Call for Papers: Humanity and Its Others
April 24-25, 2025 – George Mason University, Fairfax Campus
Proposals due by Sunday, Jan. 26, 2025
We invite Mason faculty and advanced doctoral students from across the university to submit paper proposals for our fourth annual symposium. This year’s symposium will feature a keynote address from Jeffrey J. Cohen, Dean of Humanities at Arizona State University and former co-president of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, on April 24, 2025 from 4:00 to 5:30 pm. (Cohen works in the fields of medieval studies, monster theory, and environmental humanities; he is the author or co-author of six books including, most recently, Stone: An Ecology of the Inhuman [2015], Earth [with Lindy Elkins-Tanton, 2017], and Noah’s Arkive [with Julian Yates, 2023], and he is the editor or co-editor of nine volumes, including The Cambridge Companion to Environmental Humanities [with Stephanie Foote, 2021], Thinking the Limits of the Body [with Gail Weiss, 2002], and Monster Theory: Reading Culture [1996]. Dr. Cohen’s personal website can be found here.)
In a world increasingly hostile both to the humanities and to the maintenance and flourishing of humanity, this year's annual theme calls for critical engagements, across different periods, places, and disciplines, with the qualities and category of "humanity" and with the borders, limits, doubles, analogues, antitheses, and "others" of these things.
Humanity has been imagined both as a quality intrinsic to human beings and as an acquired characteristic, something that must be cultivated and nurtured, an ideal toward which humans strive. Though at times conceived in relation to what transcends it (gods, heroes, superhumans), a sense of the value of humanness has led to critiques of human degradation, that is, of dehumanization, of subhuman subordination, of "crimes against humanity."
Some thinkers have elevated humanity over other forms of being, giving rise to doctrines of exceptionalism, extractivism, and imperialism. Moreover, the classification of humans on the basis of religion, race, nation, gender, class, education, intelligence, neurodiversity, criminality, morality, talent, beauty, and other normative qualities has often imposed hierarchies of humanness. Other thinkers have sought to dissolve the boundaries between humanity and its others and to examine the entanglement of humans with non-human "nature,” supernatural/superhuman beings, and manifestations of the divine.
More recently, the impending possibility of artificial general intelligence, alongside advances in genetic engineering and robotics and the pressures of anthropogenic climate change, raises new questions about the future of humanity. What kinds of transhuman or posthuman, hybrid, collaborative or competitive possibilities are there for humans? Is “humanity” a concept and a value that we wish to discard or to protect?
We solicit papers that interrogate, decenter, redefine, or traverse the boundaries between humanity and its “others” -- that investigate and analyze how humanity has been conceived and contested, how it has been nurtured and sustained or deformed and denied, how it has served as an essential value or as an evaluative yardstick, how it has helped to construct worlds that are hospitable or inhuman.
Please submit a brief paper proposal/abstract (no more than 500 words), along with a brief CV, as a single PDF file, clearly labeled with your last name leading (ex. Smith CHR Symposium Proposal). Send proposals by midnight on Sunday, Jan. 26, 2025 to chr@gmu.edu; we will send out acceptances by the following Sunday, Feb. 2, 2025. (The symposium itself will be held on April 24-25 at GMU.)
November 15, 2024