Postmodernism Adieu: Toward a Politics of Human Resistance

Postmodernism Adieu: Toward a Politics of Human Resistance

This is an article by Peter McLaren, Dave Hill, Mike Cole and Glenn Rikowski. It appeared in Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory (Lexington Books, 2002), chapter 12, pp.275-285.

It is now available at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/48165270/Postmodernism_Adieu_Toward_a_Politics_of_Human_Resistance and at ResearchGate: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/353148229_Postmodernism_Adieu_Towards_a_Politics_of_Human_Resistance   

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn-Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski

London

13 July 2021

Recapturing Marx on Gender, Race and Colonialism: Beyond Post-Modernism and Orthodox Marxism

Kevin Andersdon

RECAPTURING MARX ON GENDER, RACE AND COLONIALISM: BEYOND POST-MODERNISM AND ORTHODOX MARXISM

London Public Meeting

7.30 pm, Thursday, 5 November 2015
Cock Tavern, 23 Phoenix Road, Euston, London, NW1 1HB
(5 minute walk from Euston or Kings Cross Undergrounds)

 

Speakers:

– Heather Brown, author of Marx on Gender and the Family: A Critical Study
– Kevin Anderson, author of Marx at the Margins: On Nationalism, Ethnicity and Non-Western Societies
– Gilbert Achcar, author of Marxism, Orientalism, Cosmopolitanism
Chairperson:
– Peter Hudis, author of Frantz Fanon: Philosopher of the Barricades

 

Sponsored by the International Marxist-Humanist Organization
Further information: http://www.internationalmarxisthumanist.org/

Karl Marx

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Ruth Rikowski @ Academia: http://lsbu.academia.edu/RuthRikowski

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Marx’s Grave

The Politics of Poststructuralism Today Workshop

Social Imaginaries

THE POLITICS OF POST-STRUCTURALISM TODAY WORKSHOP

TheoryLab

School of Politics & International Relations

Queen Mary, University of London

Arts One, Room 1.28

10 am – 6 pm, Friday 17 April 2015

It is generally accepted that the various strands of thought associated with ‘post-structuralism’ have had an extensive impact on the study of politics in the UK and the United States over the past 30 years. However, it is also clear from a number of recent publications that there is renewed interest in the vexed questions of how to define post-structuralism and how to evaluate its overall significance. Indeed, it would be fair to say that some half-century after the publication of seminal texts such as Michel Foucault’s Madness and Civilization, Gilles Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy and Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology, ‘post-structuralism’ remains an essentially contested concept. Both supporters and critics alike remain divided on whether or not post-structuralism represents a distinct tradition, and on the extent to which post-structuralist theory can enhance the study of politics.

We will use this workshop to take stock of the state of the art in post-structuralist political theory, while also identifying the key debates and issues that will shape the field in the future. The workshop brings together leading scholars from across the UK to address these questions, in order to provide a conceptual map of the politics of post-structuralism today. We expect the discussion to show how scholars diverge on several key points, while converging in common conviction that post-structuralism represents a distinct mode of theorizing, and one that remains crucially important for the study of political movements, practices and institutions.

 

Key themes and questions

The workshop engages substantive debates within the subfield. However, the presentations and discussions will also serve to introduce colleagues working across the disciplines of political science and international relations to a range of themes and questions about the status of post-structuralism today. These include:

 

Definitional questions:

What is post-structuralism and how does it relate to other major currents in continental philosophy such as structuralism, psychoanalysis, phenomenology, existentialism and post-modernism?

How, and to what extent, does post-structuralism form part of the wider linguistic turn in 20th century philosophy?

 

Questions about distinct schools and traditions:

What have been the major contributions of (for example) the Foucauldian analysis of governmentality and disciplinary power, of the Essex School of ‘discourse theory’, of Žižek’s account of ideology, and of contemporary theories of rhetoric?

What is the significance of the recent critiques of semiotics and of discourse theory put forward by the ‘new materialist’ approaches and the ‘speculative realists’?

How, and to what extent, does post-structuralist theory overlap with and impact upon related approaches within the disciplines of political science and international relations, such as (post-)Marxism, Feminism, constructivism and the new institutionalism.

 

Conceptual questions:

How do post-structuralists address some of the major issues in the philosophy of the social sciences, such as the nature and scope of the political, the question of the construction of interest and identities, of agency and structure, and of the role of ontology and epistemology?

What are the meaning and significance of terms such ‘anti-essentialism’ and ‘post-foundationalism’?

 

Normative questions:

Can post-structuralism or post-foundationalism sustain a coherent normative theory of politics without falling into a performative contradiction?

What is the significance of the main normative approaches to emerge from post-structuralism, for example the tradition of ‘agonistic democracy’ and the revived interest in the idea of communism?

 

PROGRAMME

9.30-10.00 Registration and welcome

10.00-12.30 Session 1

Benoît Dillet (University of Loughborough): The Right to Problems: Post-Structuralism, Ontology and Politics

Gulshan Khan (University of Nottingham): Post-Structuralism, Ontology and the Political

Lasse Thomassen (Queen Mary): Post-Structuralism and Representation

Chair: Mark Wenman (University of Nottingham)

 

12.30-13.30 Lunch

 

13.30-15.30 Session 2

Iain MacKenzie (University of Kent) and Robert Porter (University of Ulster): From Occupy to Activate: Or, the (Re-)Politicization of Post-Structuralism in Everyday Life

Mark Wenman (University of Nottingham): Rethinking Freedom: Political Agency after Post-Structuralism

Chair: Lasse Thomassen (Queen Mary)

 

15.30-16.00 Tea/coffee

 

16.00-18.00 Roundtable: Poststructuralism and Political Theory Today

Simon Choat (Kingston)

Eric Heinze (Queen Mary)

Kim Hutchings (Queen Mary)

Caroline Williams (Queen Mary)

Chair: Mark Wenman

 

Register here

 

Places are limited, and registration is necessary. PSA members will be able to attend for free; non-PSA members will pay a small fee (£30/employed; £15 unemployed/students), which includes tea/coffee and lunch.

Funded by the School of Politics and International Relations

and the Political Thought Specialist Group of the PSA

——————

Dr Lasse Thomassen
School of Politics & International Relations
Queen Mary, University of London
327 Mile End Road
London E14NS
United Kingdom
Tel: 0207 882 2848
http://www.politics.qmul.ac.uk/staff/thomassenlasse.html

Contemporary Political Theory Annual Prize winner: ‘Political theory in the square: Protest, representation and subjectification‘

**END**

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Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.co.uk/

Organization and Collaborative Practices in the Arts

ORGANIZATION AND COLLABORATIVE PRACTICES IN THE ARTS

Call for Papers:  Organization & Collaborative Practices in the Arts
Organizers: Mark Banks (University of Leicester), Mandy Earley (University of Leicester), Stevphen Shukaitis (University of Essex / Autonomedia)

As a part of the 9th Critical Management Studies Conference, 8-10 July 2015, University of Leicester
Theme: Is there an alternative? Management after critique

Artists work in groups. This is a primary fact of artistic production. Collective work is an a priori, a reality of creative life. At nearly every moment artists are working together in one way or another and under many different arrangements. Without the others no one can succeed. Artists’ groups have helped them to survive in a capitalist system which values art primarily as branded commodity, and in which agents seek to accumulate art as cheaply as possible. The history of artists’ collaborations describes a flow of both resistant and protective cultural formations that moves through time. These contingent practices change shape according to the necessities of artists’ lives – maximizing their chances to live cheaply with time to work on their art, and to escape alienated labour, first in the industrial shop, and now in the service and information industry.

The social organization of artistic production is generally considered to be extraneous to the forms of art. Indeed, the analysis of each has come to concern different scholarly disciplines, with formal criticism at one end, and the sociology of art – and increasingly arts administration and management of creative production – at the other. The questions of artistic collectivity and collaboration per se cuts across disciplinary lines. Different adaptations of the collaborative practice within artistic production have diverse outcomes, generating
institutions, programs and works of art, as they have ever done.

Artists’ work within groups in the fine arts is very different than work within most businesses, and even most cultural institutions. While the results may seem the same – exhibitions, installations, spectacles, publications, recordings, films, designed objects and architecture – the processes of self-organized collective work proceed from different premises and toward different goals. The organizational structure of artistic work in groups has not been much studied.

This conference stream invites contributes that engage analytically with the questions of collectivity and collaboration among artists. A materialist point of view on the question might find that collaboration among cultural workers is contingent, circumstantial, and practical – an outgrowth of cultural economies and a necessary condition of many kinds of cultural work. Working collectively is about making a living. But modalities of collaboration are also a prime concern of those who want to remake the world, to join the great issues of the day, and to find a reason to work at all.

Please send proposals / abstracts of up to 500 words to Stevphen Shukaitis (sshuka@essex.ac.uk) by 31 January 2015. Papers selected for the panel will receive confirmation by 15 February 2015.

Please note that there will be a registration fee for the conference (the amount of which has not been confirmed yet), although there is a reduced rate for PhD students.

More information about the overall conference can be found here: http://www2.le.ac.uk/conference/cms15

 

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

 

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

 

SUBREALISM

Vampyrica
John-Paul Van-Huysse

SUBREALISM

Subrealism:  One Day Conference on Ettingerian Studies, Friday 10 October 2014, Aula Maxima, Maynooth University, National University of Ireland

Details: http://subrealismtheworkofbrachalichtenbergettinger.wordpress.com/conference/

This one-day conference features invited presentations on recent shifts in Ettingerian studies focusing particularly on gender studies, sexuality studies, queer theory, literature, ethics, aesthetics, art practice, psychoanalytic practice, political science  and philosophy.

 

For information on the work of Bracha L. Ettinger, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bracha_L._Ettinger

http://www.mamsie.bbk.ac.uk/documents/Giffney_Mulhall_ORourke.pdf

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Bracha-L-Ettinger/46707662527

 

For more on Speculative Realism see Michael O’Rourke’s introduction, Specrealisms, at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/9566568/Specrealisms

 

CONFERENCE SCHEDULE

Session 1: 10.00-11.15am

Graham Price: ‘Deconstruction and the Art-Encounter-Event’

Moynagh Sullivan: ‘An Ear to the Earth’:Matrixial Gazing in Tim Robinson’s Walk-Art-Text Practice’

Tea Break: 11.15-11.30am

Session 2: 11.30am-12.45pm

Noirin MacNamara: ‘Matrixial Theory and la démocratie à-venir’

Michael O’Rourke: ‘Specrealisms’

Lunch: 12.45-1.45pm

Session 3: 1.45-3.15pm

Medb Ruane: ‘Writing Art, Talking Psychoanalysis: sketches from a Bracha Ettinger notebook’

Paula McCloskey: ‘Artificial intelligence, art and affect: Exploring the matrixial possibilities in Micha Cárdenas Becoming-Dragon and Lise Autogena and Joshua Portway, Black Shoals Stock Market Planetarium’

Elena Marchevska: ‘The last place where we were together…’

Tea Break: 3.15-3.45pm

Session 4: 3.45-5.00pm

Dimitra Douskos: ‘Translating into French, translating into language’

Tina Kinsella: ‘Surrealism to Subrealism’

Aesthetics

 

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‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Pragmatic Perspectives on Phenomenology

Aesthetics

PRAGMATIC PERSPECTIVES ON PHENOMENOLOGY

CALL FOR PAPERS

International Philosophical Conference in Prague, February 5th- 6th, 2015

Deadline for submission of abstracts: December 15th, 2014

The Institute of Philosophy and Religious Studies (Charles University in Prague, Faculty of Arts) organizes an international philosophical conference focused on the pragmatic theses that are present in the phenomenological works of M. Heidegger, M. Merleau-Ponty and J. Patočka. Inspired by a critical reassessment of already existing pragmatic readings of Heidegger, we want to explore the following themes as possible justifications for speaking about the pragmatic turn in phenomenology: the primacy of the practical over theoretical understanding, criticism of the representationalist account of perception and analysis of language and truth claims within the context of social and cultural practices.

The goals of our conference are thus the following ones:

1) To bring together both continental and Anglo-Saxon phenomenologists striving to develop pragmatic elements in works of M. Heidegger, M. Merleau-Ponty and Jan Patočka. Our first objective is to provide a new synoptic view of different recent pragmatic readings of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty in the Anglo-Saxon philosophy (Dreyfus, Rorty, Brandom, Okrent, Taylor, Wrathall, to name but a few).

2) To reconstruct the main phenomenological accounts of perception and language which stress the above mentioned pragmatic motives. We will namely seek to develop the consequences of addressing perception in terms of coping, with the focus on various criticisms of representational account of perceptual consciousness. Concerning language, we are interested in papers discussing Heidegger´s criticism of the primacy of the proposition (cf. Being and Time § 32f.) and establishing analogies and points of divergence between phenomenological approach and analytical ordinary language philosophy.

3) To revisit the theory-praxis distinction. The aim is to investigate the question of the genesis of the theoretical mode of behavior and to ask how theoretical thematizing arises out of circumspective concern. However, it is also vital to critically assess the oversimplifying interpretations of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, insisting one-sidedly on the primacy of praxis over theory.

 

Papers are accepted under four broad topics, corresponding to four thematic sections of ryr conference:

• The Issue of the ‘Pragmatic Turn’ in Phenomenology
• Perception
• Language
• The Theory-Praxis Distinction Revisited

 

Paper presentations will have a maximum duration of 30 minutes. If you would like to participate in one of the above-mentioned panels with your paper, please state the title of the panel in question after the title of your abstract.

Submission deadline: Proposals should be sent until Monday, December 15, 2014 to the following email address: ondrej.svec@ff.cuni.cz Paper proposals will include a title and an abstract, with a maximum extension of 30 lines and 2,500 characters (without spaces).

Registration fee: For speakers accepted through an anonymous review process is 50 EUR. The conference registration fee includes: organization costs, morning and afternoon coffee breaks and conference banquet. The fee should be paid upon arrival of the participant.

The conference language will be English. Publication of selected conference papers in planned in a collected volume.

Organising committee: Jakub Čapek and Ondřej Svec (Charles University, Prague).

Confirmed Keynote Speakers:

Pavlos Kontos (University of Patras): Theory in Praxis: Aristotelian puzzles and Heidegger’s escape

Thomas J. Nenon (University of Memphis): Heidegger and His Pragmatist Readers

Mark Wrathall (University of California, Riverside): Always already more than a practitioner (‘immer schon mehr als Praktiker’): sense making and the limits of practical familiarity

Dan Zahavi (University of Copenhagen): Pragmatism and transcendental phenomenology

 

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Posthumanisms

Capitorg

POSTHUMANISMS

Call for Papers

Symploké: A journal for the intermingling of theoretical scholarship

Symploké: http://www.symploke.org/

Posthumanisms (Vol. 23, No. 1-2 [2015])

Welcome are papers that engage posthumanism in ways that avoid flattening “the human” into a monolithic or homogenous problematic. We are especially interested in papers that take up posthumanism in relation to the crisis of the humanities and the ongoing crises faced by marginalized “humans” around the globe. How might posthumanist thought be symptomatic of the crisis of the humanities and (higher) education more broadly? How has posthumanist inquiry ignored the lived heterogeneities of humanness distributed across raced, classed, gendered, and differently abled bodies? How can posthumanism’s critical political project benefit from being brought into intimate connection with critical race, queer, feminist, anti-colonial, and disability theories?(Deadline: 31 December 2014.)

Manuscripts must be received by December 31, 2014.

Submissions of any length which are appropriate to the aims of symplokē will be considered, although those between 4,000 and 6,500 words (approximately 16-26 typed, double-spaced pages) are preferred. Please keep in mind that submitted manuscripts need not be intended for an upcoming special issue; general submissions of high quality are encouraged. The editors reserve the right to make stylistic alterations in the interest of clarity. Authors will receive a complementary issue of the journal. All submissions must strictly follow the guidelines for copy preparation listed below. Articles not conforming to these guidelines may be sent back to the author for revision.

Preparation of Copy:
1. All submissions must provide a complete listing of references and use footnotes rather than endnotes.
2. Footnotes should generally consist only of references and are to be consecutively numbered throughout the manuscript.
3. References must include the names of publishers as well as places of publication. Also include full names and a complete listing of translators and editors.
4. The format of the manuscript must conform to the current MLA Style Manual.
5. All manuscripts must be submitted in duplicate. If the manuscript was word-processed, include a copy of your IBM- or Macintosh-compatible disk. Microsoft word or ASCII files are preferable.
6. All quotations, titles, names and dates must be checked for accuracy.
7. All articles must be written in English.
8. This journal has a policy of blind peer reviewing; thus the author’s name should not appear on the manuscript and a separate title page must be provided.
9. Material not kept for publication will be returned if accompanied by a stamped, self-addressed envelope.

Address submissions to:

symplokē
Jeffrey R. Di Leo, Editor-in-Chief
University of Houston-Victoria
3007 North Ben Wilson
Victoria, TX 77901.

Or send attached files to the Editor-in-Chief at: editor@symploke.org.

All materials published in this journal are copyrighted by symplokē. Submission of an article to this journal entails the author’s agreement to assign copyright to symplokē. Articles appearing in symplokē may be reproduced for research purposes, personal reference, and classroom use without special permission and without fee payment. This permission does not extend to other kinds of reproduction such as copying for general distribution, for the creation of collected works or anthologies, for advertising or promotional purposes, or for resale. These and all other rights are reserved.

 

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.co.uk

 

Glenn Rikowski’s latest paper, Crises in Education, Crises of Education – can now be found at Academia: http://www.academia.edu/8953489/Crises_in_Education_Crises_of_Education

Glenn Rikowski’s article, Education, Capital and the Transhuman – can also now be found at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/9033532/Education_Capital_and_the_Transhuman

 

Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse

Knowledge

POSTDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN DISCOURSE

Call for Book Proposals – new book series from Palgrave Macmillan

Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse

Series Editors: Johannes Angermuller and Judith Baxter

Discourse Studies is a field studying the social production of meaning at the intersection of language & society. Its principal focus is upon the central role of meaning production for the construction of hierarchies and hegemonies, identities and subjectivities. The field comprises a range of approaches, strands and schools such as poststructuralist, critical, conversational, interactional, pragmatic and semiotic approaches to discourse to name but a few.

In the past, Discourse Studies have sometimes testified to a divide between theoretical and epistemological orientations on the one hand and more methodological, analytical and empirical orientations on the other. At the same time, an increasing exchange can be observed between various strands and approaches across the entire spectrum of the social sciences and humanities. The series invites contributions from different disciplines across the social sciences and encourages contributors to reflect upon the development of theoretical and methodological strands from both their own disciplinary perspective and from positions beyond their immediate discipline.

The “Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse” series invites authors to address the theory/practice divide by integrating theory, data analysis and critique within a single research work. The series is open to new developments in Discourse Studies, including postmodern, constructivist, emergent and poststructuralist approaches to discourse theory and analysis, which may cross traditional disciplinary boundaries.

In summary, we invite you to send in your book proposal if your work responds to some of the following broad criteria:

• Making an innovative, theoretical or epistemological contribution to the field of Discourse Studies
• Offering an open and reflexive dialogue among different strands within the interdisciplinary space of language & society
• Showing disciplinary self-reflexivity and making connections between different fields
• Linking theoretical, critical and empirical challenges in Discourse Studies
• Developing narratives between theory-development, empirical analysis and critique
• Reflecting on how your research is or can be applied in non-academic contexts.

If you have any queries or are interested in submitting a proposal, please contact the Commissioning Editor Rebecca Brennan on rebecca.brennan@palgrave.com, or contact the series editors directly.

 

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.co.uk

 

Glenn Rikowski’s latest paper, Crises in Education, Crises of Education – can now be found at Academia: http://www.academia.edu/8953489/Crises_in_Education_Crises_of_Education

 

Glenn Rikowski’s article, Education, Capital and the Transhuman – can also now be found at Academia: https://www.academia.edu/9033532/Education_Capital_and_the_Transhuman

Approaching Posthumanism and the Posthuman

Capitorg

APPROACHING POSTHUMANISM AND THE POSTHUMAN

Conference and Doctoral Workshop

June 4-6, 2015 – St. Maurice, Switzerland

 

Keynote Speakers:

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington University

Stefan Herbrechter, Coventry University

Margrit Shildrick, Linköping University

Cary Wolfe, Rice University

 

Organizers: Deborah Madsen, Manuela Rossini, Kimberly Frohreich, and Bryn Skibo-Birney

 

CALL FOR PAPERS: http://call-for-papers.sas.upenn.edu/node/57765

 

A highly topical and sometimes contentious notion, posthumanism continues to spark debates as to how it is

and should be defined, particularly in relation to humanism. One might ask whether the posthuman is merely

an imaginative, literary, and/or theoretical figure or if we are already posthuman. Is posthumanism simply

“after the human” or does it speak to a being beyond, above, within, encompassing, and surpassing what we

currently know as “the human”? Moreover, even if we recognize that posthumanism is inextricably bound to

and wound up in humanist discourse, does the posthuman figure effectively open up alternative perspectives

and positions from which to question, to destabilize, and to decenter the human?

 

These questions permeate contemporary literature, film and television, comic books, video games, social

media, philosophical and theoretical essays in which posthuman figures abound. From avatars and cyborgs to

clones and zombies, the posthuman appears continually to challenge the line dividing the human from the

nonhuman. Whether blurring the distinction between human and machine, human and animal, organic and

inorganic, or the living from the dead, whether destabilizing gender, sexuality, race, class, age, the

mind/body dichotomy, or species categorization, posthumanism points to the ways in which (the exclusion

of) the Other is necessary to the self-bounded identity of the human(ist) subject. More than a contemporary

issue, posthumanism appears whenever “humanness” or anthropocentrism is in crisis, and critics have

accordingly noted the presence of posthumanist thought, themes, and figures not only in postmodern

literature but in much earlier literary periods as well.

 

The aim of this conference is both to explore the multiple ways in which posthumanism in its various

configurations questions, complicates, destabilizes, and “haunts” humanism and the human, as well as to

discuss theoretical approaches to posthumanism and/or the posthuman. In addition to inhabiting a wide range

of literary periods, genres, and media, posthumanism can also be said to blur the seemingly well-defined

borders between humanities disciplines, lending itself to interdisciplinary approaches involving literary and

cultural studies, media studies, animal studies, and fields like the digital, medical, and environmental

humanities, as well as drawing from multiple theoretical frameworks such as feminism, gender studies, queer

theory, race theory, disability studies, postcolonial studies, psychoanalysis, and deconstruction.

 

Please send 300 word abstracts to Kimberly Frohreich (kimberly.frohreich@unige.ch) and Bryn Skibo-

Birney (bryn.skibo@unige.ch) by September 15, 2014.

 

Paper topics can address (but are not limited to) any of the above areas and themes across disciplines, periods, genres, and media.

An additional list of potential paper topics is below:

• Posthumanist discourse and/or figures in medieval, early modern, modern or contemporary literature
• Posthuman figures in film and television
• Posthuman figures in comic books and graphic novels
• Posthuman figures in contemporary media forms, e.g. video games, social media, etc.
• Posthumanism and critical animal studies
• Digital humanities and posthumanism
• Medical humanities and posthumanism
• Environmental humanities and posthumanism
• Postcolonial posthumanism
• Posthumanism and the Gothic (then and now)
• Posthumanism and fantasy, science fiction and/or speculative fiction
• Virtual versus embodied reality
• Monsters, ..freaks,.. and/or superheroes
• Metamorphoses and interspecies being/becoming
• Posthuman(ist) subjectivities
• Embodying posthumanism or the posthuman body
• The posthumous
• Language and the posthuman
• Posthumanism and gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity, and/or class
• Anthropomorphism
• Posthuman politics and ethics

 

**END**

‘Human Herbs’ – a song by Cold Hands & Quarter Moon: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Au-vyMtfDAs

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

Glenn Rikowski @ ResearchGate: http://www.researchgate.net/profile/Glenn_Rikowski?ev=hdr_xprf

Online Publications at The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

 

Artistic Lives

Aesthetics

ARTISTIC LIVES

Kirsten Forkert, Birmingham City University

Tuesday February 25th @ University of Essex
3-5PM, Room LTB B
http://www.essex.ac.uk/ebs/news_and_seminars/seminarDetail.aspx?e_id=6277

Kirsten Forkert will talk about her recently published book, Artistic Lives (Ashgate 2013), which is based on interview material with artists and arts professionals in London and Berlin, together with ethnographic descriptions and analyses of social and urban policy. The book examines how artists support themselves within rapidly changing urban environments – and how they contend with the effects of property bubbles, precarious employment, uncertain funding and policies that position cultural workers at the centre of economic development with little concern for they actually make ends meet. The book examines the myth that artists can create something from nothing, and engages with debates surrounding Post-Fordism, gentrification and the nature of authorship, to raise challenging questions about the function of culture and the role of artists within contemporary capitalism.

Kirsten will discuss her motivations for starting the project, share the main findings of the research (which was carried out during the first phase of the recession) and reflect on the implications in the present context.

Kirsten Forkert is a researcher and activist, and lecturer in media theory at Birmingham City University. Prior to working at BCU, she taught at a number of institutions during and after completing her PhD in the department of Media and Communications at Goldsmiths. Her work is based within cultural studies, but draws on other disciplines, including sociology, urban studies and critical theory. It has been published in CITY, Third Text and various edited collections, as well as in Mute and Variant. Prior to academia, she worked in media art, new media and community media in Canada and the US, as a freelance practitioner. She is now developing new research on the cultural politics of austerity, and is involved in a collaborative, ESRC funded project mapping the controversies around Home Office campaigns.

Sponsored by the Centre for Work, Organization, and Society

This seminar is part of an ongoing workshop series on artist collectives.

Further events this spring will include the Nanopolitics group (March 5th), Max Haiven from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (March 19th), Jeremy Gilbert from the University of East London (April 29th), and others.

For more information contact Stevphen Shukaitis: sshuka@essex.ac.uk

**END**

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski at Academia: https://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

 

Governing Academic Life

Teaching Marx

GOVERNING ACADEMIC LIFE

Conference at the London School of Economics and Political Science

June 25-26, 2014

June 25, 2014 is the thirtieth anniversary of the death of Michel Foucault. Governing Academic Life marks this anniversary by providing an occasion for academics to reflect on our present situation through our reflections on Foucault’s legacy. The focus of the conference, therefore, will be on the form of governmentality that now constitutes our identities and regulates our practices as researchers and teachers. However the event will also create a space for encounters between governmentality scholars and critics of the neoliberal academy whose critiques have different intellectual roots – especially Frankfurt school critical theory, critical political economy, feminism, Bourdieuian analyses of habitus, capital and field, and autonomist Marxism.

Proposals for papers and panels are welcome until March 15, 2014. Please refer to the guidelines below.

Background and Context:

The impetus for this event is the set of changes currently sweeping across UK higher education, which include cuts in direct public funding, new financing arrangements that are calculated to bring private equity into the sector and foster competition between providers, the likely emergence of new corporate structures for HEI’s which will open the sector to commercial providers, the separation of elite from mass higher education and the globalization of ‘trade’ in HE services; but also (and relatedly) the continuing development of instruments for rendering student-teacher interactions visible and comparable, and for calculating and governing the impact, influence and value of academic research.

Governmentality research is featuring strongly in the debates around some of this. Yet though largely ‘diagnostic’ in nature, it is increasingly being enlisted as groundwork for the radical critiques and alternatives offered by autonomist Marxist theorists of cognitive capitalism and immaterial labour. Meanwhile, critical theorists who idealise a public sphere of rational-critical debate (with ‘the idea of the university’ at its heart) are struggling to re-define what makes the university (a) public and to re-think the terms of its engagement with the wider economy and society in less radical ways – often without problematising the forms of (Foucaultian) government, or of complicity with capitalism’s logic of accumulation, that are necessarily involved with these reconstructions.  This conference aims to bring together leading contemporary scholars and activists who draw on one or more of these traditions for a series of mutually challenging discussions.

In general, the conference will be oriented by the concern to think critically about the conditions of possibility of the academy today – where ‘conditions of possibility’ could mean governmental assemblages of one kind or another, capitalist production relations, the forces defining how different capitals (economic, social, cultural, symbolic) register within the academic field, or quasi-transcendental presuppositions of rational communication. Participants will ideally aim to explore how we might think across these usually distinct ways of both conceiving what the university is and contesting what it has become.

Specific foci of debate may include:

* The idea of the university: ruined or redeemable? Social criticism in the age of the normalized academic

* Beyond public v. private? Dimensions of corporatisation

* The role(s) of (contract, competition, corporate, intellectual property) law in constructing the market university

* The government of academic freedom: constituting competition as a way of life

* Markets, measurement and managerialism: rankings and ratings, rights and royalties, accounting and audit, metrics … and alternative metrics?

* Academic career-ism and casualization; discipline and de-professionalisation

* The conditions for the persistence in the university sector of relations of domination organised in particular around gender and ethnicity

* Critical political economy and varieties of communicative capitalism

* Entrepreneurial universities and enterprising academic subjects: personal branding as ‘technology of the self’?

* What is an author, now? The future of academic authorship and the academic book

* The potentials and pitfalls of ‘openness’ and ‘commons-ism’ in scholarly communication

* The ‘technicity’ of academic forms of life: the potentials and pathologies of living with/in digitised work environments

* The student as consumer – or as producer?

* The rise of para-academic ‘outstitutions’ beyond the university’s (pay)walls

* Other strategies for resisting the neoliberal academy

* Envisioning and enacting alternative futures for the university 

Additional ideas for panels and themes are welcome.

Proposal submission procedure:

Proposals should be submitted as e-mail attachments to A.Barron@lse.ac.uk or M.S.Evans@lse.ac.uk, or in hard copy form by mail to one of the conference coordinators (addresses below). The deadline for receipt of proposals is March 15, 2014.

 Proposals for papers must include the working title of the proposed paper (which should be suitable for presentation in 20 minutes) together with the author’s name, affiliation, full contact information (including address, phone, fax and email), and a brief (500 words maximum) abstract or outline. Submissions are welcome from graduate students as well as from more established scholars.

Proposals for panels (of up to 4 speakers) must include the information indicated above for all papers that are expected to be part of the panel, together with an overview of the panel theme (max 300 words) and an indication of each proposed panellist’s willingness to participate.

Timetable:  Proposals will be reviewed by the conference co-ordinators, and notice of acceptance will be given by April 15 2014.

Registration: A registration fee of £100 will be payable to cover costs. A limited number of places will be available at a concessionary rate for graduate students, adjuncts and scholars without an institutional affiliation. Please indicate if you wish to be considered for one of these places when sending your proposal.

**END**

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski

The New Left Book Club: https://rikowski.wordpress.com/2014/01/05/the-new-left-book-club-call-for-papers/

Glenn Rikowski at Academia: https://independent.academia.edu/GlennRikowski   

Education Crisis

Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses

Marxism Against Postmodernism in Educational Theory

RESILIENCE: INTERNATIONAL POLICIES, PRACTISES AND DISCOURSES

CALL FOR PAPERS

Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses Invites you to Submit your Paper

Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses (http://www.tandfonline.com/resi) creates a platform for dialogue about the processes, spaces, policies, practices and subjectivities through which resilience is seen to operate. As such, this journal draws together academic expertise from disciplines such as international sociology, geography, political theory, development studies, security studies, anthropology and law.

Find out why you should submit your paper to Resilience and read the full call for papers here:  http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/pgas/resilience-call-for-papers

You can also visit our Author Services website (http://journalauthors.tandf.co.uk/) for further resources and guides to the complete publication process and beyond.

To keep abreast of Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses, sign up for table of contents alerts: (http://www.tandfonline.com/action/doUpdateAlertSettings?action=addJournal&journalCode=resi20) 

Best wishes and festive greetings,
David Chandler
d.chandler@wmin.ac.uk
Editor, Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses (http://www.tandfonline.com/resi) 

**END**

Cold Hands & Quarter Moon, ‘Stagnant’ at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YkP_Mi5ideo  

‘Cheerful Sin’ – a song by Victor Rikowski: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tIbX5aKUjO8

Posted here by Glenn Rikowski

The Flow of Ideas: http://www.flowideas.co.uk

Rikowski Point: http://rikowskipoint.blogspot.com

Volumizer: http://glennrikowski.blogspot.com

Glenn Rikowski on Facebook at: http://www.facebook.com/glenn.rikowski

Online Publications at: http://www.flowideas.co.uk/?page=pub&sub=Online%20Publications%20Glenn%20Rikowski