Call for Papers: Feminism, Science & Materialism conference
Graduate Center, City University of New York
February 14-15, 2013
Keynote Speaker: Karen Barad
In the past decade, feminist theory has elaborated new materialist perspectives to re-imagine nature, biology, and matter more generally and to critically address new developments in biology, physics, neuroscience and other scientific disciplines. This scholarship revisits the relationship between human corporeality and subjectivity, questions and redefines the boundaries of human and non-human and nature and culture, and elaborates on their mutual entanglements. New feminist theories address materialization as a complex and open process and matter as lively and productive.
This conference, organized jointly by the Center for the Study of Women and Society and the Committee on Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the Graduate Center, will engage with feminist perspectives on the onto-epistemological questions raised by the materialist turn. We invite papers from various disciplines that address a wide range of issues, including, but not limited to:
– The intellectual and scientific context of the new turn toward materialism
– The relation of matter — including the biological body — to the social.
– The relation between new materialism and previous materialisms (such as Marxism and phenomenology) and particularly their feminist elaborations. What are the continuities and discontinuities between feminist materialisms from the 1970s thru the current moment?
– The insights, knowledge and methodologies offered by the new materialist studies of science. What new frontiers have they opened? What can the “new sciences” offer for feminist theory?
– The political implications of neo-materialism for feminism as a project, theory and a movement for social justice. How can we account for durable hierarchies and the normative production of gender, race, class and sexuality within new materialist frameworks?
– Critical applications of “agential realism,” as elaborated by Karen Barad, and other theoretical innovations for addressing material-discursive relations and the epistemological questions they raise
– Empirical research using materialist feminist frameworks
Space for paper presentations is limited. To apply, please send an extended abstract of 1000 words and a short bio to feminism.science@gmail.com by November 1, 2012.
