Louise Whiteley In 2012, Adam Bencard and I attended the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts (SLSA) conference in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The conference was full of energy, curiousity-driven conversation, a perhaps unsurprising amount of great vegetarian food given all the animal studies scholars, and interdisciplinary in the manner of a delicious banquet rather than a fragmented and depleted vending machine.
Whilst in Milwaukee, I was also introduced to the European chapter of SLSA, and I’m now sitting on the board and very much looking forward to the 8th SLSAeu conference in Turin, Italy this June. The conference theme is ‘Life, in Theory’, and the website contains a full description and a call for papers under several different thematic strands. Deadline is January 31st, submissions info here or via info[at]litsciarts.eu. From the website:
The VIII European Meeting of the Society for the Study of Literature, Science, and the Arts aims to continue the conversation between science and the humanities on the implications for our projected futures of the manipulation, administration, and governance of life forms. The concept of life today no longer provides sufficient ontological ground to distinguish among different forms of life and to guide ethical, political, legal, or medical actions. Thus, a discussion across disciplinary forms of knowledge and theories of life, and the practices they authorize, is literally to confront issues of life and death.
Alongside paper presentations, roundtables, keynotes from the likes of Prof. Robert Esposito and Prof. Cary Wolfe, Adam and I are organizing a public performance event as part of the conference, and a bioart exhibit is also being planned.
And not least, I ‘m looking forward to adding to my collection of conference badge self-descriptions, adding ‘In Theory’ to ‘Nonhuman’, ‘Not What You Think’, and ‘We are* Our Brains’…
*not just
