Multispecies World Conference at Harvard University
The program is out : click here.
April 25-26, 2013, Day 1: 2:45pm-7:30pm, Day 2: 8:45AM-5:30PM
Day 1: William James Hall 1550, Day 2: Bell Hall, Belfer Building, HKS
http://sts.hks.harvard.edu/events/workshops/navigating-a-multispecies-world/
Featuring talks by Stefan Helmreich (Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, MIT) and Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor & Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, MIT)
The program has not been announced, but there will be a talk by Vincent Duhamel (Université de Montréal): ‘Knowing How to Flee and When to Hide – A Case for Non-Human Knowledge”
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CALL FOR PAPERS (deadline 6 March 2013)
Navigating a Multispecies World: A Graduate Student Conference on the Species Turn
APRIL 25-26, 2013
Co-sponsored by the Harvard Program on Science, Technology, and
Society (STS), the MIT Department of Anthropology, and the Harvard
Political Ecology Working Group (PEWG).
We invite papers for a multidisciplinary graduate student conference
to be held at Harvard University from April 25 – April 26, 2013.
Our confirmed speakers include Noam Chomsky (Institute Professor &
Professor of Linguistics, Emeritus, MIT) and Stefan Helmreich (Elting
E. Morison Professor of Anthropology, MIT).
This conference concerns the recent innovations and insights for the
study of ontologies and socialities engendered through the “species
turn” — that is, the intellectual turn to, and reflection upon, life
beyond the human species in the arts, humanities, and social sciences.
Emerging over the last few decades of the 20th century, the species
turn developed (1) from a diverse array of analytical and theoretical
formations concerned with aspects of the nonhuman (animate and
inanimate), including actor-network theory, affect theory, animal
studies, assemblage theory, the new materialism, and systems theory;
and (2) in productive tension with a parallel intellectual development
— posthumanism — articulated through such innovative theoretical
work as Katherine Hayles’ How We Became Posthuman and Cary Wolfe’s
What Is Posthumanism? While all approaches hold their own particular
aims, objects, and methodologies, they urge us to consider that we,
humans, are not alone. That is, we live in a world populated by and
constituted through life forms and forms of life beyond the human. And
as such, we must critically reconsider who “we” are in terms that
challenge the limitations and dangers of anthropocentrism.
We welcome papers from any discipline on topics including, but not limited to:
– Animal rights
– Chimeras
– Human-nonhuman relations
– Interspecies solidarity
– Kinship
– Multispecies biopolitics
– Nonhuman agency
– Nonhuman ethics
– Nonhuman subjectivity
– Nonhuman ontology
– Representations of nonhumans
– Species concept
Please submit abstracts of up to 350 words by March 6, 2013, to multispeciesworld@gmail.com. If you have any questions, please send
them to multispeciesworld@gmail.com.