Staying ahead in the academic journey
On January 29, 2022 the Department of English and Literary Studies organized the 1st National Conference on Posthumanism and the Ecological Crisis, a novel attempt at introducing students to a cutting edge area of critical inquiry. The conference provided a platform for scholars all over the world from India to Morocco, to come together for a round of intellectually stimulating discussions over the idea of the human.
The relevance of posthumanism in the current era of the virocene was foregrounded by Dr. Subhadeep Paul(Assistant Professor, Department of English, School of Literature, Language and Cultural Studies, Bankura University, West Bengal) in his keynote speech titled, “The Posthuman Patient in the Affective Virocene: Critiquing Ontological Non-Futures”.
The two technical session chaired by Dr. Mukulika Dattagupta(Associate Professor, Department of Language and Literature, Adamas University) where an attempt was made to interpret the anthropocene. keynote speaker Dr. Arka Chattopadhyay (Assistant Professor, Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Gandhinagar) discussed the idea of the animal subconscious, its presence or perceived absence and its impact on the debates surrounding posthumanism.
21 presenters focused on a wide array of topics like posthumanism in the work of 13th Century Zen Monk Eihei Dogen( presented by Sara Eljechtimi, Research Scholar, IBN Zohr University, Morocco) and of Post humanist ethics (presented by Aditi Barman, Research Scholar, IIT Roorkee) with the main ideas highlighting the incessant tendency to foreground the presence of the human in matters that concern the existence of other living beings.
