EcoMaterialisms: Organizing Life and Matter
Department: Comparative Literature
Date and Time: May 15, 2015 | 8:00 AM-5:30 PMEvent Location: Humanities Gateway 1030
Event Details
EcoMaterialisms: Organizing Life and Matter
University of California, Irvine
Friday 15th May 2015
“EcoMaterialisms: Organizing Life and Matter” will bring interdisciplinary graduate work to bear on the ongoing critical discussions grouped under the umbrella of “new materialisms.” While what exactly these new materialisms might be or look like remains a vitally open question, this conference is an attempt to map a number of conceptual coordinates that give this emergent field of inquiry some consistency. As Diana Coole and Samantha Frost write in the introduction to their edited collection on new materialism, “If we persist in our call for an observation of a new materialism, it is because we are aware that unprecedented things are currently being done with and to matter, nature, life, production, and reproduction. It is in this contemporary context that theorists are compelled to rediscover older materialist traditions while pushing them in novel, and sometimes experimental, directions or toward fresh applications.”
While reconfiguring materiality and our relations to environments has significantly opened the scope of our theoretical engagements, there remains in this same gesture the risk of ignoring other potential lines of thought and practice. “EcoMaterialisms” is intended to open a forum for thinking through these possibilities and their attendant problems.