Susanna Burghartz and Anna Reimann (Univ. of Basel), Bruno Blondé, Alessandra De Mulder, and Charris De Smet (Univ. of Antwerp) (Web)

Venue: University of Basel
Time: 03.-04.02.2022
Proposals by: 30.09.2021

In recent decades, the consumption history has moved beyond the initial historiography surrounding the ‘birth of a consumer society’. Rather than documenting changing consumer patterns, the focus has increasingly shifted to cultural and symbolic elements, the so-called ‘active consumer’, and the entanglement of production and consumption. The quest for the cultural also sparked new interest in the languages of consumption, not only textual, but also visual and material.

This workshop, co-hosted by the Universities of Basel and Antwerp, aims to foster our knowledge of the languages of consumption in this era of critical transitions. It will do so by bringing together and discussing new perspectives across a broad range of languages and regions, also welcoming contributions beyond the Atlantic World.

The purpose of the workshop is to highlight the importance of looking at a variety of consumption practices, historical actors and their experiences through a myriad of discourses.

The organizers especially welcome papers addressing the following topics:

• How can we understand the history of consumption through language? And how can we (re-)assess the role of advertisements, trade cards, posters, visual representations and other forms of publicity?
• Can we assess the specific importance of (multi)lingual contexts through the development of a comparative research perspective?
• How do cities across the urban hierarchy and the countryside resonate through the languages of consumption?
• What can consumer discourses tell us about the (re-)production of social inequalities including colonialism and slavery?
• How do digital methods enhance our understanding of different languages of consumption?

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Project „Non-anthropocentric Cultural Subjectivity“ at the University of Warsaw (PDF)

Time: 03.-05.02.2022
Venue: University of Warsaw and virtual space
Proposals by: 15.11.2021

• Keynote lecture: Karen Barad, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz

The following thematic sections are planned:

1. Cultural heritage and the agency of nature
2. Re-presentation and re-cognition of non-human agency (cultural representations)
3. Performativity of agential realism and diffractive reading of literature
4. Agency, Subjectivity and Performativity in Contemporary Fiction from a Feminist Perspective
5. Non-human and more-than-human agency in performances of harmonious interspecies relationships
6. Agency and (Inter)subjectivity in After Modern-Society
7. Agency of/in digital culture

A common-sensical definition of agency is “the ability to act in a given environment”. This definition, however, requires clarification of what “acting”, “ability”, and even “environment” are. Consequently, the definition suggests a set of questions that should be probed further.

For a long time, acting and agency were seen as components of a metaphysically and religiously founded patriarchal order and thus formed a basis for the imperial understanding of colonial power, which cemented the one-dimensional determination of active impact and passive sub-ordination. This understanding was expressed in all areas of both private and public life, grounding all possible systems of oppression. We can detect it in gender-based oppression, as well as in the class structure of society, and in the machinations of world politics. At the latest since the establishment of the Cartesian view of nature, agency has also been restricted to human beings who – as thinking subjects – have gained absolute power of influence in relation to the natural world, which has been degraded to a collection of objects, without any potential for action and agency.

This state of affairs began to change very late, when … read more and source (Web).