The Department of Western Languages and Literatures of Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, in collaboration with Terra Critica, an international and interdisciplinary research network in the critical humanities, invites abstracts for the 3rd Interdisciplinary Ecological-Ethical Encounters: “Fragile Resistances, Critical Practices” to be held at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, on May 7-8, 2019.

3rd Interdisciplinary Ecological-Ethical Encounters:

“Fragile Resistances, Critical Practices”

May 7-8, 2019

Boğaziçi University, Istanbul

Organized by

The Department of Western Languages and Literatures

In collaboration with

Terra Critica, an international and interdisciplinary research network in the critical humanities

Let's imagine a bee, a tree, a refugee, a scholar, a piano, and a tent together. However distant we may appear, we have always been entangled, always heard and spoken to each other; a belated acknowledgement through our shared fragility today; a bitter irony.

In an era when neoliberal structures and practices dominate, precarities of different forms, configurations, and intensities emerge, and they press us with the urgency of Now!

This is the third of our interdisciplinary ecological-ethical encounters. We began with the question of human and non-human, took issue with anthropocentrism, and challenged conceptual boundaries that divide us; then we focused on ecology, and justice for the planet. We became all the more aware of the immediate need to intensify the bond between the critical and the ethical, and to take critical thought beyond the borders of academia, so as to foster creative and productive forms of resistance along with artists and activists, a natural outcome of our global entanglement. 

Humanities and social sciences, as well as natural and health sciences, have long been interrogating discursive boundaries of race, gender, and species, among others. Creative arts seek and propose new and transformative modes and constellations of lives that resist established categories. Activists fight against discrimination and violence on all grounds, which arise, directly or indirectly, and to varying degrees, from those stabilized or “naturalized” categories.

Therefore, we imagine this conference as a fruitful terrain where academics, activists, artists come together, think together, feel together, and act together.

Suggested topics are:

-Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene

-Ecological and economic multidependencies

-Planetary action, art, literature

-Materialities

-Precarities

-Criticalities

-Global and/or Local Resistances

-Macropolitics and/or Micropolitics

-Law and/or Justice

-Theory and Practice

-Bioethics

-Human/Nonhuman

-Other Bodies

-Transformations

-Temporalities

-Designing Space

-(De)Construction of Public Space

-(Re)thinking/(Un)learning Education

-Digitalization

KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Birgit Mara Kaiser is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Transcultural Aesthetics at Utrecht University. Her research spans literatures in English, French and German of the 19th to the 21st century, with special interest in aesthetics, affect and subject-formation. She is founding coordinator of Terra Critica.

Kathrin Thiele is Associate Professor of Gender Studies and Critical Theory in the Department of Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Trained transdisciplinarily in gender studies, sociology, literature, and philosophy/critical theory, her research focuses on ethics and politics from a feminist, queer and critical posthuman(ist) perspective. She is founding coordinator of Terra Critica.

We invite abstracts up to 250-300 words, and a short bio, to be sent to

Özlem Öğüt Yazıcıoğlu

ozlemogu@boun.edu.tr and/or ecoethicalencounters@gmail.com

Deadline for 250-word abstracts is January 25, 2019.