This conference calls for papers which opt for a mode of transversality as co-creation of form/event interassemblages. We welcome endeavors which explore the common articulation of the Anthropocene (and beyond). 29 May - 1 June, 2018 Hong Kong Shue Yan University Human society and culture have now arrived at a pivotal moment in the production of scientific, economic, psychological, even artistic and philosophical subjectivity or identity. The different “scales” inherent in the concept of Anthropocene will galvanize both the local and global, individual and the society in such a colossal way that they automatically invite academic research to adopt an interdisciplinary approach with unprecedented pace and intensity. Not only has the Anthropocene gained currency and emerged as the ultimate conceptual horizon of cultural, economic and political debates, it has also disrupted and dislodged the whole pattern of our “thought” itself – “It matters what thoughts think thoughts” (Haraway: 2016) – in a radical process of paradigm shift. Such a shift is attested to by, say, the “unreadability” of scale and frame (Clark: 2015) or what a “hyperobject” (Morton: 2013) has done to our framework of thinking on issues such as human history and Earth’s Deep History (Rudwick: 2016), or the human/nonhuman turn in psychology and sociology on a much larger scale of ontological forces on fissures of humanity along economic, racial and sexual axes. (For human turn, see Raffnsøe: 2016; for non-human turn see, Grusin, 2015). The complex and interrelated web of overarching significances, i.e. materialism, ecophilosophy, biological sciences, ethics and economic, all demand a crucial deframing and a revolutionary ethos under the banner of interdisciplinarity in academic debates.
Be it human or nonhuman turn, we are now faced with a heightened sense of human responsibility and the recognition of human dependence and precariousness which demand deep investigation in terms of our affective, cognitive, juridical, moral and existential experiences that set a new academic agenda. Today, to “act as if cultural interpretation and social explanation can proceed without consulting deeply nonhuman, planetary forces with degrees of autonomy of their own” (Connolly: 2017) is no longer possible. The question of “who is the anthropos?” (Bonneuil & Fressoz: 2015) touches on economics and politics among different regions on the planet. Paying homage to the “politics of location,” this conference welcomes contributions which make local reference to specific socio-cultural “equity issues” with perspectives from, say, the first and the third (or fourth) worlds, Eurocentrism and Asia, or South-East Asia, Hong Kong included. These issues point towards a “world-ecology in which power, wealth, and re/production are forged in conversation with needs of the web of life, and humanity’s place within it.” (Moore: 2016) Concrete examples deliberating issues of this dimension include, Foucault’s notion of discipline, sociocentrism (Connolly: 2017), Haraway’s Chthulucene (2016), Said’s Orientalism, and A. Tsing’s “counter-assemblage” of frontier stories in Indonesia.
It is not that the Anthropocene takes an interdisciplinary approach; the concept is interdisciplinarity itself, always out against fixed identity, normalized entities, givens and well-defined things. This conference calls for papers which opt for a mode of transversality as co-creation of form/event interassemblages. Environmental history, natural anthropology, laws and ethics, human-nonhuman ecology, media culture, green economics (and business) etc. are among the new areas of studies that have recently begun to renew the human and social sciences, in a dialogue with the sciences of nature, arts, politics and philosophy. We welcome endeavors which explore the common articulation of the Anthropocene (and beyond) among artists, musicians, graphic and SF novelists, physicists, sociologists, film producers, linguists and psychologists etc. After all, we have now an urgency of establishing a shared narrativity among these disciplines through the concept of interdisciplinarity.
Suggested Topics
Anthropocene Fiction: SF, New Ecocriticism, New Humanities Nonhuman/Human Turn, Entangled Humanism
Oppositional Politics: International Relations and Environmental Activism, Environmental Politics
Environmental Science and Social Sciences: Nature and Society, (Natural Anthropology) Social Stratification (uneven distribution of effluvia and environmental obligation) etc.
Human history, Big and Earth’s Deep Histories. History of the future, Science of Historicity and Time
Domesticity, Ecology and Economy: Home, Food, Family Scarcity, Trade, Markets and Consumption, the Doubling of ‘Eco,’ in Eco-nomics and Ecology
Media and Ecological Ethics: Cyberculture and Future City, Social Media and Ecosociology, Ecopsychology and Ecolinguistics, Climate Change and Visual Culture (films/TV)
Interested parties please submit a 250-word abstract to the following website (EasyChair) before 28 February, 2018:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=anthropocene2018
Acceptance letters will be sent out at the end of February. For enquiries, please contact Dr. YM Lam through email:
