2nd Beyond Humanism Forum
8th and 9th of July 2021
Glocal Metahumanities. A “Posthuman Studies Reader” Symposium
Organizers: Jaime del Val, Evi Sampanikou, Stefan Lorenz Sorgner, Jan Stasienko
How to enable plural modes of relation that do not assume a universalistic, homogenising paradigm of globalisation and which are at the same time exceeding an isolated locality? The idea of the Glocal haunts discourses critical with globality for decades. What could post-trans-metahumanistic approaches provide to this debate in challenging not only discourses, but also practices, media and a reinvention of sensibility? How to develop a new care for ourselves, others and the Earth in times of Surveillance Capitalism, when the algorithms in our pockets defy every SF imagination? How to deal with the global systemic abuses and exploitation of other humans, nonhuman animals and the planet, when dominant models of consumption are covering Africa with digital waste, the oceans with plastic and space with garbage; when production is delocalised in an invisible slavery, crossing oceans in giant cargo ships, polluting, when data centres consume astronomic amounts of energy while bodies are increasingly immobile and atrophied, clicking on screens in the Internet Panoptic, as climate change rises and with it pandemic outbreaks? What singularity of planetary disruption is “the Global” pointing to? And how could one decentre that vortex in ways that don’t reproduce the grand mistakes of humanism and colonialism? Is the all-too-human a Trash-human, and how to revert its planetary Unhancement? How to regain the Innocence of becoming and the movement of creative evolution? How to move on towards a Planetary Health?…
…Perhaps a world of partial connections that assume the undesirability of subjecting the universe to a homogenising vision, a world where the irreducibility of experience to pure quantification can be claimed back against the onset of generalised flattening? A world of foams rather than globes (as Sloterdijk would say)? Or… and… if… what about…? The recently published Posthuman Studies Reader[1] gives us a starting point for discussion and an opportunity to reflect upon these and other pressing questions from a multiplicity of diverse and even divergent perspectives, staging a more than necessary plurality for contestable futures and ecologies to come.
This second online Beyond Humanism Forum[2] will bring together once more distinguished scholars and thinkers from Africa (Nigeria), Australia, South and North America (Chileand US), Asia (Philippines and India), Middle East (Israel) and Europe (Greece, Poland, Italy-Germany, Spain and UK), for a plurifocal post-trans-metahumanistic exchange of situated bodies across and beyond regions.
PROGRAMME:
1st day – 8th
of July 2021
10.45am-2pm CET
10.45-11am Introduction
Jaime del Val – Spain
Jan Stasienko – Poland
Evi Sampanikou – Greece
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner – Italy/Germany
11-11.30 am
Carmel Vaisman – Israel
11.30-12 am
Joseph Reylan B. Viray – Philippines
12-12.30 pm
Nina Sellars – Australia
12.30-1pm
Discussion among and announcements by the organizers
1pm-1.30pm
Anna Markopoulou – Greece
1.30-2 Discussion
2nd day – 9th of July 2021
4.45pm-8pm CET
4.45-5pm Introduction
Jaime del Val – Spain
Jan Stasienko – Poland
Evi Sampanikou – Greece
Stefan Lorenz Sorgner – Italy/Germany
5-5.30pm
David Pearce – UK
5.30pm-6pm
Nicolás Antonio Rojas Cortés – Chile
6-6.30pm
Marcin Garbowski – Poland
6.30-7pm
Leo Igwe – Nigeria
7-7.30pm
N. Katherine Hayles – USA
7.30-8pm
Discussion
[1] Schwabe Verlag, 2021, Sampanikou and Stasienko Eds.
[2] upon a second postponement of the Beyond Humanism Conference in Lesvos due to the pandemic crisis.