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Plenary speakers:

Janina Wellmann (Gotha Research Centre, University of Erfurt)

Author of Biological Motion: A History of Life (2024) and The Form of Becoming: Embryology and the Epsiemology of Rhythm, 1760–1830 (2017)

Howard Caygill (CRMEP, Kingston University London)

Books include: (2020),  (2017) and e (2013)

Call for papers

This conference is concerned with mapping the concepts of "life" and "death" in contemporary philosophy and social theory with regard to the related problematics of extinction, reproduction, resistance and survival. There has been an increasing presence of each of these concepts in recent debates, whether through the growing significance of the history of the life sciences for histories of philosophy, the importance of reproduction, social death and ecology to contemporary critical theory, or their representation in contemporary activist and socially engaged art practices. 

Concepts of life and death appear to move freely between each of these domains, with little account of their respective relations. The object of this conference is therefore to examine the various instantiations of these concepts in practices of knowledge production, art, activism and politics, in order to map their more general, transdisciplinary philosophical articulation.

We welcome all papers that might contribute to this endeavour, with particular regard to four problematics: 

1. The development of concepts of life and death in the history of philosophy, particularly with respect to the life sciences.
2. The critical examination of the ways in which the concepts of life and death are explicitly or implicitly employed in ecological and environmental discourses, and the ways in which such employment obfuscates or clarifies our understanding of contemporary crises.
3. The nature and significance of a social theory organised around the theorisation of life and death, using such concepts as bio/necro-politics, social death and social reproduction theory.
4. Exemplary forms of transdisciplinarity in the context of contemporary art, aesthetic, activist and broadly political practices which draws upon any of the concepts indicated above.

 Please send 500-word max abstracts to [email protected] by Friday 28 March 2025.