Lauren Fournier
Lauren Gabrielle Fournier is a writer, curator, and interdisciplinary researcher working at the intersection of art, science, and the humanities. A first-generation student and scholar, her work coheres around multi-genre and hybrid genre writings as practices of philosophy. Her debut, scholarly monograph Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (The MIT Press, 2021) is the first book-length study of “autotheory,” which historicizes the literary term in light of longer, intersectional and transmedial feminist art histories. The book has been featured and reviewed in such venues as The Los Angeles Review of Books, High Theory, Hyperallergic, Passage, Journal of Curatorial Studies, and Art in America, and she spoke with McKenzie Wark on the topic for The MIT Press Podcast.
At the heart of her research, teaching, and writing lies an intellectual, ethical, and political commitment to environmental, economic, and social justice. Her research engages with comparative race and ethnicity studies (esp. settler colonial studies and critical whiteness studies), the economic humanities (esp. intergenerational class mobility, labor, working conditions, financial imperialism), the medical humanities (esp. microbiology, ecology, the vagus nerve), and artificial intelligence. She is the founder and director of Fermenting Feminism, an ongoing, site-responsive curatorial project that engages fermentation or microbial transformation as a metaphor and material practice through which to approach present-day social and political issues. She has organised major exhibitions and screenings at such venues as the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and the Horse Hospital in London. She is the editor of Critical Booch, which was featured in Art the Science and The New York Times.