Online Conference April 2nd, 2022 (EST)
Call for Critical and Creative Proposals:
“Not all of us can say, with any degree of certainty, that we have always been human, or that we are only that.”
--Rosi Braidotti, The Posthuman (2013)

The University at Albany’s 19th annual English Graduate Student Organization Conference, “Encountering the Other(s),” seeks out papers, projects, and creative works that explore the association between humanism and posthumanism. We encourage a great range of perspectives engaging with or responding to the moments in which human subjects encounter the Other(s). Although in “Letter on Humanism” (1946), Heidegger’s vision of humanism still attests to human exceptionalism by arguing that the human is a shepherd of being, it is important to note that he introduces the standpoint of being precisely to break with the tradition of metaphysics whose use of language is incorporated into the logic of the subject/object distinction. As noted by Tony Davis, from the Heideggerian legacy of antihumanist humanism, to Foucault’s humanist antihumanism, and to Haraway’s posthumanism, there have been attempts to deconstruct and reconstruct the notion of the human being rooted in liberal humanism. In literary texts, as well as in our social circumstances, what prompts the contemplation of what it means to be human is the Other(s) the humanity encounters.

The conference will be held virtually via Zoom. We will schedule approximately 15 minutes for each presentation. All proposals should include your name, affiliation, e-mail address, the title of your proposed paper, and a short bio (100 words max). For critical presentations, please submit also a 250-word abstract; for creative presentations, please submit a 250-word description of your presentation. The deadline for submissions, which should be uploaded to our outlook form, is March 13, 2022. Responses to submissions will be sent out soon after March 14th. Please direct any queries to the conference chair, Minji Huh (mhuh@albany.edu). Link: https://forms.office.com/r/V2RAqCpBU7.

Some questions that presenters might want to consider include: How have liberal human subjects responded to Otherized people based on race, gender, nationality, sexual orientation, and more? How are new and more capacious forms of identity are forged through encounters with the Other(s)? How have humans related to nonhuman agency?

Potential approaches to our topic may include, but are not limited to:
 Postcolonial Studies
 Critical Race Theory
 Gender Studies
 Disability Studies
 Animal Studies/Plant Studies
 Deleuzoguattarian Becomings
 Queer or Trans Theory
 Encounters with Aliens, Cyborgs, Vampires, etc.