Abstract 

The “end of the world” names a methodological problem before it names an apocalypse: how do humanities scholars and artist-researchers think, make, and teach when climate disruption, extinction, extractive infrastructures, forced displacement, and slow violence reformat what counts as evidence, what counts as futurity, and what counts as responsibility? This conference convenes research and practice across film, theatre, performance, and allied arts to ask how (post)Anthropocene conditions are not only represented but produced, felt, and negotiated through aesthetic forms, production systems, embodied publics, and more-than-human milieus. 

We invite scholarly, practice-based, and creative research submissions that treat the (post)Anthropocene as a problem of form, method, and ethics. We welcome proposals that move beyond “environmental themes” to examine how media and performance operate as ecological infrastructures: as energy users, extractive supply chains, sensory prostheses, archival systems, pedagogical machines, and sites of political imagination. We especially encourage work that stages productive tensions, such as between urgency and care, documentation and speculation, critique and repair, or planetary scale and situated struggle. 

We use the “end of the world” in the plural: as climate ​disruption​, extinction, and toxicity, but also as the historical and ongoing destruction of lifeworlds through colonialism, racial capitalism, militarism, technocratic governance, and epistemic capture—alongside the cosmic and planetary scales that exceed ‘Earth’ as a closed frame. 

Formats 

The conference welcomes proposals for: individual papers, pre-constituted panels, roundtable presentations, artist talks, screenings with discussions, performances, exhibitions/installations. 

Proposed Subject Areas (but not limited to):   

Submissions may engage climate, but also adjacent or entangled end-of-world conditions (nuclear, pandemic, carceral, computational, extractive, and extrasolar/astrophysical), especially where theory and practice meet. We invite proposals engaging (post)Anthropocene research and practice through topics such as: 

• Aesthetics after Nature: Worlding, Genre, and Performance 

• More-than-Human Publics: Companions, Kin, and Multispecies Performance 

• Ends of Worlds: Extinction, Ruins, and Survival 

• Evidence, Archives, and Planetary Sense-Making 

• Infrastructural Worlds: Extraction, Energy, and the Arts 

• Practices of Repair, Refusal, and Justice 

• Cosmic/Extrasolar Mediations and Post-Terrestrial Ecologies 

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Una Chaudhuri is Collegiate Professor and Professor of English, Drama, and Environmental Studies at New York University (NYU), and is widely recognized for pioneering work in eco-theatre, ecocriticism, and performance in the Anthropocene. She is also the Dean for the Humanities and Vice-Dean for Interdisciplinary Initiative.  

Submissions 

To submit a proposal, please fill out the form (linked below) with your name, affiliation, proposed format, an abstract of 200-300 words, and a brief biography of 100 words maximum.   

CFP: Scholarship at the End of the World – Fill out form