“borders / debordering” Towards a New World Culture of Hospitality

We live in an age of uncertainty which demands new answers about our more and more insecure dwellings in the world, about various insecure modalities of our being-in-the-world, and about our political futures we all wish to share. We always face borders in our lives, some of them visible, some hidden, invisible, or even latently present in our selves and bodies. Borders / debordering conference thus wishes to discuss in an interdisciplinary view some of the most important issues of the present, such as:

•  the role of the body, being at the threshold between our subjectivities and subjective identities and various intersubjective spaces in ontology, epistemology an ethics;
• the epistemological and existential borders, such as between voice and silence, power and disability, activity and passivity, freedom and constraint, past and future, etc.;
• borders as inscribed in our social spaces and defined by the economic and/or social (in)justice(s), especially in the issues of gender/sexuality and race, as well as borders between “Human/Animal” and “Technology/Nature”;
• the role of geographical borders that shape/limit/constitute our everyday lives, such as ancient city gates, national borders and future cosmopolitan transnational debordered places/spaces.

Papers are welcome from the fields of philosophy, religion, psychoanalysis, ethics, sociology, cultural studies, gender studies, political economy, and political geography.

Please send your abstracts (150–200 words, with personal information and institutional affiliation) by February 1, 2016 to:[email protected]. Lectures should be intended for a 20-minute presentation. The conference will be held in English. Notification of acceptance will be given by March 1, 2016. All accepted abstracts will be published in a book of abstracts available at the conference.

Conference Chairs:

• Lenart Škof (Head of Institute for Philosophical Studies, Science and Research Centre, University of Primorska)
• Creston Davis (Director of GCAS)

 Programme and organizing committee:

• Maja Bjelica (Univ. of Primorska, Slovenia)
• Nadja Furlan Štante (Univ. of Primorska, Slovenia)
• Magdalena Gorska  (Linköping University, Sweden)
• Tomaž Grušovnik (Univ. of Primorska, Slovenia)
• Sigrid Hackenberg (GCAS, USA)
• Nina Lykke (Linköping University, Sweden)
• Eduardo Mendieta (Penn State University, USA)
• Mateja Sedmak (Univ. of Primorska, Slovenia)

Selected conference papers will be published in an edited volume with one of the international presses.

The conference is a part of the research project “Between Politics and Ethics: Towards a New World Culture of Hospitality and Non-violence” (J6–5565) sponsored by Slovenian Research Agency (ARRS).