When: Friday, April 19, 2024, 9:30 AM - 5:00 PMWhere: The Octagon, Queen's Building, Mile End
The second Doing IPS Spring Symposium, Navigating Catastrophic Times, brings together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences around thematic roundtables on the Planthroposcene, military imaginaries and theories of time.
This symposium interrogates discourses and imaginaries of intensified crises threatening the survival of individuals, nations, species, and the planet. The menace of multiplying catastrophic events, such as global wars and extinction, can lead to pervasive defeatism and depression or end-time forms of hedonism and thinking.
We explore if and how navigating catastrophic times can also re-energise political discourses and practices as a means to re-assign meanings to a life in peril and to re-locate deflated hopes. We are interested in how apocalyptic horizons move individuals to take action in the present, which is all we have against a felt-approaching end-time. In other words, we are interested in how end-thinking and urgency play a role in politicising environmental challenges, migration, global health, and other issues. In so doing we wish to interrogate the politics of catastrophic thinking to activate imaginaries that stretch, re-write, re-think the future anew.
To unpack these dynamics, the symposium brings together scholars from across the humanities and social sciences around three thematic roundtables on the Planthroposcene, military imaginaries and theories of time.
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