INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON
BODIES IN THE CLIMATE CHANGE ERA (CALL FOR PAPERS)
Konkuk University, Seoul, SOUTH KOREA
Sungkyunkwan University, Seoul, SOUTH KOREA
17-18 April 2020

 

This two-day conference (hosted by Konkuk University, Sungkyunkwan University, and Sichuan University) seeks to address theorizing about the body in the era of climate change. Climate change has had increasingly intimate corporeal, and the widening gap between the rich and the poor has only exacerbated these matters, as has the global rise in right-wing extremism. And while advances in genetic research offer startling rewards of overcoming human vulnerability, they also prompt concern about corporeal borders and boundaries—physical and ethical.

New materialist theories about agency and matter have led to productive analyses of intersections among gender, race, food, sexuality, class, and species as they relate with corporeal issues and climate change. What this Forum Kritika seeks are theoretical understandings of those intersections in the Climate Change Era.

— How can we discuss from literary works and mass media the ways in which various natural materials threaten human corporeal constitution? What, for instance, are the microbial threats we face as the organisms our vaccines and antibiotics control become immune? What are the legitimacy and implications of body upgrading prosthetics, technological body modifications, organ transplants, including the transhumanist desire for homo deus? What are the changing status of the body in constructing human identity, subjectivity, citizenship, and collectivity? What is the ethical care in this critical age of the Anthropocene?

— What are the relationships between violence (ecological, cybernetic, psychological, physical, symbolic, and so on) and the imagined integrity/dis-integration of the body as both an ontological and material space, and how are these relationships impacted by climate change?

— How can we theorize about the ways in which our phobias (ecophobia, transphobia, germophobia, homophobia, and so on) compromise modalities of the production and transformations of bodies?

— How can we theorize about corporeality in body upgrading and modification?

— How important are matters about food and why?

— What can we gain from literary and cultural investigations of non-human corporeality?

 

Submissions must address climate change in some way and may include but are not restricted to the following topics:

•corporeal borders and boundaries, visible and imagined

•the migrating body

•multicultural and multiracial bodies

•trauma, violence, or terror

•queer and transgender citizenship

•monstrous bodies

•disability studies

•body art (implants, painting, piercings, tattoos, scarification, sculpting, shaping) and body modifications

•vegan studies, food, and meat

•coloniality, postcoloniality, and tribal sovereignty

•cyborg bodies, post- and transhumanism, and ecocriticism

•biopolitics and medical engineering of reproduction, sexual identity, and gender

•eco-feminism

•#metoo, sexual harassment, gendered audiences

 

Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words (along with a biographical note of the same length) to Dr. Jonggab Kim (jonggab@konkuk.ac.kr) and Dr. Simon C. Estok (estok@skku.edu) by 01 February 2020. Selected essays will be published in a Special Issue of Kritika Kultura in August 2021.