CALL FOR PAPERS
POSTHUMAN AGENCY: NONHUMAN AND HUMAN ACTORS
September 5-7, 2023
Venue: Faculty of Arts and Philosophy, Purkyne University, Ústí nad Labem, Czech Republic
http://kritickyposthumanismus.cz (to be updated soon)
Submission deadline for abstracts: May 31, 2023
In our second instalment in the critical posthumanism series we intent to explore the concepts of actor and agency. A posthuman perspective means, among other things, acknowledging that we live in more than human or not only human world. The post-human world is co-inhabited and co-constituted by other than human actors. Although this epoche is characterized as anthropocene, it doesn’t mean that “nature is now completely subordinated to human agency”. Instead, we should consider human societies as “themselves constructed from a web of relationships between human beings, nonhuman animals, plants, metals, and so on.”
In our conference, therefore, we would like to address the concepts of actor and agency in the context of more than human world. Without rejecting the idea of the individual, self-reflective, rational, responsible and autonomous human actor, we would like to focus on other types of agencies – those that are not fully autonomous, but rather co-dependent, that are not rational in the sense of linguistic rationality; that are not individual without being also collective; that are not just individual living beings, but also forces or systems. Our conference aims to discuss various possibilities how to understand relations between different types of agencies with the emphasis on hybrid actor networks and the boundaries and coalitions between various identities.
In order to open such discussion, we invite researchers, authors, performers, and independent scholars from any discipline to submit proposals addressing the following topics and questions:
1) Types of actors and agencies
What does it mean to act in more than human, post-human, or not only human world? What is agency apart from the activity of individualized human actors? What other types of agencies do we acknowledge? What are the types and varieties on nonhuman actors and actants that co-shape our world? What is agency in collectives and assemblages that transcend the old dualities of nature/culture, human/animal, human/machine, organic/inorganic, or individual/social.
2) The concepts of action and agency
To whom and in what sense do we attribute agency? What does it mean to act beyond the actions of an individual, self-conscious, and self-reflective human subject? How to differentiate between authorship, influence, and causation? What does it mean to act in terms of mutual interdependence? What is the relationship between conscious and unconscious, reflective and pre-reflective components of action?
3) Living non-human actors: Animals, plants, fungi, microorganism
How do we define and understand other than human types of agencies in terms of living beings? How do human, plant, insect, fungal, microbial, or viral collectives act? In what sense ecological actants shape the actions of living beings? What types of interspecies influences are relevant for our future?
4) Social and collective agency
What types of agencies exist in human social collectives and institutions? What types of agencies exist in non-human collectives? What is a collective agency?
5) Technology and other artificial systems
How does technology – tools, machines, apparatuses – partake in human action? In what sense do technological and institutional actants shape the actions of the individual ones? What happens in between and among them? What type of agency do we attribute to an AI? What types of inter-species and inter-realm influences and relations are relevant to our future?
6) Ethics and politics of post-human agency
What ethical and political questions open with adopting a post-human perspective? The more than human world requires redefinition and new interpretations of several key concepts, such as: autonomy and responsibility; respect, dignity, acknowledgment, dependence; – conflict, fight, discord, claim, right; mutuality, cooperation, help, care.
Deadline for abstract proposals: May 31, 2023
Letter of Acceptance: June 30, 2023
Abstracts should be between 300 – 500 words
Send your abstracts (and all questions if there are any) to this address: posthumanaussig@gmail.com
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