Until October 15th : Call for Applications : Anthropocene Campus Lisboa: Parallax : January 6-11, 2020

We welcome applications for the Anthropocene Campus Lisboa: Parallax (ACL: Parallax), taking place at Culturgest in Lisbon, Portugal, between 6 and 11 January 2020. The Campus is organised by the Portuguese research center CIUHCT and is part of the Anthropocene Curriculum initiated by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), which has generated two Anthropocene Campus in Berlin (2014, 2016) and several satellite events worldwide.

 

Like previous editions, the Anthropocene Campus Lisboa: Parallax is an interdisciplinary event in which participants will be working in workshop-like seminars hosted by conveners. We welcome  the attendance of students from higher education institutions, scholars from the sciences and the humanities, artists, and activists. We encourage participants to engage in sketching possible collaborative outputs in several formats (publications, videos, artworks, research projects, etc.) that will circulate in different fora. 

 

Core topics in the discussion on environmental crisis will be approached through different perspectives: Inequality, Turistification, Big Data, Hacking, Animal Care, Popular Dwelling, Sonic ecology, Technological resistance, etc.

 

According to its dictionary definition, parallax is «the effect by which the position of an object seems to change when it is looked at from different positions.» The challenges of the Anthropocene demand research actions that cut across disciplinary barriers to create new modes of making and sharing knowledge. But while a transdisciplinary approach is necessary, we should also restrain from aiming at an integrated framework. On the contrary, new actionable insights may spark only from an open, non-hierarchical and even conflictual exchange, in which multiple, and not necessarily compatible, perspectives on reality are at stake. Taking the parallax effect seriously means not to dismiss it as an error or as “apparent” movement. The movement is there, and we must move to follow it.

 

The Anthropocene Campus Lisboa: Parallax uses the parallax effect to engage with issues of environmental and social transformation and collapses highlighted by the term Anthropocene. To that end, we propose to organize a discussion around two intertwined and complementary but often divorced frameworks: on the one hand, systems of social and technological organization, which determine the actions that are possible within a given historical context; and on the other, perception and narrative, which determine our limits for understanding and imagining. Power and discourse are negotiated, challenged, and perpetuated through both means, defining the conditions for living in contemporaneity.

 

Participants will participate in one seminar from each of the two overarching framework: Systems of Social and Technological Organization and Perception and Narrative. To apply please use exclusively the online application form in https://parallax.ciuhct.org/call-for-applications. No other applications will be considered. Applicants must submit a short CV and motivation letter stating their interest in the Anthropocene Campus Lisboa. The Registration Fee is €150, paid upon acceptance of the application (the fee includes coffee-breaks and lunch for the 6 days of the Campus); information on the payment will be available soon.