FRONTIERS OF HUMANITY AND BEYOND: TOWARDS NEW CRITICAL UNDERSTANDINGS OF BORDERS - Call for Panels
CHAM – Centre for the Humanities of NOVA FCSH is proud to announce the organisation of its V International Conference on Frontiers of Humanity and Beyond: Towards new critical understandings of borders.
This will be a semi-presential Conference held in FCSH, Lisbon.
The covid-19 pandemic is exacerbating a global-scale conscience on the limits of human life on Earth, and is putting to the fore the mutual interaction between social, cultural and natural processes. A whole new understanding of the essence and role of borders needs to be brought into focus.
The V CHAM International Conference will happen between the 21st and 23rd of July 2021. The call for panels is now open.
The challenges of the early decades of the 21st century relate to the survival of humanity as a species. While the covid-19 pandemic has exacerbated a global-scale awareness of the limits of human life on Earth, climate change has for long been putting to the fore the interactions between social, cultural and natural processes. In this context a whole new understanding of the essence and role of Borders, in its multiple dimensions, needs to be brought into focus, and include as well the notions of physical boundaries and territorial control.
In this sense, the definition of the Anthropocene as a stage in the history of the Earth entails a radical reshaping of the traditional chronological divisions based on a vision of human history disconnected from nature and reduced to the account of social and technological change. Redefining the idea of border in its multiple dimensions, in present days and through history, becomes of critical importance.
Political and geographic frontiers require attention too. Up until the covid-19 crisis, national frontiers seemed to be on a vanishing process: in the post-Cold War world, mass media and popular culture have favoured a narrative of the world open to synergic interconnections. However, this view of globalization has always presented an incomplete picture of reality. Borders, although dispersed and controlled through their constant shifting and movement, may have indeed proliferated rather than disappear, whilst becoming more resistant to particular activities and peoples.
Additionally, the boundaries of human society require renewed critical approaches on issues of gender, class, ethnicity, religious beliefs or ideology. Instituted forms of dehumanization, animalization or reification relate to the establishment of social and cultural frontiers throughout history. A focus on the divisions, intersections and hierarchies between human and non-human species, animals, plants and minerals is of paramount importance.
Finally, rethinking the traditional, culturally mediated relations between beings and objects demands a thorough disciplinary critique. This approach is a means of assessing frontiers in the quest for knowledge as established by modernity in order to overcome their normative representations and to propose new forms of self-consciousness as well as multi- and inter-disciplinarity.
We invite scholars from all humanities and social sciences, as well as from related natural and environmental sciences, to submit panel proposals on the following themes: