Kent County Times

Brown University recently issued the following announcement.

Time: All Day (until May 7)

Sponsor: Cogut Institute for the Humanities

Location: Cogut Institute, Pembroke Hall

Room: 305

May 6 – May 7, 2022

“Capitalism and the Human” begins from two closely related premises: 1) that the category of the human is today inseparable from the dynamics of contemporary capitalism and 2) that 21st-century activism cannot evade a critical encounter with the question of the human in its various guises. Topics will include the persistent allure of concepts such as agency, autonomy, and thought; the philosophical implications of ever more invasive technologies of surveillance and governance; the apparent indispensability of the category of the human in demands for racial justice; and the uncertain prospects of species survival.

The events of the last 18 months — in particular, the rising threat of fascism despite Trump’s election defeat, publicly documented episodes of police and vigilante anti-Black violence, ever more menacing dangers of climate change — cast a further inflection upon these topics. What future remains for one of the most influential traditions of 20th-century radical thought, the philosophical critique of the human?

Schedule

Friday, May 6, 2022
10:00 am – 10:15 am	Welcome: Amanda Anderson Opening remarks: Jeremy Gilbert and Timothy Bewes
10:15 am – 12:00 pm	Panel: Anthropocene and Futurity Claire Colebrook, Pennsylvania State University • “‘Anthropos’ Trumps ‘Homo Economicus’” Ashley Dawson, CUNY Graduate Center • “The Human Prospect in an Age of Biocapitalism” Moderator: Marah Nagelhout
12:00 pm – 1:45 pm	Lunch
1:30 pm – 3:30 pm	Panel: Bio-Necro-Sociality Sophie Lewis, Brooklyn Institute for Social Research • “Antiwork Anthrogenesis” Dierdra Reber, University of Kentucky • “Losing Our Minds to Post-Truth: On White Capital, Necroprofit, and Human Futurity” Moderator: Connie Scozzaro
3:30 pm – 3:45 pm	Coffee
3:45 pm – 5:30 pm	Panel: Racial Capitalism Kathryn Yusoff, Queen Mary University of London • “Decapitalizing the Human in the Epoch of the Inhumanities” Richard E. Purcell, Carnegie Mellon University • “Rereading Long ’70s Black Radicalism Against Our Techocapitalist Present” Moderator: TBA

Saturday, May 7, 2022 — Click here to see schedule.

See the conference website for abstracts of the talks.

Free and open to the public. No registration is required. For questions or to request special services, accommodations, or assistance, please contact humanities-institute@brown.edu or (401) 863-6120.

The conference, presented as part of the Collaborative Humanities Initiative, is co-organized by Timothy Bewes, Professor of English at Brown University, and Jeremy Gilbert, Professor of Cultural and Political Theory at the University of East London, who was a visiting professor at the Cogut Institute in spring 2020.

Original source can be found here.