Sink or Swim. Humanities and Arts in the Anthropocene

As part of the postartistic festival Polish Soundtrack. The Last Chance - PRLS & the Anthropocene Lab, UIC are pleased to present “Sink or Swim. Humanities and Arts in the Anthropocene” - cross-disciplinary conference devoted to new research, educational and activist practices in the age of the Anthropocene.

Full programme of the festival is available here: centrumcentrum.xyz/polishsoundtrack_thelastchance.html.

Among the events - sensory, audio and herbal walks, Walk About It, film screenings, Boring Drug concert & DJ set by Vesolo, landscape fieldwork exercises, workshops on DIY survival strategies, premiere of a self-published book co-authored by students of POL150 (Intro to Polish Cinema, 23’).

What to do with the humanities in the age of the Anthropocene? If humanities are in a crisis, as we have been repeatedly told, they are not alone. Anthropocene considered as an epoch, in which ‘things erupt out of humanly defined functions, categories, coordination and meanings, become blasted out of history, to drift and wash ashore into other, less familiar, but at present no less significant, associations’ (Þóra Pétursdóttir) is by its very definition - a time of epistemological crisis. As such, it redefines the scope, methods, objectives and fields of human enterprises. Michael Hardt said at a lecture at the University of Chicago that the theory that will get the academic world out of its current crisis could only come from the field i.e. fieldwork, unorthodox collaborations across disciplines, engagement with social movements, urban activist practices etc. In this vein Polish Soundtrack. The Last Chance seeks to explore new ways of knowledge-making and sharing, experimenting with cross-disciplinary research, educational and collaborative practices of anthropocenic humanities and arts.

Speakers: Michał Paweł Markowski, Ralph Cintrón, Julia Fiedorczuk, Aishath Huda, Łukasz Jastrubczak, Katarzyna Majchrowicz-Wolny, Janek Sowa, Julia Vaingurt

Festival curators - Justyna Wąsik & Beate Geissler with Katarzyna Majchrowicz-Wolny. Main Sponsor & Intellectual Supporter - Michał Paweł Markowski.

Co-Sponsored by the UIC Department of Polish, Russian and Lithuanian Studies, the School of Literatures, Cultural Studies and Linguistics, Institute for the Humanities, and Anthropocene Lab.

All festival events are free and open to the public.