LECTORAAT CHANGE MANAGEMENT – De Haagse Hogeschool

PhD Defense | Ohad Ben Shimon – Articulating Embodiment in Knowledge-Intensive Institu-Situations
Date: 2 September 2026
Time: 10:15
Location: Utrecht University, Senate Hall (and online)
Supervisors: Prof. Dr. Iris van der Tuin and Dr. Joost de Bloois

As the title of this dissertation suggests, its central concern is articulating embodiment in what Ohad Ben Shimon calls knowledge-intensive institu-situations: academic and cultural environments in which knowledge production and circulation, organizational structures, and lived experience are deeply entangled. Rather than treating institutions as stable, bounded entities, knowledge as linear and progressive, or embodiment as an individual attribute, the dissertation approaches institutional life, knowledge, and embodiment as relational, contingent, and emergent processes lived in practice. It questions how bodies, knowledge, and institutions co-constitute one another in situated ways, and how careful attunement to this co-constitution can ethically and methodologically re-organize the conditions for knowledge intensity to emerge.

A key contribution of the dissertation is the development of a methodological framework based on what Ben Shimon calls ‘glowing concepts’. Drawing on Maggie MacLure’s (2010) notion of data that glows, Ben Shimon introduces a framework for conceptual engagement that is responsive, situational, and attuned to the unfolding of embodiment in knowledge-intensive institu-situations. Just as institu-situations foreground the situated, relational, and affective nature of knowledge work, glowing concepts provide a methodological framework for engaging with these dynamics without prematurely fixing or reifying them. Rather than applying pre-given analytical categories, glowing concepts emerge from fieldwork encounters as felt intensifications—moments where something begins to “glow” because it matters, resonates, or exerts force across bodies, practices, and institutional structures. In this sense, concepts glow through the researcher’s situated attunement.

Drawing on fieldwork conducted at the European Graduate School (EGS) in Saas-Fee, the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, and the Centre for Unusual Collaborations (CUCo) in Utrecht, the dissertation argues that embodiment is not a stable object of study, but a practice of doing. It is an indeterminate phenomenon that is continually articulated and disarticulated through knowledge-intensive institu-situational encounters, relations, and temporal structures. Embodiment appears in multiple registers, through participants’ lived experiences, through Ben Shimon’s situated attunement, and through glowing concepts themselves, as they emerge and come to matter in practice.

More information and livestream access are available here: https://www.uu.nl/en/events/phd-defence-ohad-ben-shimon-articulating-embodiment-in-knowledge-intensive-institu-situations

Image by Mercedes Azpilicueta.