Death & Culture II Conference (Registration Open)

6-7 September 2018, 9.00am

How does culture understand death?

This biennial conference focuses on the impact of mortality on culture, and the ways in which the very fact of death has shaped human behaviour, evidenced through thought, action, production and expression. The conference, in its second iteration, seeks to continue engaging with the study of mortality as an academic enterprise, supported by evidence and framed by theoretical engagement. This truly interdisciplinary event brings together death scholars, including postgraduates, as well as those who might not consider themselves death scholars whose work that overlaps with death and the dead.

We welcome contributions on topics such as but not limited to:

• Governance of mortality
• Death in the popular imagination
• Death and the digital realm
• Work in the death industry
• Mass death in the age of individualism
• Artistic death

Keynote speakers:

• Professor Dina Khapaeva
• Professor Dorthe Refslund Christensen
• Professor Joanna Bourke
• Professor Stephen Regan 

This event will launch a new associated book series, Emerald Studies in Death and Culture

Location: University of York, Ron Cooke Hub

Admission: Registration OPEN

Email: death-and-culture@york.ac.uk

Imagining the History of the Future: Unsettling Scientific Stories (3 Days) Registration Open

Tuesday 27-29 March 2018, 9.00 am - 5:00 pm

Speakers:Professor Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside, USA)
Professor Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent, UK)

The future just isn’t what it used to be… not least because people keep changing it. Recent years have seen a significant growth of academic and public interest in the role of the sciences in creating and sustaining both imagined and enacted futures. Technological innovations and emergent theoretical paradigms gel and jolt against abiding ecological, social, medical or economic concerns: researchers, novelists, cartoonists, civil servants, business leaders and politicians assess and estimate the costs of planning for or mitigating likely consequences. The trouble is that thinking about the future is a matter of perspective: where you decide to stand constrains what you can see.

With confirmed plenary speakers Professor Sherryl Vint (University of California, Riverside, USA) and Professor Charlotte Sleigh (University of Kent, UK) this three-day conference will bring together scholars, practitioners, and activists to explore ways in which different visions of the future and its history can be brought into productive dialogue.

Focused on the long technological 20th Century (roughly, 1887-2007) and looking particularly at the intersections between fictional/narrative constructions of the future, expert knowledge, and institutional policy development, the themes of the conference will include but are not limited to:

• The relationship between lay and expert futures, especially futures produced by communities marginalised in public dialogue by ethnicity, gender, sexuality, species or political orientation
• How have different forms of fiction (novels, films, games, comics) created different visions of what’s to come? How have their audiences responded to and shaped them?
• The role of counterfactuals/alternate histories, as well as factional accounts and popular science: how have different forms of writing positioned the future?
• What’s the relationship between past and present scenario planning in government or commerce? How have they fed into wider cultural conceptions of impending developments?
• Disciplinary influences: how have different academic disciplines – sciences, humanities, arts, social sciences – fed into developing futures? Has this changed over time?
• The role of futures past: how can we recover them, and what do they tell us about futures present? What are the forgotten or marginalised sites of future-making
• How have different themes – time, the apocalypse, the individual, among others – changed over the last century of future-thinking?

Website: http://unsettlingscientificstories.co.uk/imagined-futuresTwitter: @UnSetSciStories #ImaginedFutures

Registration: http://store.york.ac.uk/product-catalogue/sociology/imagining-the-history-of-the-future-unsettling-scientific-stories

Location: Ron Cooke Hub, University of York
Registration: NOW OPEN
Email: unsettling-science@york.ac.uk