Dear All,
Submissions of abstracts for the "Humanity and Animality"
interdisciplinary conference is still open. Please see the Call for
Papers below:
Call for papers:
University College London (UCL)
Joint Faculty Institute of Graduate Studies
Humanity and Animality in 20th and 21st Century Culture:
Narratives, Theories, Histories. An Interdisciplinary Conference
15 September, 2014
This interdisciplinary conference takes up an important debate in a
field of growing importance in the humanities, where animal studies,
post-humanism, and eco-criticism have surged in recent years. The
definition of mankind seems necessarily to pass through an
understanding of what constitutes the animal. Philosophically, what
distinguishes, or indeed brings together humanity and animality has
been the subject of debate from Aristotle's understanding of man as
'zôon logon echon' and from Kant's view of man's treatment of animals
as an insight into the true nature of humankind, Derrida's seminars on
'the beast and the sovereign', up to Agamben's recent theory of 'bare
life' as the breakdown of the barrier between man and animal.
Artists, authors and filmmakers, such as Kafka, Dalí, Borges, Coetzee,
Primo Levi, Margaret Atwood, Karl Appel, Paula Rego, Werner Herzog
('Grizzly Man'), and Benh Zeitlin ('Beasts of the Southern Wild') to
name but a few, have also grappled with the significance of the divide
or symbiosis of humanity and animality. Donna Haraway, Rosi Braidotti
and Andrew Benjamin are also redefining ways in which humanity and
animality can be thought together, or apart. The violent upheavals of
the 20th century, with its global wars, unprecedented genocides and
totalitarian experiments led to a re-evaluation of notions such as
humanism and humanity, which has made way for new hopes and anxieties
relating to the subhuman and the post-human.
By hosting a varied programme of papers and debates chaired by
high-profile contributors to this emerging field of inquiry, this
conference aims to establish a forum for researchers throughout the UK
to discuss this important theoretical issue.
Topics of discussion may include but are not limited to the following
questions/topics:
· Is it possible, or even desirable to distinguish between
animality and humanity?
· In which ways does the dialectic of 'human' and 'animal'
shape our identities, culture and morality?
· Why is the comparison with animal world so important for our
culture?
· Shame, pride, sorrow, fear, anxiety, fascination, awe: how
do emotions acknowledge the relation between humanity and animality?
· How do literature, art, evolutionary theory, philosophy and
other disciplines negotiate the changes undergone by the concept of
the 'human' in the last century?
· How have our perceptions of 'humanity' and 'animality'
changed in relation to violent and extreme events such as genocide,
widespread atrocity, world war etc.?
· What does the persistence of the fascination with animals
suggest about specific cultural and historical moments?
· Are we really a Darwinian species, or do technology,
morality and creativity separate us from the rest of the natural
evolution?
· How can we rethink the binary opposition between humanity
and inhumanity?
· Have we entered into a post-human era?
· Evolutionary theory and the human condition
· Human-Animal studies
· Humanity and Animality in Art, Literature, Science,
Philosophy, Cinema, Religion, etc.
Deadline for Abstracts:
Please send an abstract (300 words maximum) and a short biography (50
words maximum) to [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>
by August 1st, 2014.
A selection of the papers will be published.
Confirmed speakers (other speakers will be announced soon):
Martin Crowley (Cambridge; University)
Robert S. C. Gordon (Cambridge University)
Pierpaolo Antonello (Cambridge University)
Florian Mussgnug (UCL)
Kevin Inston (UCL)
other speakers will be announced soon
--
The University of Edinburgh is a charitable body, registered in
Scotland, with registration number SC005336.
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