ANNOUNCEMENT

2nd International Conference The Humanities to Come

The Humanities and Science,
Dialogues / Resistances / Praxis
June 7-9, 2023

The Institute of Critical Studies in the Humanities (IECH, UNR-CONICET)

and the School of Humanities and Arts of the National University of Rosario
(FHyA UNR) are pleased to invite you to the 2nd International Conference
“The Humanities to Come: The Humanities and Science,
Dialogues/Resistances/Praxis” to be held on June 7-9, 2023.
For the last three decades, we have been witnessing a transformation in
contemporary thought: a critical review of the divorce between scientific and
humanistic cultures, understood as an expression of the resistance of
modern Western epistemology to assume the register (both symbolic and
non-symbolic) of the Other in all its manifestations. Some theorists
characterize this process as a material turn, highlighting the emergence of a
renewed interest in materiality and the processes of materialization in
beings and things that has been taking shape, with different intensities, since
the late 20th century. This change implies a commitment to a differential
integration which would lead, as has been proposed by several authors
(Karen Barad, Rosi Braidotti, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton,
among others), to a more abstract and non-binary materialism, now an
urgent need. This implies a revision of received ideas about matter as a
uniform and inert substance, or as socially constructed, and brings tothe fore
new stories about its procedural nature, its formative force, and its capacity
for self-organization: matter, an active force, would not just be given shape
by human experience and the social sphere, but would coproduce them.
In this context, the Humanities are reconfiguring their link with the social,
exact, and natural sciences from a posthumanist, antispeciesist perspective;
one, of course, deeply critical of the opposition between nature and culture.
The notion of the Anthropocene questions this binary relationship based on
an ontological dualism and on the hypothesis of human exceptionality, which
has led to an environmental emergency whose consequences we have not
yet fully apprehended.
The Humanities, in an active dialogue with science, with artistic practices,
and with various kinds of environmental activism, actively intervene in the
production of meaning and the orientation of policies regarding these issues.
The 2nd International Conference “The Humanities to Come: The
Humanities and Science, Dialogues/Resistances/Praxis” is an invitation to
discuss the theoretical, methodological, political, aesthetic, and ethical
aspects in this reconfiguration of contemporary thought, in order to reflect
on the effective possibilities of a life in common and to promote an attentive
and collaborative listening between the Humanities and science.

M ain T opics

 The Humanities and Science: Converging concepts, problems, and praxis.

Debates, dialogues, and historical resistances. Transdisciplinarity.
Policies for science.

 New Materialisms: The centrality of life in the Humanities. Emotions,

body, and language. The affective turn. Knowledge embodied, extended
and situated. Materialism and speculative realism.

 Posthumanisms: The redefinition of the concept of “humanity” based on

dialogues with ethology, biology, and biological anthropology.
Transdisciplinary paths in Posthumanities.

 Time and Temporalities in the Humanities and Science: Definitions and

historicities around a transversal concept. Constructions and
articulations of time and space in common.

 Subjectivities between Humanities and Science: Convergent

constructions around subjectivity; dialogues between psychoanalytic
theory, neuroscience, philosophy of mind, sociology and aesthetics.

 Environmentalisms: Assemblages and agencies. Environmental

Sciences-Humanities. Arguments and debates about “nature”. Activism
and artivism.

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This will be an in-person event. The options for registration, teams, organizers, and guests will be
detailed in the First Conference Statement. For more information, please email
lashumanidadesporvenir@iech-conicet.gob.ar.