The third Biennial PARSE Research Conference (13/14/15 November 2019) at the Faculty of Arts at the University of Gothenburg will undertake an interdisciplinary investigation within the arts, humanities and social sciences of the category Human from the multiple perspectives of what it excludes and overlooks.
Politically, culturally and theoretically, it is impossible today to navigate through the dense lattice of emergencies and urgencies without addressing the question of what constitutes the human, inhuman, subhuman and non-human, as well as formulating an adequate response to the anthropocenic threat posed by the human against the planet. As such, the Human conference intends to prompt an interdisciplinary and international debate on key issues of the contemporary global condition.
The six topics
Within the broad and open framework of (artistic) research represented at the PARSE conference it will become possible, in a unique setting of international encounter, to reflect upon burning issues related to the concept of the human. We seek to initiate a dialogue based in the non-separation of theoretical inquiry, artistic practice, arts education, and cultural production, centred around the following themes or “tracks”:
- the inhuman, the subhuman, the body and inscriptions of the human (the contested universality of the human across the divisions of class, race, gender, trans, queer, ableism, neurodiversity);
- the imperiled non-human (the Anthropocene, nature, ecological catastrophe) and the technological non-human and objecthood (tools, machine, nature, world of objects, OOO, robotics, algorithms etc);
- the posthuman, pedagogy and the institution (anti-humanism, anti-anthropocentrism, critique of the humanities, the human produced by the university, knowledge and distinction, disciplines of the human);
- human mobility and nationhood (transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, migration, human rights, personhood);
- biopolitics, necropolitics and the governance of the category of the human;
- decoloniality, post- and neo-colonialism (slavery, indigeneity, empire, desegregation, white Suprematism, white privilege).
These themes are organised to be deliberately transdisciplinary. It is our intention to make the conference operate as a complex dynamic and open meeting point and generator of critique, networks and new multidisciplinary research. We aim to strengthen existing research environments, and to initiate and stimulate research collaborations within the university as well as with international research environments.