Beyond Bios Symposium
This event was held at the Event Space (416) in the Susan Wakil Health Building between 27-29 June 2023. Learn more about the Beyond Bios project here.
In an age of intensifying human activity, living conditions are being undermined at a global scale. Colonial capitalist thinking continues to subject humans to racialised hierarchies of worth and exploit natural resources for (some) humans’ ends.
Against this backdrop, posthumanist currents, such as the environmental humanities, new feminist materialisms, and multispecies studies, have highlighted the entanglements of humans with plants, animals, microbes, and fungi, whose meaningful lives and deaths are intertwined with our social worlds. In doing so, these approaches reframe both human and other-than-human entities as matters of concern and care in an age of eco-social unravelling.
This interdisciplinary symposium contributed to these conversations by asking:
- What happens when we think about worlds beyond the categories and boundaries of dominant scientific frameworks, including biology and species?
- What do alternative epistemologies reveal about the substance, scope, and spectrum of life and non-life?
- Alongside matter, what role do immaterial, sacred, ghostly, or otherwise non-secular beings play in power and politics?
- What, in sum, might it mean to imagine and engage with worlds beyond bios?