The 10th European Society for Literature, Science and the Arts Conference.
Theme: Control
Stockholm June 14-17, 2016
While the birth of biopolitics at the “threshold of modernity” made politics itself a matter of controlling and modifying life processes, it seems evident that a whole string of developments over the last few decades have given birth to new modes of control. For example, ways of influencing, shaping, directing, and restricting human and nonhuman animals, organisms, processes, systems, motions, and behaviors change alongside developments in technology and science, in modes of production, in the globalization of neoliberal capitalism, and in geopolitical and postcolonial processes. Since contemporary modes of control make it possible to influence all levels and forms of life, the spectrum under discussion reaches from laboratories experimenting with stem cells and live tissue, to media representations of war and climate change, to enactments and discourses of security, to the policing of borders and migration, to mention a very few. The representations, experimentations, and expressions of literature, science, and the arts provide examples of as well as challenges to the various mechanisms of control. We hereby invite individual or panel proposals engaging with the notion of control in relation to topics such as:
* security, including biopolitical-, climate-, food-, and human security, surveillance, digitalization and debt as a mode of governance.
* borders, including the history of borders; migration, diaspora and borders; the precariat in and outside the nation; borders between the human and non-human.
* war, including the political, cultural, juridical and philosophical stakes of the role of techno-science, visual culture and hyper-communication.
* climate, including the affective, technological and political gymnastics of climate control as well as the fascination with that which escapes prediction and preparation.
* life, on the verge of extinction and in the shadow of the Anthropocene, including life as the limit of control, as uncontainable, excessive, recalcitrant, and insistent.
* animals, including animal agency; intersectional approaches to species, gender, race and more; animal spaces and place-making; animal representations.
* bacteria, including theoretical, literary, and artistic engagements with the relationship between humans and the microbial world.
* desire, including the link between control-desire and: the media; gender; sexuality; pleasure; private/public; agency/passivity; and the beauty industry.
Artists are invited to present theoretical work in any of the streams but are also particularly invited to send proposals (for installations, exhibitions …) to the Control-Experiment exhibition. Descriptions of streams can be found on the conference homepage.
Submission:
Deadline for individual abstracts or panel proposals is December 14th. Individual abstracts should be 250 words. Panel proposals must include three individual abstracts as well as an additional paragraph describing the focus of the panel, including a title. Submissions and inquiries should be made to info@control2016.com