[Reader-list] Call: Johannesburg Workshop on Theory and Criticism 2012

[OISHIK SIRCAR]

*FUTURES OF NATURE*

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You are invited to apply for a place in the 2012 Session of the
Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism. The 2012 Session, *Futures
of Nature*, is part of a drive within the humanities to reframe the
disciplines and critical theory in light of the environmental emergency
that is said to endanger most species on the planet, including our own.

We will reflect on some of the major challenges relating to the
contemporary conditions and the long-term sustainability of life on Earth.
Ours is an age characterized by the indelible imprint of human activity on
the Earth’s climate, its geology and its conditions – a process which may
lead to the planet’s becoming inhospitable to human life. It is also an era
that blurs the distinction between human history and culture and the
Earth’s natural history and material composition.

We will reflect on a position long held by environmental activists, but now
demanding urgent political and intellectual attention, that humans are a
species alongside other species, one whose survival is threatened by its
own behaviour. If to survive the ecological crisis means to work out new
ways to live with the Earth, then a different mode of humanity is required.
The extent to which these new modes of humanity are prefigured in
contemporary arts, technology and aesthetics will be assessed.

The JWTC was founded in 2008 as a place for experimenting with theory in
the global South. Our goal is to open questions that are fundamental to
contemporary aesthetic, philosophical, political, literary, ethnographic
and ethical inquiry – questions that potentially point to new paths for
critical theory at the interface of local and global circuits.

Our audience is a new generation of local and international scholars who
locate their work beyond the model of area studies; are willing to
challenge naturalized conventions of interpretation and are eager to bring
about a renewed dialogue among the disciplines with a view to a transformed
critical theory landscape.

The 2012 programme will span ten intensive days of lectures, seminars,
public events, exhibitions and performances. It will also include
explorations of Afropolitan Johannesburg.

We encourage to apply both faculty, postdocs and senior post-graduate
students in the humanities, social sciences and critical studies in law,
media, health, ecology, technology, design, architecture, urban studies and
the arts. We also encourage applications beyond the academy in cases where
applicants have a strong interest and capacity for social theory.

The deadline for applications is *March 25, 2012*. Admissions to The
Workshop are announced on April 5, 2012. For details and application form,
visit http://jwtc.org.za

Tuition fees have been broken down in sliding categories in order to insure
a financial scheme that accommodates global resource inequities.

The Convenors for the 2012 Session are: Kelly Gillespie, Julia Hornberger,
Achille Mbembe and Leigh-Ann Naidoo.

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*A few broad concerns will animate the 2012 Session*

*The being-in-common of humans and ‘non-humans’*

The privileging of human existence as determining the actual and possible
qualities of both thought and being has been the object of philosophical
critique. So too have been the nature/culture divide and the opposition
between an instrumentalist attitude towards nature and what has been taken
to be the ‘nature worship of the primitive’.

Yet skepticism – a belief/doubt dualism – seems to still plague ecological
thought. A discourse of limits, ecological critique has become a target for
appropriation by opposed and contradictory political positions. All of
these raise larger epistemological questions concerning the final
knowability of nature and the extent to which we can access it directly.
How do we extricate ourselves from the skepticisms tugging at (if not
produced by) the schisms between faith, belief and doubt? What would a
rethinking of the humanities, critical theory, architecture, city planning,
the arts, or knowledge itself look like beyond the subject-object dualism
that separates humans from plants, animals and objects? Is a different mode
of humanity possible – a mode that would render us newly constituted beings
in a newly constituted world?

*Oil, capital and democracy*

As a growth-consumption machine, capitalism is impossible to reconcile with
finite environment. Today’s global economy is deeply dependent upon, and
embedded into, cheap oil and natural gas. Western industrial democracies
and countless other political regimes are built around the plentiful
production or supply of oil and gas which power virtually all movement of
people, materials, foodstuffs and manufactured goods, and indeed capital
itself. As threats to oil suppliers rise, Western powers have been prepared
to resort to more extreme measures in the name of securing supply:
technologically, fracking (hydraulic fracturing) enables deeper drilling
but at increased risk of uncontainable deep sea leaks and heightened
occurrence of earthquakes in areas unrelated to tectonic plates. The 2012
Session will explore the histories of capital and democracy in terms of the
changing natures of nature and the forms of energy consequently available
to it at any given historical moment.

*Catastrophes and disasters*

Catastrophes and disasters have usually been thought of discretely as
either natural or socio-political events. While the catastrophic character
of politically prompted events – genocidal wars, ethnic cleansing,
epidemics, etc. – are often analogized by naturalistic representation.,
large ‘acts of God’ have been rationalized as being beyond the
socio-political. But this distinction is fast being undone, bringing to
‘catastrophe’ an older critique of the impossibility of separating the
natural from the cultural. How do we account for the dramatic speeding up
of the rate of change in natural processes when the time lines of nature
are converging with those of society in a mutual lockstep? To what extent
does the apocalyptic force us to grasp the collective through its possible
extinction, or to think the world through our absence? How would a future
in which humans have disappeared look like? How will the thoroughgoing
deterioration of the Earth and of nature signal the end/reformulation of
social and political forms?

*Bio-extraction and bio-wealth*

 One of the most salient questions in contemporary life is how the
biological is being given new forms, denominated, stored, accumulated and
turned into new forms of property. The genome of plants, animals and
micro-organisms are now transformable and transactable in ways that were
heretofore unimaginable. Bio-banking itself is increasingly directed at
human DNA, human tissue, human embryos and human stem cells. As debates
about patenting life itself rage, a new round of bio-extraction is under
way. We will assess recent challenges to conceptions of nature, biology,
technology and life and inquire into the extent to which new developments
in life-science produce new possibilities of exploiting nature.

 *Alternative economies and the urbanization of nature*

* *The cumulative threat to humanity and the Earth arises from the existing
relations of production; from the ways in which products are consumed or
wasted and how surplus is appropriated and distributed. The 2012 Session
will reflect on  what “alternative economies” might look like and how a
commons might be produced and sustained. What are currently the kinds of
economic activities and modes of consumption that offer possibilities of
livelihood and well-being beyond the global purview of growth and boundless
consumption inherent to capitalist rule? If the concept of “community” is
to be extended beyond the human species, how can “the economy” be
represented as a tangled space of negotiated interdependence between humans
and non-humans?

 Furthermore, the ecological crisis and the enlargement of the scales of
territorial design are requestioning the project of urbanism, the future of
architecture, landscape and infrastructure design and the relations between
design, life sciences and the natural world. In the age of climate crisis
and natural resource scarcity, what novel options for urban design and
urban living are worth considering? What experiments are currently under
way in art, technology and aesthetics to face down the conditions of
degradation and disaster?

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OISHIK SIRCAR

oishiksircar at gmail.com
oishik.sircar at utoronto.ca