Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society Organization Logo Neubauer Collegium for Culture and Society

Conference

Engineered Worlds II: On Resolution and Resolve

05.12.2017 – 05.13.2017

Event Summary

Photo by Max Herman

One of the key challenges of our moment is to locate ourselves (physically, psychically, and politically) within the global environment. The shifting nature of earth systems today rides on specific forms of industrial economy, on historic practices of dispossession and war, and enduring colonial-settler violences. Thus, people are always already inside a set of conditions and aftermaths, but unequally so. This makes the key question of our age one of attunement: How do individuals come to understand their historical embeddedness in an industrial condition and imagine alternative futures? How do we collectively create a politics that responds to these ongoing aftermaths? This conference interrogated the optics and affects of self-conscious world-making today in light of the mounting effects of industrial toxicity, financial insecurity, and permanent war. In confronting such complex and interlocking problems, we asked: What kinds and degrees of resolution are needed to both identify and locate oneself within conditions that are simultaneously local and planetary? What forms of political resolve can enable the modification of a life that is already altered by the interplay of toxicity, capitalism, and militarism?

The conference was supported by the Engineered Worlds II research project at the Neubauer Collegium.