Multispecies Modernities: Biocultures Between Science and Fiction - Einzelansicht

MULTISPECIES MODERNITIES SEMINAR CANCELLED

The MA Seminar Multispecies Modernities: Biocultures Between Science and Fiction (Winter Semester WiSe 2020/2021) has been CANCELLED. Please make sure to DEREGISTER and register for another class BEFORE OCTOBER 29, 2020.

[CANCELLED COURSE DESCRIPTION:]
[The class will take place in an online format (asynchronous with some synchronous elements). This graduate seminar begins by asking ”What is Modernity?” and proceeds to examine modernity as an intricate multispecies project. Critically considering concepts of ”species” and their multiple genealogies, we will focus on the diversity and polyvocality of modernity and read it through a variety of genres and disciplines, from biomedical literatures and science fiction to critical race studies and queer theory. In particular, we will be engaging with the conceptual and political impasses that have shaped and continue to animate debates about modernity’s convoluted histories of racism, colonialism and the violent exploitation of human and nonhuman resources. The approach on offer is reflexive, both in terms of the authors we will read, who offer a broad range of responses to modernity’s entanglement with racist, heterosexist, ableist models and practices, and also in its invitation to pay critical attention to our own intellectual, disciplinary and/or political attachments. Informed by the practice of slow scholarship and other movements committed to ”slowing down” against modernity’s investment in progress and expansion, in this graduate seminar we will read texts slowly and deeply, mining for their intertextual and epistemic genealogies while remaining aware of our own situatedness as we extract and circulate the cultural capital of specific texts and authors. Key authors in this critical overview will include Zakiyya Iman Jackson, Mel Chen, Anna Tsing, Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor, Kathryn Yusoff, Susan Squier, Donna Haraway and Bruno Latour.]