CFP: Nature: Animal, Moral, Technological

Submission Deadline: 15th December 2021

Conference Dates: 26-29th May, 2022

Venue: Fairmount Banff Springs in Banff, Canada

In our efforts to surmount the problem of “human access,” do we risk repeating (even more blindly) the violence and immorality of anthropocentrism? If so, is our only option to re-approach nature paradoxically via its antithesis: solar panels and wind turbines that can save us from green-house gases; virtual simulations that can measure distance better than any animal eye; digital photography and narrative structures that might preserve the nature of indigenous life; genetic engineering that can dissolve the distinction between nature and its others? Should we then re-consider the moral roadblocks embodied in our narrative and philosophical efforts to imagine the posthuman—from Mary Shelley’s monster and Philip K. Dick’s androids to Donna Haraway’s cyborgs and Octavia Butler’s aliens?

Surrounded by the sublime weight and majesty of the Rocky Mountains in Banff, Canada, these are the questions we hope to address—as we attempt to “think” (yet again) Nature: Animal, Moral, Technological.

Potential topics might include, but are not limited to…

• The Meaning of nature and the natural

• Conceptions of the beautiful and the sublime

• Humanity’s domination and subordination of nature

• The role of philosophy and/or literature in an ongoing environmental crisis

• Literature and/or philosophy as forms of environmental activism

• The possibility of defining the very “nature” we seek to protect

• Biodiversity and/as the polyphonic or heteroglot text

• The rise and efficacy of so-called new materialisms (including thing theory, object-oriented ontology/philosophy, speculative realism/materialism, actor-network theory, etc.)

• The rise and efficacy of eco-criticism in literary and cultural criticism, including ecofeminism

• The link between new materialism and postcritique, or “surface reading”

• Literary depictions and/or philosophical considerations of cybernetics, genetics, and/or conceptions of post- and/or transhumanism

• Affect and its relation to narrative/mimetic form

• Animal-human-machine relations; speciesism

• The nature of race and racism

• Sex and gender, biology and interpellation

• Psychoanalytic conceptions of the unconscious, drives (vs. instincts), polymorphous perversity, etc.

• Biopsychology and essentialism

• Indigenous cultures and approaches to nature

• The role of technology in studies of the natural (from the natural sciences to anthropology and ethnography)

• Writing or filming “nature”

• The post-postmodern nostalgia for authenticity; efforts to surmount “the precession of simulacra”

• The nature of morality; the moral obligation to nature

• Ontology today

• Phúsis and/as tékhnē

• Implications, dating, and meaning of the Anthropocene

Proposals for individual papers, panels (of 3-4 participants), or roundtables of (5-6 participants) can be sent to info@philosophyliterature.com.

Proposals (for individual papers, panels, or roundtables) should be no more than 300 words; they should be sent via email as a WORD attachment. Proposals should also include a title and a short biographical description of each participant. Bios should be no more than 75 words.

The deadline for submissions is 15th December, 2021.

Event Website: https://www.philosophyliterature.com/

Source: https://philevents.org/