CICAS, the Center for Interdisciplinary Collaboration in the Arts and Sciences, invites proposals for its inaugural conference on the theme of The Future of Humanity. In a world where, on the one hand, we are informed that the planet cannot support a human life worth living a century from now and, on the other, that the first human to live to be 1000 years old may have already been born, no topic is more urgent for humans to debate through the lenses of their different disciplines. What is the future of the human species? What does it mean to be "human"? Or, as Richard Grusin (2015) suggests in The Nonhuman Turn, are we experiencing a different kind of "humanity" in the twenty-first century? Are humans mere "climatological and geological forces on the planet that operate just as nonhumans would, independent of human will, belief, or desire" as Grusin (2015) suggests? What role do humanities and sciences play in shaping our future? In what ways are disciplinary statements "events" unto themselves? If the future is in crisis, then what does it mean to 'live'? Is life "a subjective category" as Badiou (2009) proposes? Scholars from the sciences, social sciences, and humanities are invited to complement an interdisciplinary political response to the crisis facing us with an interdisciplinary intellectual response to that same crisis in an international conference held at Nipissing University from July 22-24, 2016 (North Bay, Ontario, Canada).

Nipissing University is located in North Bay, Ontario, near Algonquin Provincial Park. From Lake Nipissing to Duchesnay Falls, the university campus is close to many natural areas that are ideal for swimming, hiking, fishing, or pondering the many topics that surround the issue of humanity's future.

Topics of interest include but are not limited to:

Climate change and the future of the environment
Migration and refugees
Transhumanism and posthumanism, theories and applications
Ray Kurzweil and the futurist movements
The future of human rights
Genetic editing and the future of the fetus
Interdisciplinarity as the future of academia, the arts, and the sciences
Humanity's future in space
Utopian and dystopian Visions
Assisted dying, assisted suicide, and the future for the elderly
The future of capitalism
The future of fundamentalist ideologies
Panpsychism and speculative realism

Please submit your abstract (no longer than 250 words) to Drs. Sarah Winters and Pavlina Radia (sarahw@nipissingu.ca and pavlinar@nipissingu.ca) no later than March 4, 2016.
cfp categories:
cultural_studies_and_historical_approaches
ecocriticism_and_environmental_studies
humanities_computing_and_the_internet
interdisciplinary
international_conferences
popular_culture
religion
science_and_culture
theory
twentieth_century_and_beyond