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DTSTAMP:20260407T142220Z
DTSTART;TZID=Europe/London:20260612T090000
DTEND;TZID=Europe/London:20260612T170000
SUMMARY:Fragility and the Aesthetics of Sensitivity 
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TZID:Europe/London
LOCATION:55-59 Penrhyn Rd\, Kingston upon Thames\, London\, United Kingdom\, KT1 2EE
DESCRIPTION:<p><strong>Call for Contributions: Fragility and the Aesthetics of Sensitivity</strong></p>\n<p><strong>Keynote Presenters:&nbsp\;</strong></p>\n<p>Andrew Goffey (University of Nottingham)</p>\n<p>Brigitte Hart (Sound artist\, Shortwave Collective)</p>\n<p>When crisis becomes a permanent state rather than an exceptional rupture\, fragility assumes the form of an existential condition visible across social\, ecological\, and political domains. Under such circumstances\, the production of knowledge increasingly shifts toward anticipatory regimes&mdash\;risk modelling\, foresight studies\, and adaptive infrastructures designed to navigate instability. Contemporary problems appear as hybrid entities: complex issues that exceed the grasp of any single discipline and demand collaborative investigation capable of rendering them perceptible and registering fragile relations that cannot be stabilised or fixed.</p>\n<p>In this context\, the problem of disciplinarity&mdash\;of relations between disciplines and collaboration across them&mdash\;acquires renewed urgency. Contemporary ecological frameworks in the humanities further intensify this concern by grounding the crossing of boundaries in an existential condition. This expansion of the problematic invites a reconsideration of an older question: what do the prefixes inter-\, trans-\, non-\, or post- differentially signify when applied to disciplinarity? Which form of disciplinarity adequately captures our present condition?</p>\n<p>While the laboratory has served as a central model&mdash\;a metonym for interdisciplinary collaboration\, anchoring the emergent mode of scientific praxis called &ldquo\;research&rdquo\;&mdash\;today research also unfolds across privately funded para-institutions\, hybrid platforms\, and transient project-based networks. However\, collaborations between artists and social theorists with natural scientists remain structurally asymmetrical: artistic practice is often reduced to the visualization of scientific data\, while social theory has long remained under pressure to imitate the methods of the hard sciences. In this context\, the symposium seeks to examine the tangible forms of contemporary cross-disciplinary collaboration and the conceptual frameworks that sustain them.</p>\n<p>The symposium approaches this question under the long shadow of post-1968 French philosophy\, whose insistence on the inherent intertwinement of politics and aesthetics continues to shape contemporary thought. As a guiding reference\, we take the framework developed by Bruno Latour\, approached here through the twin themes of&nbsp\;<strong>fragility and the aesthetics of sensitivity</strong>. Latour may be seen as the synthetic inheritor of this philosophical trajectory\, insofar as his anthropology of laboratory science leads to a non-disciplinary\, transversal form of social ontology that immanently connects science\, aesthetics\, and politics. His model advances a form of collective pragmatism oriented toward the proposal of new entities for social existence&mdash\;entities defined relationally as fragile networks of attachments. Scientific instruments function as sensitive devices that inscribe and thereby render these entities visible\, thereby making them open to collective concern.</p>\n<p>The symposium is thus both a call for dialogue and an invitation to rethink disciplinarity under the increasingly urgent\, deteriorating\, and transitional conditions of the present. We are interested in contemporary artistic and theoretical practices\, particularly those that combine the two and critically reflect on their disciplinary\, institutional\, and methodological conditions. If\, as F&eacute\;lix Guattari reminds us\, &ldquo\;there is no general pedagogy relative to the constitution of a living transdisciplinarity\,&rdquo\; then where and how might such a transdisciplinarity be practiced today?&nbsp\;</p>\n<p>Possible contributions might focus on:&nbsp\;</p>\n<ul>\n<li>Contemporary collective artistic practices experimenting with scientific approaches and methods.</li>\n<li>New (para-)\, (non-) institutional\, methodological and disciplinary models of research\, collaboration and knowledge production.</li>\n<li>The problematics of sensitivity\, visualization\, and representation across science\, politics\, and art.</li>\n<li>Disciplinary praxis under conditions of social\, economic\, institutional and ecological crises.&nbsp\;</li>\n<li>Fragility as a methodological and institutional condition in the production of social knowledge.</li>\n<li>Fragility in experimental and interdisciplinary forms of knowledge production.</li>\n<li>Scientific instruments and sensing technologies as aesthetic devices of perception\, operating both as instruments of biopolitical control and as instruments of resistance.</li>\n<li>Reflections on forms of collectivity and collective practice at the crossroads of aesthetic and political concerns\, including the inflation of the term &ldquo\;collective&rdquo\; to describe practices whose institutional status remains indeterminate.</li>\n<li>Transdisciplinary practices that challenge conventional notions of authorship\, expertise\, or institutional authority.</li>\n<li>Critical reflections on the conceptual and institutional limits of different forms of disciplinarity.&nbsp\;</li>\n<li>Pedagogical experiments in transdisciplinarity and collective learning.</li>\n</ul>\n<p><strong>Submission Guidelines:</strong></p>\n<p><strong>Abstract:&nbsp\;</strong>max. 300 words</p>\n<p><strong>Presentation length:&nbsp\;</strong>20 minutes&nbsp\;with time reserved for discussion.<strong></strong></p>\n<p>Please send an abstract (max. 300 words) and a short biographical note to: &nbsp\; k2035920@kingston.ac.uk</p>\n<p><strong>Deadline for submissions:</strong>&nbsp\;26 April 2026<br><strong>Notification of acceptance:</strong>&nbsp\;10 May 2026</p>\n<p>The event is organised as a&nbsp\;PhD student-led symposium supported by the Techne AHRC Doctoral Training Partnership.</p>
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