16 Oct On the Beach: Precariousness, Risk, Forms of Life, Affinity, and Play at the Edge of the World
Thursday, October 16-Saturday, October 18, 2014 / 9:30 AM
UCSB (University Center, Humanities & Social Sciences Building & Loma Pelona Center)
“On the Beach: Precariousness, Risk, Forms of Life, Affinity and Play at the Edge of the World,” co-hosted by theBABEL Working Group and the UCSB Literature & the Mind Center, is a 3-day multidisciplinary conference that will explore new directions for humanistic, scientific, and artistic thought and practice suggested by the bio-poetics of the beach. How does the beach, in particular, shape our creativity, intellect, and research enterprises, and vice-versa? How, further, could it serve as a conceptual and material framework for thinking ecology anew, in its earthy, social, and institutional modes, and vis-a-vis the interdependence between all of these. “On the Beach,” as a conference-event, brings together a wide variety of histories and trajectories of “beachy” thinking and art-practice in order to explore the entanglements of the ecological and the institutional, at a time when the defunding of public higher education coincides with looming ecological catastrophe. Featured speakers include: Stacy Alaimo, Benjamin Bratton, Una Chaudhuri & Marina Zurkow, Robin Clarke & Josh Zelesnick, Lowell Duckert, Laurie Finke & Martin Shichtman, Morteza Gharib, Steve Mentz, Marcos Novak, and Tess Shewry.
Sponsored by the BABEL Working Group, the UCSB Center for Modernism, Materialism & Aesthetics, UCSB College of Creative Studies, UCSB College of Letters and Science, the Comparative Literature Program, the Dept. of Art, the Dept. of English, the Dept. of French & Italian, the Dept. of History, the Dept. of Spanish & Portuguese, the Early Modern Center, the Dept. of Film & Media Studies, the Dept. of Germanic, Slavic and Semitic Studies, the Interdisciplinary Humanities Center, the Literature & Environment Center, the Literature & Mind Center, the Medieval and Early Modern Studies Institute, George Washington University, the Medieval Literatures Center, the Medieval Studies Program, the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, Punctum Book, Palgrave Macmillan, the School of Engineering, the School of Humanities & Social Sciences, College of Charleston, and the Transcriptions Center.
For more information, please visit: http://babel-meeting.org/2014-meeting/2014-program/