Download the conference program: After Extinction Program
Unless otherwise noted, all events are scheduled in Curtin Hall 175, UW-Milwaukee, 3243 North Downer Ave.
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THURSDAY, APRIL 30
1:00-3:00pm Registration
3:00pm Welcome
3:15pm Conference Introduction, Richard Grusin
Director, Center for 21st Century Studies, UWM
3:30pm Plenary: William E. Connolly
Johns Hopkins University
Introduced by Kennan Ferguson (UWM)
“Extinction Events and Entangled Humanism”
This essay starts by reviewing the limits and dangers of sociocentrism in the social sciences and humanities during a time when neoliberal capitalism and a host of nonhuman force fields with powers of their own bump into one another. It soon turns to a review of two major extinction events in the past that may help to illuminate dangers and possibilities of today: the decimation of 90% of life 250 million years ago and the demise of the Neanderthals 28000 years ago. The essay then attempts to account for the denials and deferrals about capitalist/climate intersections today through an engagement with Nietzsche. It closes with an elaboration of “entangled humanism”, both to challenge humanist exceptionalism and to soften the appearance “post-humanism” sometimes takes to those still mourning the loss of sociocentrism and humanist exceptionalism.
4:45pm Break
5:00pm Plenary: Claire Colebrook
Penn State University
Introduced by Patrice Petro (UWM)
“Extinguishing Ability: Persons as Post-Extinction Animals”
As ‘we’ face a future of resource depletion and of a series of choices regarding what sort of world we leave for the future, we rely upon normative concepts of the person. The question of what sort of life we will be able to lead, and the question of what forms of life we wish to sustain is intensified by questions of climate change. Rather than see disability as an added concern when thinking about the future of the environment I will argue that both the humanities and traditional forms of eco-criticism are already intertwined with normative conceptions of life. Not only should we see some conceptions of ‘nature’ as dependent upon liberal theory and it’s economic-political assumptions, we should also see the liberal conception of the person as dependent upon a techno-industrial manufacturing of nature. In order to provide an adequate way of undertaking humanities inquiry into the fragile future the liberal conception of personhood (and its strongly normative conception of ability and capacity) needs to be rejected in favor of a new mode of questioning that takes into account what I will define as a transcendental incapacity. For this reason concepts of capacity, debility, ability and personhood should give way to a new lexicon that is ecological (to do with powers of relation rather than powers of adaptation or sustainability).
6:30-8:00pm Reception and Book Launch Party for The Nonhuman Turn
Sala Restaurant, 2613 E. Hampshire St.
FRIDAY, MAY 1
8:30am Coffee (Curtin Hall lobby)
9:00am Plenary: Joanna Zylinska
Goldsmiths, University of London
Introduced by Jennifer Johung (UWM)
“Photography after Extinction”
In this talk I will consider what it would mean to envisage the world ‘after extinction’: not at a time when various species, including the one we are narcissistically most invested in – ourselves – have disappeared, but rather at a time when extinction has entered the conceptual and visual horizon of the majority of global citizens. Specifically, I will take the horizon of extinction as a reference point against which I will think the ontology of photography and its agency: what photography can do with and to the world, what it can cast light on, and what the role of this light (or, more broadly, light as such seen through the photographic lens) is in approaching questions of life and death on a planetary scale. Considering the history of photography as part of the broader nature-cultural history of our planet, I will trace parallels between photography and fossils, and read photography as a light-induced process of fossilisation occurring across different media. Seen from this perspective, photography will be presented as containing an actual material record of life (rather than just its memory trace). But I will also go back to photography’s original embracing of the natural light emanating from the sun to explore the extent to which photographic practice can tell us something about energy sources, and about our relation to the star that nourishes our planet. I will do this via an engagement with photographers who have consciously adopted the horizon of extinction as their workspace – from the nineteenth century geologist-photographer William Jerome Harrison through to contemporary artists such as Hiroshi Sugimoto. I will also look at practices in which the work of the sun has been taken on as both a topic and a medium, including the post-digital practice of Penelope Umbrico. The talk will end with a brief presentation of my own artwork, The Anthropocene: A Local History Project.
10:15am Break
10:30am Art After Extinction
Art After Extinction (Curtin Hall 175)
Panel Chair: Nathaniel Stern (UWM)
◊ Kelly Kirshtner (UWM), “Falling, in terms of Silent”
◊ Adam Trowbridge & Jessica Westbrook (Channel TWo), “Everything Will Be Fine”
12:00pm Lunch (Curtin Hall)
1:00pm Plenary: Daryl Baldwin
Myaamia Center, Miama University
Introduced by Margaret Noodin (UWM)
“aapisaatawiaanki: We Awaken Our Language”
The Myaamia (Miami) language ceased to be spoken sometime during the mid 20th century after the passing of its last speakers. During the following years, linguists and other academicians labeled the language as extinct, and claimed there was insufficient documentation to describe the language. This terminal designation, and the lack of knowledge regarding available documentation, would become challenged during the following decades. Beginning in the late 1980s, linguists and community members began the difficult work of not only reconstruct the language, but to reawaken their sleeping language among the tribal community. Today the Miami-Illinois language, as it is now officially called, has expanded in use and is currently being promoted by a youth generation who is developing an identity around its use and the knowledge system it reflects.
2:15pm Break
2:30-4:00 Breakout Session 1
Animals (Curtin Hall 118)
Panel Chair: Nigel Rothfels (UWM)
◊ Juno Parrenas (Ohio State University), “Orangutans After Extinction: The Wildlife Rehabilitation Center as a Hospice for a Dying Species”
◊ Ron Broglio (Arizona State University), “Animal Revolution: Say the Animal Respond”
Ontologies (Curtin Hall 119)
Panel Chair: Ivan Ascher (UWM)
◊ Claire Brault (UMass-Amherst), “Nietzsche’s Eternal Return in Times of Ecological Crisis; Traversing Extinction Synchronically”
◊ Alexandra Franco (Chicago-Kent College of Law), “The Law After Human Extinction: Finding a Legal Definition of Human Amid The Deafening Noise of the Transhumanist Debate for a Balanced Regulatory Approach”
◊ Natasha Zaretsky (Southern Illinois University), “A Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: Nuclear Winter Theory in the 1980s”
Literatures (Curtin Hall 103)
Panel Chair: Mark Vareschi (UW-Madison)
◊ Eric Gidal (University of Iowa), “After Ossian: Bardic Poetry in the Industrial Age”
◊ Peter Paik (UWM), “The Narrative of Extinction and the Extinction of Narrative: On Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island”
4:00pm Field trip to INOVA – Institute of Visual Arts at UWM
Exhibit: Placing the Golden Spike: Landscapes of the Anthropocene
Artist talk: Marina Zurkow
SATURDAY, MAY 2
8:30am Coffee (Curtin Hall lobby)
9:00am Plenary: Joseph Masco
University of Chicago
Introduced by Gloria Kim (UWM)
“The Six Extinctions: Visualizing Planetary Ecological Crisis Today”
This paper considers the contemporary visual logics of planetary scale environmental crisis. Engaging an art exhibit curated by Hamza Walker entitled “Suicide Narcissis,” the talk considers artistic and earth science visualizations of extinction, and interrogates the geological science proposal to name industrial age human impacts on planet earth the “anthropocene”. Ultimately, the essay considers the psycho-social problematics of considering mass death and theorizes the contemporary logics of visualizing a radically changing environment.
10:15am Break
10:30-12:00 Breakout Session 2
Games and Afterlife (Curtin Hall 118)
Panel Chair: Michael Newman (UWM)
◊ Stuart Moulthrop (UWM), “Fiction After Extinction: Object-Oriented Narratives and Strange Remediation”
◊ Stina Attebery (UC-Riverside), “Technological Obsolescence and Extinction: Rethinking Uplift Animals in the RPG Eclipse Phase”
Capitalism and Labor (Curtin Hall 119)
Panel Chair: Annie McClanahan (UWM)
◊ Arun Saldanha (University of Minnesota), “Capital, extinction, race: undead as a dodo”
◊ Miriam Tola (Rutgers University), “The Extinction of Species-Being”
◊ Ashley Dawson (CUNY), “Capitalism and Extinction”
Tools and Technology (Curtin Hall 124)
Panel Chair: Jason Puskar (UWM)
◊ Hugh Crawford (Georgia Institute of Technology), “Where Have All the Axes Gone?”
◊ Shane Denson (Duke), “Post-Cinema after Extinction”
◊ Antoine Traisnel (Cornell University), “Eadweard Muybridge and the Animal in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility”
12:00pm Lunch (Curtin Hall)
1:00pm Plenary: Cary Wolfe
Rice University
Introduced by Tasha Oren (UWM)
“The Poetics of Extinction”
Abstract Forthcoming
2:15pm Break
2:30-4:00pm Breakout Session 3
Indigeneity and Race (Curtin Hall 118)
Panel Chair: Joe Austin (UWM)
◊ Joseph Klein (UC-Santa Cruz), “Being Uncertain: Rumor & Extinction in Western Indonesia”
◊ Les Beldo (University of Chicago), “”Just Don’t Take the Last One”: Management and Extinction in the Makah Whaling Conflict”
◊ Nick Mirzoeff (NYU), “The Trace of Systemic Racism in Extinction”
Deextinction (Curtin Hall 119)
Panel Chair: Bernard Perley (UWM)
◊ Luis Campos (University of New Mexico), “Jurassic Ark: Or, A Menagerie of Methods for Thinking Historically About De-Extinction”
◊ Amy Fletcher (University of Canterbury), “Sweet Billions Overhead: Dreaming of the Passenger Pigeon”
◊ Nigel Rothfels (UWM), “Extinct in the Wild (EW)”
Waste and What’s Left (Curtin Hall 124)
Panel Chair: Gloria Kim (UWM)
◊ Katherine Behar (Baruch College), “E-Waste: ‘Modeling’ post-species”
◊ Bettina Stoetzer (University of Chicago), “Ruderal City: Urban Ecologies in a World of Rubble”
4:00pm Break
4:15pm Concluding Roundtable
5:30pm Closing Remarks: Richard Grusin
Director, Center for 21st Century Studies, UWM
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