The Seminar is cancelled. A new date will be announced soon!
8 April 2019, 14:00-16.00, Room 3A08
IT University of Copenhagen
Rued Langgaards Vej 7, DK-2300 Copenhagen S
An open seminar on the conceptual and its limits with talks by
PROFESSOR STEVE BROWN
Department for People and Organisations, The Open University
PROFESSOR BODIL MARIE STAVNING THOMSEN
School of Communication and Culture, Aarhus University
PROFESSOR MORTEN AXEL PEDERSEN
Department of Anthropology, University of Copenhagen
Concepts abound across the social sciences and humanities. From anthropology to political science, cultural theory to history, design to linguistics, concepts rule supreme. But concepts are never merely concepts. They have histories and legacies. They are variously attached to people and projects. They serve as academic capital. They have shadows and exclusions. And they do not just represent but intervene in the very worlds they describe. Indeed, concepts not only name what and who is seen, but also what or who remains unseen and unspoken of. Concepts always partially fail to capture what they are intended to: there seems to be an excess that cannot be contained within the conceptual, something that escapes conceptualization.
So how are we to think through concepts as concepts? How do we work with the silences, failures and erasures created by concepts? Can conceptual excess be captured and used generatively? And do conceptshave their own strangers, others or alterities? Moreover, should we be satisfied with working within the conceptual? A trend in social theory has been to situate ‘the conceptual’ together with ‘the practical’ or ‘the empirical’, but might there be other venues for thinking the more-than-conceptual? If so, what kind of registers would such an analysis need to mobilize: the affective, the temporal, the ephemeral, the political, the unforeseen?
This seminar will hone in on these questions about concepts, their excess and overflow. Through presentations and debate with distinguished scholars from several different fields of research, the seminar seeks to crack open interdisciplinary terrain for thinking with – and, perhaps, beyond – the conceptual. It hopes to offer a critical space for thinking that which cannot be named or conceptualized.
THE SEMINAR IS FREE BUT REGISTRATION IS NEEDED.
MAIL CHRISTOPHER GAD TO SIGN-UP.
ORGANIZED CHRISTOPHER GAD
TECHNOLOGIES IN PRACTICE (TiP)
DEPARTMENT OF BUSINESS IT
www.itu.dk/tip