Call for Papers

Generative Anthropology and Transdisciplinary Inquiry:

Religion, Science, Language, Culture

Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University, Warsaw, Poland,

June 21-23, 2018

12^th Annual GASC (Generative Anthropology Summer Conference)

Plenary Speakers:  Eric Gans; other TBA

The Generative Anthropology Society and Conference (GASC) is pleased to announce its 12^th annual summer conference. The second one in Europe, it will be held at the Cardinal Stefan Wyszynski University, Warsaw, Poland.  Participants can look forward to enjoying Warsaw, a brave city which in its long history has risen many times from the ruins -- Warsaw, a city of Chopin, today full of palaces, theatres, museums, cathedrals and concert halls.

This conference will explore the transdisciplinary potential of Generative Anthropology (GA). Much recent scholarship in the humanities assumes that traditional disciplinary boundaries needlessly limit inquiry into social relations, representations, and technologies. Transdisciplinary fields such as cultural studies, postcolonial studies, science studies, and religious studies, have made important contributions to human understanding. Yet they pursue a diachronic model of historical development which brackets the question of human origin.  In contrast, GA presupposes an emergentist paradigm of culture that starts with a minimal scene of origin.  Rather than synthesizing different fields, GA locates their common origin in representation as the deferral of intra-human violence. In doing so, GA does not set limits to the ethical means humans invent to defer violence but rather points to the possibility of finding the transdisciplinary in that which transcends all disciplines.

Topics might include, but are not limited to, the following – especially in relation to generative anthropology and its priority of fundamental reflection on the human:

·       The “two cultures” (or three? four?)

·       The internet as common culture

•     Interfaces of the biological and social

•     Silicon Valley and the utopian culture of high tech

·       Transdisciplinary aesthetics

·       Retrieving faith traditions as interdisciplinary inquiry

·       Overlapping and intersecting modes of inquiry across the human and natural sciences

·       Engagements with thinkers whose work anticipated transdisciplinary inquiry:  Michael Polanyi, Marjorie Grene, Bruno Latour

·       Science and Enlightenment culture, then and now: complicating the interrelations of the social and natural scientific thinking of the Enlightenment, as historical precedent and contemporary ideal

·       Science and faith: God invents humans invent God invents humans…

Please submit short proposals for 20-minute papers in either Word or PDF format to organizer Magdalena Zlocka-Dabrowska  mzd-edu@wp.pl or to Andrew.Bartlett@kpu.ca by April 1, 2018.