Call for Papers
Posthuman Materialisms: Knowledge, Economy, Ecology
An Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference at Georgetown University
Saturday, April 8, 2017
“[N]ow may be the time,” as Teresa de Lauretis suggests, “for the human sciences to reopen the questions of subjectivity, materiality, discursivity, [and] knowledge, to reflect on the post of posthumanity.” She goes on to enumerate the various “schemata” to which that reopening applies, a list that is, unsurprisingly, a long one. As scholars reconsider their own disciplines in light of the “nonhuman turn,” the question of what comes next becomes increasingly pressing. What’s more, escalating global temperatures and rising sea levels have urged thinkers, from the mechanical sciences to the humanities, to move beyond traditional methodologies to consider their fields of study from increasingly interdisciplinary vantage points. Given this confluence, the English Graduate Student Association of Georgetown University seeks proposals from various disciplines and theoretical approaches addressing, but not limited to, the following questions: How do new materialist theories think through the increasingly complex global systems—economic, technological, and environmental in scope—impacted by anthropogenic climate change? To what extent can posthumanist theory and emerging disciplines like critical animal studies challenge or even collapse the subject-object division inherent to Enlightenment epistemology? In refusing the confines of a traditional subject-object divide, how might a reconsideration of these non-human agents allow us to reconceive our failures within the political arena or the ramifications such a failure might entail? How might we rethink historical periods, and especially literary periodization, along the lines of energy regimes? How are terms like “nature” and “environment” employed or circulated as discursive constructs that affect human bodies, knowledges, and spaces? In what ways does a reconsideration of the nonhuman world—of animals and inanimate objects as agents in and of themselves—shape our understanding of science, methodology, or historicity? We are particularly interested in papers that investigate burgeoning technologies in relation to research methods in the humanities, as well as in studies that integrate approaches or methodologies less common in humanistic inquiry.
A combination of any of the following theoretical approaches (as well as those not listed here) would be welcomed:
Marxist theory and criticism
Feminist theory and gender studies
Queer theory
Postcolonial theory
Race and ethnic studies
Psychoanalysis
Globalization and globality
Environmentalism and ecotheory
Animal studies
Poststructuralism and Deconstruction
Epistemology, phenomenology, and ontology
Digital humanities
Metropolitanism
Disability studies
Reader response theory
Print and material culture
Television and media
Pop culture and game studies
Please submit 250-500 word abstracts via email by February 13, 2017, to the following address: egsa@georgetown.edu. Please address conference submissions to Emily Coccia, Academic Chair.
Key terms: Anthropocene, Ecology, Environmentalism, Animal Studies, Queer, Materialism, Posthumanism, Transhumanism, Antihumanism, Metahumanism, Cyberhumanism