[csaa-forum] Life in an Age of Death - Call for Panels - Australian Anthropological Society Conference, 4-7 December, James Cook University

[Rodd, Robin]

Dear Colleagues,

The Call for Panels and Roundtables is now open for AAS2018 and will close on May 7. The conference will take place 4-7 December 2018 at the Cairns campus of James Cook University in Cairns, Queensland. The 2018 conference aims to promote the use of innovative formats in presentations.

Link to conference website: https://www.aasconf.org/2018/

Please read more on the theme<https://www.aasconf.org/2018/theme> of this year’s conference "Life in an age of death", and the formats, rules and instructions on the Call for Panels and Roundtables page<https://www.aasconf.org/2018/call-for-panels>.
All contributions should be submitted via the Call for Panels and Roundtables page on the conference website (the "propose your panel" link is beneath the rules and instructions).

If you have any questions, please email <admin at aasconf.org><mailto:admin at aasconf.org>

Looking forward to welcoming you to Cairns!

AAS2018 organising team
w: https://www.aasconf.org/2018/
e: admin at aasconf.org<mailto:admin at aasconf.org>



Life in an age of death

During the first decades of the twenty-first century, the proliferation of life as a generative possibility has become marked by the spectre of death, closure, denial and ends. Ours is an era of precarity, extinction, militarised inequality, a seemingly boundless war on terror, the waning legitimacy of human rights, a rising consciousness of animal cruelty and consumer complicity in killing and suffering, and the global closure of decolonial and socialist windows of emancipation. Artificial intelligence and post-human technology-flesh interventions have become sources of existential threat to be secured against, rather than means of freeing, or otherwise expanding life. Mbembe (2003) first developed the notion of necropolitics in relation to ‘assemblages of death’, zones where technology, economy and social structures bind together to reproduce patterns of extreme violence. Following Foucault, he envisaged a distribution of the world into life zones and death zones. While we can readily identify zones of life and death on these terms, the imaginaries of death have increasingly colonised life zones.

This conference seeks to embrace this moment in history in all its roiling complexity, challenge, and specificity. It asks what accounts for this current interest in the spectre of Death in the anthropological imagination? What sorts of life—social, cultural, technological, creative—emerge in spaces pregnant with death and other life-ending spectres? What new horizons of fear, hope and possibility emerge? What kinds of new social formations, subjectivities and cultural imaginaries? What social and cultural forms might an affirmative biopolitics, where the power of life is regained from the spectre of death, take? What new strategies of engagement, activism and refusal?



Dr Robin Rodd
College of Arts, Society and Education
James Cook University
Townsville, Qld, Australia, 4811
e: robin.rodd at jcu.edu.au
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