CFP Politics in/of the Anthropocene
Stream organized by David Chandler and Harshavardhan Bhat
for London Conference on Critical Thought 2018
Deadline : March 26 2018
Event date : 29, 30 June 2018
Event location : University of Westminster, London
The 7th annual London Conference in Critical Thought (LCCT), hosted by the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, will offer a space for an interdisciplinary exchange of ideas for scholars who work with critical traditions and concerns. Central to the vision of the conference is an inter-institutional, non-hierarchal, and accessible event that makes a particular effort to embrace emergent thought and the participation of emerging academics, fostering new avenues for critically-oriented scholarship and collaboration. The event is free but registration is required.
The Anthropocene – the new geological epoch of humanity’s own making – promises to be a major challenge to scholars across disciplines. This stream is interested in panels, papers, conversations and performances that explore the politics of and in the Anthropocene. Does politics transform in the Anthropocene? What are its politics? As Timothy Morton prominently argued, the advent of the Anthropocene marks ‘the end of the world’ – not (only) physically, as ecological catastrophe at planetary scale, but also in a philosophical sense. The Anthropocene collapses the foundations of modernity: subject-centred rationalism and Anthropocene norms, discourses and regulations. The speed and energy of planetary changes overwhelm existing political institutions – from national parliaments to international organizations, from linear views of life to highly complex scenes of inter-species entanglements (Haraway). For some, the realization of the Anthropocene leaves little hope for futural politics. They paint a bleak scenario in which Anthropocene politics resembles a mere management of the postapocalyptic present: the governance of polluted oceans, flooded cities and deserted landscapes. In this new world, survival is all we can hope for. Others, however, paint a more optimistic picture. For them, the collapse of the modernist universe represents a unique possibility: to decolonise contemporary approaches (Demos) and understandings, to become attuned (Myers, Shapiro) to the needs of nonhumans (Tsing), to (re)discover non-western indigenous cosmologies (Kohn, de Castro) and cultures (la Cadena), to renegotiate core political ideas including security, participation, well-being and care (de la Bellacasa), and to establish new forms of (cosmo-)political cooperation. For contemporary critical thought, the Anthropocene is a momentous opportunity to rethink things. So this stream is an invitation for proposals on the politics of/in the Anthropocene and what this might mean for contemporary critical thought today, and to-come.
Suggestions for prospective panels (not limited to): • Decolonising the Anthropocene • Time, temporality and politics in the Anthropocene • Digital Anthropocene/Technosphere politics • Anthropocene security: risk, resilience and resistance • Atmosphere and toxicity • Architectures and surfaces • Sensing the Anthropocene: visuality, knowledge and power • Ways of 'Staying with the trouble' • Microbial and vegetal agencies • Oceanic and aerial flows • ‘Scale’ in the Anthropocene • Matter and Mattering • Ways of knowing in the Anthropocene
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