SLSA 2018: Out of Mind

A four-day SSBF Affilated Conference at SLSA 2018 the 32nd Annual Meeting in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

Nov. 15-18, 2018

Toronto, Ontario, Canada

The University of Waterloo and York University will jointly host the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Society for Literature, Science, and the Arts. The SLSA 2018 theme will be “Out of Mind.”

SSBF Roundtable: This event will officially close the research group, which began in spring 2013 at Syracuse University.

Nov. 17

3:30-5 The Last Aviary: Papers from the Society for the Study of Biopolitical Futures—A Roundtable Discussion

Wolfe, Cary—convener

SSBF participants: Lambert, Gregg; Seshadri, Kalpana; Nealon, Jeffrey; Iuli, Cristina; Schwab, Gabriele; Clough, Patricia

Abstract
The founding of the Society for the Study of Biopolitical Futures in 2012 was inspired—very loosely—by the establishment and activities of the College of Sociology between 1937-1939. The College took as its “precise object of contemplative activity,” according to the collective statement by its members 1[biopoliticalfutures.net] “the name of Sacred Sociology, implying the study of all manifestations of social existence where the active presence of the sacred is clear, determining the coincidence between the fundamental obsessive tendencies of individual psychology and the principal structures that govern social organization and are in command of its revolutions.” When the SSBF began, if any name could have served to replace the sociological and anthropological notion of the “sacred,” it was “biopower” and the “biopolitical.” In another sense, the concepts of “biopower” and the “biopolitical” have also functioned, during the Society’s existence, as “theoretical stocks” in the reproduction and circulation of academic discourse and new investment strategies defined both in symbolic terms and in terms of the creation of new subjects of “human capital.” Here, at the “official” demise of the SSBF (four years overdue, we might add), have we witnessed a “selling off” of the biopolitical, or quite the contrary? How has canonical biopolitical thought been renovated and rejuvenated since the Society’s inception to address issues and questions—of “life,” the “living,” and “biopower”—that political thought itself brought into focus in its first iteration?

For more information, please view here or visit the conference website: https://litsciarts.org/slsa18/