Post-Human Politics: Inheriting from 1968
As we approach the 50 year anniversary of 1968, a high point of activism and protest around the world, we are interested in reflecting on and engaging with 1968’s legacy of activism as it influences theory and practice.
While 1968 is often associated with the May protests in France, this time period saw various protests and radical action occurring at places around the world, including the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, student movements in Mexico, the Cultural Revolution in China, and anti-war protests and counter-culture movements in the U.S.
Many of these events still resonate in our contemporary sociopolitical atmospheres.
We are interested in bringing the legacy of 1968 into the present through presentations engaging with any of the following questions:
• What and how have we inherited from the events of ‘68 and its global figures?
• How have practices such as ‘activism’ and ‘social movements’ changed in the last 50 years?
• What practices are sufficient or insufficient to the evolving impositions of climate change, integrated world capitalism or dominant cultures of technoscience?
• How can enacted events help us to think about ecopolitical and biopolitical issues outside of apocalyptic or salvific discourses?
• How can we rethink notions of speed, acceleration and slowness apart from cybernetic frameworks of accelerationism and transhumanism or the reified subject of embodiment studies or phenomenology?
Keynote Speaker:
Kavita Philip, professor of history, University of California, Irvine
Kavita Philip is an associate professor in the UCI Department of History. Her research interests are in technology in the developing world; transnational histories of science and technology; gender, race, globalization and postcolonialism; environmental history; and new media theory. Her essays have appeared in the journals Cultural Studies, Postmodern Culture, NMediaC, Radical History Review and Environment and History. She is author of "Civilizing Natures" (2003 and 2004). Her work in progress includes a monograph entitled "Proper Knowledge, on Technology and Property."
Submissions:
Paper presentations should be no more than twenty minutes in length. If you would like to arrange an event that is longer than twenty minutes, please indicate the desired length of time in your submission.
Submission Instructions:
Please visit https://sites.google.com/view/posthuman/conference/cfp-submission to submit an abstract.
Abstracts should be 300-500 words in length.
Submission Deadline:
Dec. 10, 2017
Please feel free to email the PHuN graduate students with any questions regarding potential submissions or any other conference-related topic at PHuNRG@gmail.com.
About PHuN and the Annual PHuN Graduate Student Conference:
The Post-Human Network (PHuN or "Fun") is a collective of students and faculty based at Arizona State University. We engage with streams of "post-humanist" thought and practice and seek to move beyond anthropocentrism in the academy and in society.
Participants come from a number of disciplines across campus, including arts media and engineering, geography and literature.
We aim to facilitate opportunities for collaborative study, creation and experimentation. Our individual and collective production spans a variety of registers including, but not limited to art, media, technoscience, urbanism and design. Our work is influenced by areas of post-humanist thought such as vitalism, enactivism, process, new materialism, left-accelerationism, post-phenomenology and systems theory.
The Post-Human Network Graduate Student conference series has been supported by the ASU School of Arts Media and Engineering, the Lab for Critical Technics, the Synthesis Center, the ASU Department of English, the ASU School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, the Center for Science and the Imagination and ASU Institute for Research in the Humanities.