ÌÇÐÄTV

Speakers:

Hartmut Rosa (Sociology, Jena University/Max Weber Kolleg Erfurt)
Daniel Hartley (World Literatures, Durham)

Irina Hron, (German Studies, Vienna University/Gothenburg University)

This conference examines the relationship between cultural production and environmental change through the rubric of two related critical terms: flows and floods. A flow – a steady current or stream – is perhaps the defining metaphor of the contemporary world: academic and popular discourse alike is replete with references to the flow of goods, money, energy, information, wealth, resources, and cultures. These flows connect and shape people and places, states and societies, in uneven and unequal fashion. In the current Anthropocene era – where human activity has had significant geological and environmental impact – the stability of these flows is increasingly called into question. The world’s enmeshed currents of wealth, resources and biophysical processes over-flow into destructive literal and metaphorical floods. In times of crisis, flows of energy, people, commodities, and climate become oil spills, ‘tidal waves’ of migrants, flooded markets, and storms. Our conference, therefore, looks to generate discussions on the variety of ways literal and metaphorical flows and floods are represented, registered, and imagined in various forms of cultural production.

Flows and Floods Conference - organized by three PGRs in the Department of English & Comparative Literary Studies.

Entitled Flows and Floods: Changing Environments and Cultures, it promises to be an exciting day of environmental humanities-focused discussion, with a keynote by and (Rice University, USA). Registration is still open until February 16, 2020, and more information can be accessed here.

Hartmut Rosa’s Resonance. A Sociology of our Relationship to the World was published in English translation in June 2019 with Polity Press. Following on from Rosa’s Social Acceleration. A New Theory of Modernity (2013), that designated acceleration as the driving force of modernity, Resonance is an attempt to re-theorise the possibility of a ‘good life’ in an age that increasingly looks at human life in terms of manageable resource and that is dominated by experiences of subject alienation. Combining the traditions of Critical Theory with recent theories of alienation, Resonance is both a critique of contemporary life-world relations and develops a conceptual apparatus to enable us to re-think a utopian horizon of functioning relationships to the world.

German Studies at ÌÇÐÄTV and ÌÇÐÄTV's Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts (CPRLA) mark the publication of Hartmut Rosa's Resonance with a lecture by Rosa and a one-day workshop with colleagues from Literary and Cultural Studies and Social Theory.

Speakers include: Anne Fuchs (Dublin), Elisabeth Herrmann (ÌÇÐÄTV), Irina Hron (Vienna/Goteborg), Doro Wiese (ÌÇÐÄTV), Charles Turner (ÌÇÐÄTV, Helmut Schmitz (ÌÇÐÄTV).

The workshop is generously funded by HRC, ÌÇÐÄTV,

The Centre for Research in Philosophy, Literature and the Arts (CPRLA), and

The School of Modern Languages and Cultures (SMLC)