international conference
CRITICAL POSTHUMANISM

About the Conference

In our second conference in the critical posthumanism series we intent to explore the concepts of actor and agency. A posthuman perspective means, among other things, acknowledging that we live in more than human or not only human world. The post-human world is co-inhabited and co-constituted by other than human actors. Although this epoche is characterized as anthropocene, it doesn’t mean that nature is now completely subordinated to human agency. Instead, we should consider human societies as themselves constructed from a web of relationships between human beings, nonhuman animals, plants, metals, and so on.

In our conference, we would like to address the concepts of actor and agency in the context of more than human world. Without rejecting the idea of the individual, self-reflective, rational, responsible, and autonomous human actor, we would like to focus on other types of agencies – those that are not fully autonomous, but rather co-dependent, that are not rational in the sense of linguistic rationality; that are not individual without being also collective; that are not just individual living beings, but also forces or systems. Our conference aims to discuss various possibilities how to understand relations between different types of agencies with the emphasis on hybrid actor networks and the boundaries and coalitions between various identities.