CALL FOR PAPERS
Modernity defines its civilization and epoch,
its political desires and ethical norms through the value and
meaning of being human. It is in terms of the rights, needs
and nature of a common humanity that universal laws are conceived
as valid and true. Yet the privileges and benefits conferred
on some by being counted members of a human community, have
regularly corresponded with the exclusion from membership in
the category of the human of others, from whom the rights and
mode of being that follow from recognizing equality are withheld.
Today, if the notion of the human remains essential to progressive
and emancipatory discourses, it is only to the extent that the
human is acknowledged as a strongly contested category - the
vehicle of an aspiration to become human more than the marker
of an uncontroversial mode of being.
This conference aims to explore the multiple sites
at which ‘being human’ encounters limits that contest
and render problematic its force and meaning. These pressures
come not only from acknowledging histories and practices of
exclusion but alongside these, myriad ways of thinking about
the human that come from philosophy, the biological sciences,
environmental studies, political theory, law and religion. How
do the plurality of modern ways of thinking about what it is
to be a human animal, what it is for human life to bear a distinctive
meaning or what it is for political forms to enhance or destroy
humanity, coincide or clash? In what specific ways do biological,
philosophical, spiritual, ecological, legal and political elements
in interpreting the nature and significance of humanity work
with or against one another? What is the purchase of the ‘human’
in the many ‘Humanisms’ intellectually conceived
since modernity – liberal, Marxist, postcolonial, global,
cosmopolitan? What of its relationship with postmodern and poststructural
antihumanisms? If humanity is the subject and object of extensive
technological intervention and construction, how can a ‘nature’
of the human continue to provide a point of reference? Where
do we meet the limits of imagination, of tolerance or of justice
that are so often invested in the sense of ‘shared humanity’?
In war, genocidal violence and acts of terror? How do we contemplate
the finitude of our species in the global conversation on climate
change? And how might we make the encounter with limits the
site of a potential for becoming human rather than a renewal
of violence?
We would welcome proposals that address the conference theme
in the following areas:
• Philosophical approaches to thinking the limits of being
human
• The historicity of the ‘human’ as a concept.
• The ‘human’ in Human Rights and International
Law
• Technology, the human and new humanisms
• Bioethics and the human genome project
• Religious and theological perspectives on being human
• The ‘human’ in colonial and postcolonial
contexts
• Global challenges to being human in this era of rapid
climate change.
Abstracts can be sent to either Debjani Ganguly or Fiona Jenkins
at debjani.ganguly@anu.edu.au,
or fiona.jenkins@anu.edu.au.
The deadline for receiving abstracts is 20
February, 2008. Notification for acceptances
will be sent out by end April 2008.
