The core concept of “the human” that anchors so many humanities disciplines issues from a very particular modern European definition of Man “over-represented” as the human. The history of modernity and of modern disciplinary knowledge formations are, in this sense, a history of modern European forms monopolizing the definition of the human and placing other variations at a distance from the human. In this seminar, we will discuss forms of interdisciplinary research that decenter Man-as-human as the subject/object of inquiry, and propose a relational analytic that reframes established orthodoxies of area, geography, history and temporality. This work involves new readings of traditional archives, and finding alternative repositories and practices of knowledge and collection to radically redistribut our ways of understanding the meaning of the human.
Free and open to all graduate students. Refreshments will be served.