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