Materialisms Unbound: flows, temporalities, formations

CALL FOR PAPERS

Workshop at York University, Toronto, May 7-8, 2015

The humanities and social sciences have recently seen a growing emphasis on materiality in relation to bodies, discourses, economies, affects, nature, culture, technologies, ideologies, assemblages, networks, entanglements, social formations, and latent potentialities. How, in this attention to the material, is our understanding of the social being recast for example in relation to transformations in capitalism, bearing on such topics as im/material labour and precarity? How might conceptions of the relationship between temporality and materialism be changing, especially in regard to the ephemeral, the enduring, to history and to moments and events? How can materialist methodologies be utilized to explore various empirical sites? Emerging out of recent debates on and attention to materialism, as well as variants of realism, this workshop aims to put different materialisms (e.g., “new materialism,” historical materialism) in dialogue and explore the potential and limits of various approaches in diverse research domains, including but not limited to literature, political economy, the arts, security studies, environment, design, science and technology studies, development studies, and political geography.

We welcome theoretical and/or empirical contributions from graduate researchers, scholars, and faculty working in various academic disciplines, which engage any of the themes and topics above and any others that are related.

Confirmed Keynote Presentation: Nick Dyer-Witheford (University of Western Ontario) "Cyber-Proletariat: Global Labour in the Digital Vortex"

If you are interested in presenting a paper or organizing a panel at the workshop, please submit a 300-word-abstract as a Word attachment by February 25, 2015 to yorkcsst@gmail.com. Accepted papers will be announced by mid-March.

Hosted by: Program on Critical Scholarship and Social Transformation at York University http://criticaltransformation.blog.yorku.ca/

Organizers: Robert Latham (Political Science, York), Özgün Topak (Political Science, York), Raju Das (Geography, York)