-
CFP: Theorizing Decomposition across Space and Time
How might we chart the generative possibilities of decomposition? Often indexing danger, disease, or disgust, decomposition has also emerged across multiple disciplines as a process that upends theorizations of agency, archives, temporality, and offers the promise of re-composing damaged worlds (DeSilvey, 2017; Hage, 2021; Lyons, 2020; Tsing, 2015). This seminar asks how decomposition might unsettle inherited narratives of progress, sustainability, and human exceptionalism, and how it might reshape our methods, archives, and aesthetics. We invite papers that theorize, historicize, or creatively engage decay in its many forms—material, symbolic, political, and aesthetic. We welcome approaches from literature, environmental humanities, STS, media studies, political theory, and the arts, among others. Topics may include: nuclear and petro-archives; architectures and landscapes of containment; cryonics and cold storage; decompositional aesthetics; the politics of durability and waste; and ecological practices of compost and care.
From the entombed plutonium reactors to decompositional art and literature; from cryonic suspension to compost politics; this seminar will explore how processes of breakdown afford new perspectives on how we produce knowledge together in the midst of ecological breakdown and social decay. Together, we will ask how attending to rot and decay, rust and half-lives, death and renewal might transform our methods, imaginaries, and sensibilities.
Please contact Christopher Walker (Christopher.Walker@colby.edu) and Jessie Croteau (jcroteau@haverford.edu) for questions.
https://www.acla.org/seminar/d1a3deb9-9a25-4097-871a-7066ab2200ed
-
0 Replies
Sorry, there were no replies found.
Log in to reply.