CEP International Conference

Interweaving Anthropology, Science, and History: Postanthropocentric Novels in the era of Climate Crises.

Deadline for submissions: September 30, 2023

name of the organizer: Dr. Saswat Samay Das 

Organization: Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur

contact email: clificonferenceiitkgp2023@gmail.com

Event dates: 1st to 3rd November 2023 

Place: Department of Humanities and Social  Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur, West Bengal, India

Extended Abstract Deadline: 30 September 2023

This conference organized by the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur in association with the University of Oldenburg, Germany can be attended both online and offline mode.

Coordinator (s):

 Dr. Saswat Samay Das, Liberal Arts and Critical Humanities, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Kharagpur.

Dr. Ananya Roy Pratihar, Communication and Media Studies, Institute of Management and Information Science, Bhubaneswar, India.

Keynote Speakers:

Prof. Dr. Anton Kirchhofer, Professor  of English Literature, Institute for English and American Studies, Literary and Cultural Studies, University of Oldenburg.

Dr. Anna Auguscik, Linguistics and Cultural Studies, Institute of English and American Studies, University of Oldenburg. 

Overview:

With anthropocenity driving the planet towards the brink of extinction the survival of humanity hinges on reconfiguring its relationship with fiction. Rather than merely using narrative spaces to record encounters with phenomenological realities, fiction should become an effective mechanism for actualizing a post-anthropocentric imaginary. John Wyndham’s The Kraken Wakes, Amitav Ghosh’s The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables of Planet in Crisis, Rajat Chowdhury’s The Butterfly Effect, James Bradley’s Clade and Jaspreet Singh’s Face imagine such a world by combining multiple trans-disciplinary strands. In their bid to problematize and transcend the existent anthropocentrism, these writers produce new ecocratic sensibilities through their fictions, searching for what can stand as foundational essences of the post-anthropocentric world that we seek to actualize at this juncture.

Simultaneously, anthropocentric fiction writers maintain a disjunctive relationality with the organization of modern fiction and engage with planetary sciences, emphasizing the need for a "new philosophical anthropology". However, this process partakes of side-lining modern fiction's colonial genealogy and overlooking the degree to which precolonial knowledge systems were integral to planetary and geological sciences. Despite these challenges, anthropocentric fiction offers a powerful means of grappling with our planet's urgent issues and imagining a post-anthropocentric future.

Our conference would then aim to engage with the following questions:

1. In what ways do what we call anthropocene fictions repeat the patterns of modern fiction and in what respects do they strike a radical departure from such patterns, radically transcending the outlooks and characteristics of modernity?

2. How these fictions revisit the conceptual territory of the agency, concomitant with individuations (whether as cultural institutions or as narrative devices) while emphasizing geo-historicity and Planetarity?

3. How do these fictions stand as the production house of philosophical anthropology and the supplemental ally of science?

4. Whether these fictions can be wedded to decolonial and postcolonial concerns or we need an exclusive set of new fictions that can yield what we may call decolonial ecosophy reflecting engagement with archived and minor alternative histories?

5. How specifically might these fictions stand as the ground for working out what Ghosh in his novel Nutmeg Curse calls vitalist praxis? How far do they buttress Dipesh Chakrabarty’s understanding of ecological crises in the light of planetarity and geo-history?

Call for Papers:

We invite papers making an attempt to link fiction with the following concerns and issues but of course not limited within the provided guideposts:

• Modernity, anthropocenity and accelerationism 
• Geo-planetary science and geo-planetary immanentism 
• Geo-history, events and minor histories
• Earth, materiality and smooth spaces
• Actual time and stratigraphy
• The ‘human’ in the context of colonization and decolonization 
• Historicizing the ‘human’ in the context of conceptions of modernity
• New forms of capitalism, cancel cultures and post neo-liberalisms
• coloniality, planetarity, and ecology
• Eco-activisms, new parallaxes, and the decolonial vitalist praxis
• Eco-politics, green capitalism, and ecosophy
• Cultures, stratification, and New Earth
• Capitalist mobilizations and material dynamics

Please send your extended abstract within 500 words to email clificonferenceiitkgp2023@gmail.com by September 30, 2023.

Respective fees(i, ii, iii, iv) for registration and paper presentation 

Participants

i. Offline Participation Fees

ii. Online Participation Fees

iii. Offline Paper Presentation Fees

iv. Online Paper Presentation Fees

• Faculty Members: i- 2500, ii - 1500, iii- 3000, iv- 2000
• PhD. /Post.Doc: i- 1000, ii- 750, iii- 1500, iv- 1000
• M.A students: i- 750. ii- 500, iii- 1000, iv- 750
• Industry: i- 5000, ii-4000, iii- 7000, iv- 3000

All the fees are mentioned in INR.