Politics, Bodies, and the Earth

The Department of Philosophy at Memorial University of Newfoundland will be hosting a philosophy graduate conference entitled Politics, Bodies, and the Earth from March 8th to 10th, 2018.

Several thinkers throughout the philosophical tradition take up the relationship between metaphysics, the body, and politics. While thinkers like Hegel, Schelling, and
Deleuze have demonstrated an essential connection between the political and the metaphysical, others such as Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault have shown that these concerns must necessarily be considered in terms of their embodiment. This conference seeks to explore the dynamic relationships between politics, metaphysics, and bodies.
More recently, the study of metaphysics has tended towards the topics of nature and the earth, as exemplified in the works of Jane Bennett, Déborah Danowski, Bruno Latour, Timothy Morton, Isabelle Stengers, and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro. We are interested in considering the relationships between politics, bodies, and metaphysics both as they stand, and also in light of recent turns in metaphysics towards the natural and the earth. How exactly are these relationships to be understood? What are their consequences? And how are they altered by a metaphysics made entirely natural and grounded in the earth? As the pressures of ecological crises make themselves known, there is good reason to imagine that learning to think the metaphysical nature of the earth and the embodied reality of our politics will play a role in transforming our capacity to think of political solutions. We invite papers from graduate students and junior level researchers considering any facet of this topic.

Topics to be considered may include but are not limited to:

• the relationships between politics, bodies, and metaphysics
• the relationships between politics, bodies, and metaphysical philosophies of nature or the earth
• the body or embodiment as mediator between metaphysics and politics
• the hermeneutics of embodiment
• aesthetics and the political body
• feminist interpretations of embodiment and political bodies
• feminist ontologies
• political ecology
• the anthropocene and the political philosophy of climate change
• naturalistic metaphysics and its political implications
• defences of transcendental metaphysics in light of recent naturalisms
• ecophenomenology

Keynote Speaker: John Russon, University of Guelph

Extended deadline for submission: January 16th, 2018

Speakers will be allotted 25 minutes for presentations followed by ten minutes for discussion. Please send abstracts of no more than 500 words to munphilgrad2018@gmail.com no later than January 16th, 2018. Abstracts should be prepared for blind review. Please include your name, paper title, and institutional affiliation in your email. Applicants will be notified of the results of the review process by January 22th, 2018.
Please contact munphilgrad2018@gmail.com for more information or with any questions, comments, or concerns.