The University of Wrocław organises a Conference on the Anthropocene, with the participation of the Nobel Prize laureate Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk

The University of Wrocław invites Arqus PhD students and early-stage researchers to participate in the Conference “The Anthropocene: from boundaries to bonds. Interdisciplinary crossovers in knowledge development” that will take place next 19th and 20th October 2023 at Wrocław, a beautiful city in south-west Poland. The Conference is organised by Ex-Centre, the Academic Research Centre of the Faculty of Letters (University of Wrocław) and the Academia Europaea Wrocław Knowledge Hub. Olga Nawoja Tokarczuk, winner of the 2018 Nobel Prize for Literature and co-founder of the Ex-Centre, will participate in the event, making it an exceptional opportunity for young researchers to share their knowledge and experience with her.

The Conference aims at investigating the potential of inter/trans/multidisciplinary alliances in research on the Anthropocene and the importance of such disciplinary border-crossings for producing knowledge that can not only meet the challenges of the scientific kind, but also be transferrable to the social sphere.

The fact that the Anthropocene poses an unprecedented challenge urging political action at global and local levels has been already evidenced by activists, NGOs, political groups and researchers across the world. Governance models so far have been involved in the crucial conflict between the harshness of data forecasting catastrophic scenarios and the fear to decrease consumption and extraction of resources.

By bringing together scholars from many areas of research inquiry, the seminar aims at exploring the possibility of inter and multidisciplinary scholarly work on developing accountable knowledge that needs to be subsequently translated into social and cultural narratives: How do we cooperate across the boundaries within academia, in politics and social organizations as we strive to address the Anthropocene? How do we create new ways of relating (intra- and interspecies) and turn the shattering experience of boundary-crossing into active bond-making through science, politics and various forms of activism?

The keynote speakers and the members of the Scientific Board of the Conference bring together a large number of internationally recognised experts from European and American universities. Individual presentations, thematic panels and roundtables on the following main topics are encouraged:

• The geopolitics of modernization: capitalist (Capitalocene) and socialist (communist) models; extractivism and coloniality.
• Cartographies of Anthropocene-generated displacements.
• Anthropocene(s) in critical thought, arts and cultural narratives: apocalyptic narratives; ecomodernism and narratives of hope; the role of art in imagining better futures; and the Anthropocene art.
• Social temporalities (political, cultural, etc.) and planetary (geological) temporalities.
• Programs promoting climate care: forms of intervention, the appealing value, viability of plans, translationality/transferability of premises.
• Local struggles and resilience: decarbonization, transition to renewable energy, grassroots and cross-border practices of sustainability and restoration.
• Anthropocene pedagogies: how and what to teach about the Anthropocene to various social and age groups?
• Affective Anthropocene: anxiety, grief, mourning, denial, hope.
• Indigenous knowledges as models for sustainability and environmental justice struggles.
• Planetarity of ecological imagination and thought vs. globalism of consumer markets.
• New ontologies: ecological catastrophe as an example of “hyperobjects”; materials and their processes; interdependencies of life and non-life; non-human (more-than-human) agencies and the possibilities of new relationality for the human, the non-human and more-than-human.

The deadline to submit abstract proposals (20 minutes for individual papers; 60 minutes for panels; 45 minutes for roundtables) is 31st May 2023. The abstract proposals should be accompanied by a short bio-note and sent to anthropoceneconf@gmail.com.

There is no conference fee. The organizers may offer a small travel refund to a limited number of PhD students and emerging scholars.

For more information, please visit the following website or download the leaflet of the conference.