Suspensions: Atmospherics of the Anthropocene
Knowledge/Culture/Ecologies International Conference
November 15-18, 2017 – Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago – Chile.
http://knowledgeculture.org

Convenors
Manuel Tironi (Instituto de Sociología, P. Universidad Católica de Chile)
Cristián Simonetti (Programa de Antropología, P. Universidad Católica de
Chile)

Confirmed speakers
Bronislaw Szerszynski, Lancaster
Timothy Choy, UC Davis
Nicholas Shapiro, Chemical Heritage Foundation and Public Lab

Articulated in the quarters of the earth sciences, the Anthropocene has
brought geological matters and imaginaries to the critical attention of
social scientists. Rocks, strata, tectonics and other geological beings and
processes saturate the discourses around and about the Anthropocene.

This panel aims at expanding the theoretical scope on the Anthropocene by
attuning to air, breathe, volatility, atmospheres and suspension as modes of
attending to the more-than-solid ecologies of the Anthropocene. We ask: what
temporalities, phenomenologies, embodiments, and politics does the
Anthropocene invoke when thought in aerial, eolic, respiratory or
atmospheric terms? What does it mean for theory and action to think the
Anthropocene and our present environmental challenge as a form of
suspension?

We thus take suspension as an analytics pointing to different meanings and
conditions in an anthropogenically intervened planet. Forms of suspension
whirling around discussions on the Anthropocene, include:

* First, suspension as the condition of being immersed, carried and
enlivened by aerocenic forces, but also intoxicated –and often harmed– by
volatile chemical toxicants produced relentlessly yet accretively in our
late liberal present.
* Suspension also as a way of relating and dwelling that problematizes
conventional assumptions on surfaces and movements as key tropes to think
the unfolding of life on Earth.
* Suspension, finally, as politics: as a state of not-quiteness, of
in-betweenness and exception, a form of conviviality and sociality that rest
on the temporal withholding of citizenship, locality and identity proper of
21st century politics.

We invite papers, and other non-standard interventions, to inquire about
these and other similarly emerging suspensions

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The call for papers and media work closes 26 May, 2017. For further details,
please contact us at metiron@uc.cl. Or submit directly via the
online submission form.