scientific Council of the Conseil National de la Recherche Scientifique in France.

Her main publications include Nomadic Subjects (2011) and Nomadic Theory (2011), both with Columbia University Press, The Posthuman (2013), Posthuman Knowledge (2019), and Posthuman Feminism (2022) with Polity Press.

In The Posthuman (Polity Press, 2013), Braidotti offers both an introduction and major contribution to contemporary debates on the posthuman.

As the traditional distinction between the human and its others has blurred, exposing the non-naturalistic structure of the human, The Posthuman starts by exploring the extent to which a post-humanist move displaces the traditional humanistic unity of the subject.

Rather than perceiving this situation as a loss of cognitive and moral self-mastery, Braidotti argues that the posthuman helps us make sense of our flexible and multiple identities.

Braidotti then analyzes the escalating effects of post-anthropocentric thought, which encompass not only other species, but also the sustainability of our planet as a whole.

Because contemporary market economies profit from the control and commodification of all that lives, they result in hybridization, erasing categorical distinctions between the human and other species, seeds, plants, animals and bacteria.

These dislocations induced by globalized cultures and economies enable a critique of anthropocentrism, but how reliable are they as indicators of a sustainable future?

The Posthuman concludes by considering the implications of these shifts for the institutional practice of the humanities.

Braidotti outlines new forms of cosmopolitan neo-humanism that emerge from the spectrum of post-colonial and race studies, as well as gender analysis and environmentalism.

The challenge of the posthuman condition consists in seizing the opportunities for new social bonding and community building, while pursuing sustainability and empowerment.

In 2016, she co-edited Conflicting Humanities with Paul Gilroy, and The Posthuman Glossary in 2018 with Maria Hlavajova, both with Bloomsbury Academic.