CFP: Second Annual Posthuman Network (PHuN) Graduate Student Conference
Date: February 22nd-25th, 2018

Host: PHuN (Posthuman Network // www.posthuman.net)

@: Arizona State University // Tempe, Arizona USA
Deadline: December 10

(apologies for cross-posting)

As we approach the 50-year anniversary of 1968, a high point of activism and protest around the world, we are interested in reflecting on and engaging with 1968’s legacy of activism as it influences theory and practice. While 1968 is often associated with the May protests in France, this time period saw various protests and radical action occurring at places around the world, including the Prague Spring in Czechoslovakia, student movements in Mexico, the Cultural Revolution in China, and anti-war protests and counter-culture movements in the USA. Many of these events still resonate in our contemporary sociopolitical atmospheres.

We are interested in bringing the legacy of 1968 into the present through presentations engaging with any of the following questions:

❖ What and how have we inherited from the events of ‘68 and its global figures?

❖ How have practices such as ‘activism’ and ‘social movements’ changed in the last fifty years?

❖ What practices are sufficient or insufficient to the evolving impositions of climate change, integrated world capitalism, or dominant cultures of technoscience?

❖ How can enacted events help us to think about eco- and biopolitical issues outside of apocalyptic or salvific discourses?

❖ How can we rethink notions of speed, acceleration, and slowness apart from cybernetic frameworks of accelerationism and transhumanism, or the reified subject of embodiment studies or phenomenology?

Keynote Speaker: Kavita Philip, Professor of History, University of California, Irvine

Kavita Philip is an Associate Professor in the UCI Department of History. Her research interests are in technology in the developing world; transnational histories of science and technology; gender, race, globalization and postcolonialism; environmental history; and new media theory. Her essays have appeared in the journals Cultural Studies, Postmodern Culture, NMediaC, Radical History Review, and Environment and History. She is author of Civilizing Natures (2003 and 2004). Her work in progress includes a monograph entitled Proper Knowledge, on technology and property.

We invite submissions from a range of disciplines, including (but not limited to):

Critical Theory, Media Arts and Sciences, Gender and Postcolonial Studies, Science and Technology Studies Environmental Studies, Art and Design, Literary Theory, Social Theory, Cultural Geography

(see attached PDF for more suggested topics and readings. Alternative modes of engagement and knowledge production around the theme such as workshops, discussions, performances/installations, are *highly encouraged*)

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS: Please visit post-human.net/conference/cfp-submission to submit an abstract. Abstracts should be 300-500 words in length.

SUBMISSION DEADLINE: December 10, 2017
Please feel free to e-mail the PHuN graduate students with any questions regarding potential submissions or any other conference-related topic at PHuNRG@gmail.com.

About PHuN and the Annual PHuN Graduate Student Conference

The Post-Human Network (PHuN or "Fun") is a collective of students and faculty based at Arizona State University. We engage with streams of ‘post-humanist’ thought and practice and seek to move beyond anthropocentrism in the academy and in society. Participants come from a number of disciplines across campus, including Arts Media and Engineering, Geography, and Literature. We aim to facilitate opportunities for collaborative study, creation, and experimentation. Our individual and collective production spans a variety of registers including, but not limited to, art, media, technoscience, urbanism, and design. Our work is influenced by areas of post-humanist thought such as vitalism, enactivism, process, new materialism, left-accelerationism, post-phenomenology, and systems theory.

The Post-Human Network Graduate Student conference series has been supported by the ASU School of Arts Media and Engineering, the Lab for Critical Technics, the Synthesis Center, the ASU Department of English, the ASU School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning, the Center for Science and the Imagination, and ASU Institute for Research in the Humanities.