The Harvard Humanities Center Graduate Student Conference
April 25-26, 2008
Call for Papers
Instability and Decomposition:
19th- and 20th Century Moments in Art, Literature, Philosophy and Technoscience
Over the 19th and 20th centuries the humanities often insisted on discussions that presuppose or argue for some version of stabilization: units of scientific measurement are standardized, pidgins either stabilize as creoles or die, boundary work done by communities of experts serves to police and preserve their domains, and works are composed in styles and genres of writing that in turn may come to be cemented.
The Harvard Humanities Center Graduate Student Conference for 2008, which will take place on April 25-26, follows a different track. In the four broadly construed areas of art, literature, philosophy and technoscience, we wish to attract provocative contributions from graduate students, postdoctoral students and junior faculty that parse instability, glissement, decomposition or desovereignization as manifestly productive forces. In art, what are the effects of the growing instability and radical expansion of materials, spaces, and techniques? How is artistic production and reception reconfigured by computers and by engineering systems? In literature, what are we to make of modes of writing that explore narrative possibilities in ways that complicate the notion of genre? In philosophy and theory, how might we read the fact that ownership and authorship with respect to many problems and tools is claimed and shared well beyond the bounds of the dominant analytic tradition? Or in technoscience, what consequences follow from the collapse of certain structures and ecologies of knowing? These are illustrative questions only; all submitted abstracts showing some relation to our main theme will be given careful consideration.
Abstracts of up to 300 words should include your name, institutional affiliation, and email address. These should be submitted by email to Séverine Meunier (meunier@fas.harvard.edu) and Lambert Williams (lwilliam@fas.harvard.edu). The deadline for abstract submission is March 7, 2008. Those whose abstracts are selected for the conference will be informed by March 22, 2008. Limited funds may be available to defray the cost of travel and hotel stays in Cambridge.