Posthumanism and the Limits of Ability
November 3 - 4, 2022
Location
Behavioral Sciences Builduing
Address
1007 W. Harrison St, Suite 153, Chicago, IL 60607
Calendar
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This colloquium will consider how notions of dis/ability signify in the post-pandemic contemporary and how they have developed historically. What is the relation between ability and the human? What moral assumptions accompany the use of these terms? How do theoretical considerations of the limits of the human informed by posthumanism intersect with reflections on ability and disability? The extension of life and the optimization of health stand as the highest ideals of the contemporary West: any human who lives long enough will experience their “ability” as dependent upon prosthetics or technology, tools that are primarily available to the global rich—who consequently displace their anxieties about vulnerability and dependence onto the poor, onto ethnic, sexual, gender and racial minorities, and onto non-human beings. Within Germany and the U.S., contemporary discourses about ability and humanness trace a history of eugenicist ideologies that conflict with narratives of social justice progress.
The Humanities scholars and artists gathered for this event will consider the potentialities of live theater, of narrative, of film, of literary aesthetics, and of art to help us rethink the destructive binaries of human/ non-human, dis/abled, valuable/waste, productive/parasitic, organic/inorganic etc.
https://german.uic.edu/events/posthumanism-and-the-limits-of-ability/
Date posted
Aug 23, 2022
Date updated
Jan 11, 2023