HUMAN

The 3rd Biennial PARSE Research Conference takes its title Human to prompt an interdisciplinary and international debate on key issues of the contemporary global condition. Politically, culturally and theoretically, it is impossible today to navigate through the dense lattice of emergencies and urgencies without addressing the question of what constitutes the human, inhuman, subhuman and non-human, as well as formulating an adequate response to the anthropocenic threat posed by the human against the planet.

Historically, the category ‘human’ has been instrumental to the justification and practice of sovereignty and universalism in the Western world, insofar as delimiting and differentiating what ‘human’ means has been central to the project of modernity.

Such delineations have centered on questions of self-consciousness and language, intellectual ability in the form of abstract thought, the possession of a soul, tool-making capabilities, genetic inheritance or private property; however, they have demanded demarcations through the production of prohibition and hierarchization, in processes of inevitable social, political, legal, and economic violence.

Drawing on a broad interdisciplinary network of critical, creative, and pedagogical communities, PARSE seeks to stimulate exchange and dialogue about how to reimagine, remake, expose and expand the human vis-à-vis notions of the nonhuman, inhuman, subhuman, posthuman and inhumane. How can we rethink the conditions for a political imaginary capable of structural transformation and justice for human and nonhuman alike? What is at the heart of current debates on the human? What political imaginaries have enabled the current wave of xenophobic and neo-colonial dehumanization? How can the arts respond to what may be termed a crisis in humanity?

The main theme of the 3rd Biennial PARSE Research Conference 2019, Human, will be organised around 6 streams that will identify clusters for thinking about the human and its discontents. PARSE particularly welcomes proposals for papers on any subject within the traditions of art, design, craft, theatre, music, photography, film, literature, and arts education, including those disciplines from social science and the humanities that are operative within the arts.

PARSE welcomes doctoral student submissions, which will be presented in a session dedicated to ongoing doctoral research projects. When submitting please indicate if your submission should be considered for this session.

We welcome contributions that engage with the following topics:

* the inhuman, the subhuman, the body and inscriptions of the human (the contested universality of the human across the divisions of class, race, gender, trans, queer, ableism, neurodiversity)

* the imperiled non-human (the Anthropocene, nature, ecological catastrophe) and the technological non-human and objecthood (tools, machine, nature, world of objects, OOO, robotics, algorithms etc)

* the posthuman, pedagogy and the institution (anti-humanism, anti-anthropocentrism, critique of the humanities, the human produced by the university, knowledge and distinction, disciplines of the human)

* human mobility and nationhood (transnationalism, cosmopolitanism, migration, human rights, personhood)

* biopolitics, necropolitics and the governance of the category of the human

* decoloniality, post- and neo-colonialism (slavery, indigeneity, empire, desegregation, white Suprematism, white privilege)

All queries to: parse@konst.gu.se