Non-Human Encounters: Animals, Objects, Affects, And The Place of Practice

a forum with Nuar AlsadirPablo Assumpção B CostaEleonora FabiãoCarla FrecceroElaine FreedgoodKatie GentileFrancisco GonzalezAnn PellegriniDonovan SchaeferJulietta SinghNathan Snaza, & Michelle Stephens

March 24, Friday
2pm-6:30pm

Pablo Assumpção B Costa, Global Visiting Scholar, Center for the Study of Gender & Sexuality, New York University

Eleonora Fabião, performance artist & theorist, professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro

Carla Freccero, Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Cruz

Elaine Freedgood, English, New York University

Katie Gentile, Interdisciplinary Studies, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York

Francisco Gonzalez, Personal & Supervising Analyst, Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California, and Staff Psychiatrist, Instituto Familiar de la Raza

Ann Pellegrini, Performance Studies and Social & Cultural Analysis, New York University

Donovan Schaefer, Lecturer in Religion & Science, Trinity College, University of Oxford, United Kingdom

Julietta Singh, English, University of Richmond

Nathan Snaza, English, University of Richmond

Michelle Stephens, English & Latino and Caribbean Studies, Rutgers, State University of New Jersey

This half-day symposium is the 9th annual collaboration between NYU’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality and the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality. The question of the non-human is a vital one for psychoanalysis, but in the main remains a path not taken. There is, meanwhile, a growing scholarly literature, and across multiple fields, that explores the post- and non-human: e.g., critical animal studies, new materialisms, object-oriented ontology, post-colonial studies, affect studies, and queer of color critique. The broad goal of this year’s forum is to see what happens when clinicians, cultural theorists, and arts practitioners talk together about and beyond the limits of the human, through such keywords as animals, objects, and affects. Through an explicit foregrounding of the “place of practice,” panelists will also attend to questions of institutional location (e.g., classroom, cubicle, consulting room, museum or gallery, street corner) as well as histories of power. How does where we think, write, work, and with whom (or what) shape critical practices, conceptual possibilities, horizons of the sayable and sensible.

Performance Studies Studio
721 Broadway, 6th Floor, Room 612

Co-sponsored by the NYU Animal Studies InitiativeCenter for the Study of Gender & Sexuality and Department of Performance Studies, and by the journal Studies in Gender and Sexuality.