Conference Call For Papers

CALL FOR PAPERS

DePaul University Department of Philosophy,
In Conjunction with Chicago’s Institute for Nature and Culture
18th Annual Philosophy Graduate Student Conference
April 9-10th, 2011
…natura urbi en horto et orbi…

Topic: Urban Nature and the Praxis of Denaturalization

Keynote Speaker: Dr. Timothy B. Morton*

Philosophers have had a long-standing relationship with cities.  Their departure from the hubbub of the metropolitan center can be mildly remarkable – recall Phaedrus and Socrates uncharacteristically strolling in the countryside.  In contrast, Thoreau famously walked out of town towards wilderness on the western horizon, and an entire discipline strolled after him.  A hundred years after Thoreau, Murray Bookchin, an old-fashioned eco-anarchist, chides the “lazarus stratum of the urban population that exists partly on the dole, partly on crime, partly on the sick fat of the city.”  Indeed, environmentalists, environmental scientists in particular, historically have not relished urban environments.

In a relatively recent turn, this primary consideration of nature as wilderness has been supplanted by an analysis of nature as it appears, functions, disappears and dysfunctions in urban landscapes.  Urban nature, even urban ecology, if it is not immediately taken as an oxymoron, may signify metaxy itself, in all its maddening valences and yet revolutionary potential.  Conspicuous and interstitial, planned and spontaneous, nature in urban landscapes mixes and melds the supposedly authentic with the synthetic, the original with its copy, the animal and the human, bare life and technology.  It instantiates hybridity.  It incarnates complicity.  And for this reason, the study of urban nature necessitates inter-disciplinarity.  It is time for philosophers to welcome the prodigal environmental laborer home.

In a world where more than 3.5 billion people live urban-ly (if not urbanely), we ask what “nature” means for the city and for the world.  We encourage a rallying of all the resources of theoretical analysis dispersed across the university today.  Beginning where we find ourselves, we invite classically philosophical papers which interrogate the nature/culture divide and union in fresh and fortuitous ways.  But we hope for much more.  We solicit theoretical work that bedecks, that creeps, that tangles, and that even burgeons in the humus of philosophy.  This, of course, includes but is not limited to papers on the rural/urban gradient, on monstrosity, metamorphosis, transformation and cosmetic surgery, on the muddied origins of social contract theory, on the constitutive exclusion of the expressly raced or the feminine, on the sexy-ugly categorizations of sustainability, resilience, resistance, stable states, socio-ecological systems, and in fact on the entire lexicon of social-ecological systems.

This conference calls not only those in philosophy and environmental studies, but also those in …
Feminism            Queer Theory             Critical Race
Psychoanalysis             Urban Studies            Geography
Architecture             Rhetorical Criticism         Phenomenology   
Aesthetics             Literary Criticism         Political Science

The deadline for submissions is January 31st, 2011.  All submissions should be sent electronically to depaul.philosophy@gmail.com.  Papers should be 12 double-spaced pages in length or less and must be prepared for blind review: please include biographical information (name, contact information, university affiliation) in your email or cover letter but no identifying marks on your paper itself.  For more information, please contact Perry Zurn at perry.a.zurn@gmail.com.
*Dr. Timothy B. Morton hails from the University of California Davis.  His wide-ranging interests include literature and the environment, eco-theory, philosophy, biology, physical sciences, literary theory and food studies.  He has published over sixty essays and nine books, the most recent of which just appeared this April, at the hand of Harvard University Press, and is entitled, The Ecological Thought.  We are honored to have Dr. Morton join us for this conference.

Perry Zurn (perry.a.zurn@gmail.com)
DePaul University Philosophy Department
2352 N. Clifton Ave., Suite 150
Chicago, IL 60614
513-255-4842