“Thinking Through Deleuze: Nomadic Subjects, Global Citizenship and Posthumanism” is a transdisciplinary conference that seeks to explore the multitude of ethical and social problems posed by capitalism and its global political order. This global order has marked a shift to what some have called a network society (Castells), a society of control (Deleuze and Foucault), and a new order of Empire (Hardt and Negri). Globalization has radically changed how we understand social life, including how we understand and represent subjectivity, citizenship, and community.
Because Gilles Deleuze’s work provides unique conceptual tools for theorizing the various assemblages—epistemological, ontological, and material—that constitute our lived realities, the organizers seek papers that continue the project of taking up Deleuze’s many “tools” while examining the promises and perils of the global order in the 21st century. If, as scholars such as Braidotti, Casarino, Hardt, and Negri argue, globalization fosters the potential for re-imagining citizenship and how we understand the “human” subject, it also continues to sustain exploitative practices and ideologies. Therefore, in order to address the complexity of our historical condition the conference will provide a space for scholars to consider the various ways in which subjects are affected, or even constrained, by macropolitical structures—political, economic, or social—and the micropolitical resistances they enact against such systems of containment. As scholars have pointed out, these resistances are developed in socio-cultural practices across a wide variety of fields including Performance Studies, Literature, Philosophy, Political Science, Geography, Film and Communication Studies.
We invite proposals for papers on any topic—and from any discipline—that explores the condition of our global world through philosophies of immanence, nomadism, and posthumanism. Papers might consider, for instance:
- Philosophies of immanence and biopower
- Nomadism and current practices of resistance
- Globalization: line of flight or molar line par excellence?
- Social networking: connecting or closing off
- Non-essentialist vitalism
- Agential realism and material-culture processes
- Nomad citizenship and hyper-consumerism
- Affirmative posthuman ethics, or posthumanism through Deleuze?
- From humanism to anti-humanism to posthumanism
- Towards a post-anthropocentrism: after the anthropocentric subject
- Eco-philosophy and new materialism
- Questions of identity/re-thinking subjectivity
- Subjectivity beyond postmodern global capitalism
- Activism and emancipatory politics
- Constructing the “common(s)”
- Nomadic feminism and gender in posthumanism
- Masculinities from a posthumanist perspective
- Temporality and immanent politics
- The biopolitical production of humans, nonhumans, and posthumans
Paper proposals should consist of a title and an abstract of 500 words. Please include a brief biographical note (100 words), and any required technical or audio-visual material.
The deadline for proposals is August 30, 2014. The conference organizers will contact all participants by the end of September.
Please send any inquiries to deleuze.canada@gmail.com.