SAVE THE DATE | Rethinking Relations: Michel Serres and the Environmental Humanities | International Conference @TUD | Nov 9-12, 2022

​Rethinking Relations: Michel Serres and the Environmental Humanities

International Conference, Nov 9-12, 2022, TU Dresden

"So forget the word environment commonly used in this context." (The Natural Contract)

"We have to invent new relations between humans and the totality of what conditions life: the inert planet, the climate, living species, visible things, invisible things, science and technologies, the global community, morality and politics, education and health … We are leaving our world for other worlds, possible ones, and will have to abandon a hundred passions, ideas, customs and norms brought about by our narrow historical duration." (Branches)

This conference is dedicated to dialogues between the environmental humanities and the boundary-defying philosophical thinking of Michel Serres (1930-2019). At least since the English translations of key texts in Hermes: Literature, Science, Philosophy (1982), The Parasite (1982), The Natural Contract (1990), Genesis (1997), The Troubadour of Knowledge (1997), or The Birth of Physics (2000), Serres’ poetic and transgressive exploration of interdisciplinary borderlands and confluences has been recognized as foundational for emerging fields such as literature and science, the posthumanities, science and technology studies, and media ecology. Effortlessly interweaving philosophy of science with literature, myth, geography, history, meteorology, politics, media, and art, his work is mercurial in the best of ways. With a penchant for the poietic processes of the natural world, the baseline of his thinking is an appreciation of complexity, of the ways in which contingency generates newness modelled on the turbulent dynamics of oceans, storms, rivers, flames, clouds, atoms, tectonic plates, and animal collectives. Committed to the incessant circulations between nature and culture, the global and the local, the natural sciences and the humanities, Michel Serres’ books provide an evocative cartography for rethinking the relations among humans, environments, technology, and knowledge, especially in times of eco-systemic disruption and uncertainty.

​This conference extends an invitation to think beyond and with Serres to mobilize his work in relation to disciplines and fields that include media studies, design, literature, history, classics, sociology, philosophy, and psychology. Our international contributors attend to the ecological paradigms that inform both his polyphonic prose and hybrid subject matter to explore modes of generous, reciprocal, and ethical encounters for urgent, transdisciplinary, and experimental responses of the arts and humanities to ecologies in crisis.

Keynotes:

• Timothy Barker (University of Glasgow)
• Vera Bühlmann (TU Vienna)
• Paul Carter (RMIT Melbourne)
• Jeffrey J. Cohen (Arizona State University)
• William Paulson (University of Michigan)
• Stephanie Posthumus (McGill University)
• Julian Yates (University of Delaware)

Visitors are welcome. If you would like to attend, please register by sending an email to rethinking.relations@tu-dresden.de. No registration fee.

For more information and program, see the conference website: www.rethinkingrelations.com

This conference is co-organized by Moritz Ingwersen and Beate Ochsner (University of Konstanz)