Call for Participation in the Seminar: Worldmaking in Ruptures and Rifts. Fabulating Pasts and Futures of Transscalar
Coordinations
March 2025 – January 2026
The planned two-semester seminar Worldmaking in Ruptures and Rifts within the framework of NCN Opus 22 project “After Climate Crisis. Non-scalable survival strategies in speculative fabulations of the last two decades” (UMO-2021/43/B/HS2/01580) addresses the role of broadly defined speculative fabulations as ways of knowing the past and future of the ongoing ecological, economic and social crises. The seminar will conceptualize these current and past predicaments in terms of two titular notions – rupture and rift. The former, as recently introduced in Field Guide to the Patchy Anthropocene (2024) refers to a sudden state change of an environmental or social system, that makes life as we know it impossible to continue. In moments of rupture all existing coordinations between entangled beings are dismantled to make space for new arrangements and alliances. But also, the sudden breaches and collapses can cause, what Kathryn Yusoff in her Geologic Life (2024) calls the rift – “a site that is pulled apart by the flex of extensional tectonics … exhibiting what is materially buried and what is uplifted to the surface.” Survival in times of ruptures and rifts requires not only ingenuity in forging new livable arrangements of beings, but also the ability to think retrospectively and prospectively beyond the accepted progress-based narratives of Western modernity. Such “material experiences of shattered grounds” call for new ways of thinking and doing relationships across multiple scales – new ways of worldmaking.
The more-than-human coordinations that come into being in ruptures and rifts evade the biopolitical modes of stabilization and disciplining. But they are also conditioned by forces and flows on larger and smaller scales outside of human control, and thus can be viewed as materializations of processes taking place in deep time as well as entangled pasts of humans and not humans. Such a view of more-than-human worldmaking across scales requires, however, new ways of knowing and representing, new forms of description and storytelling, new manners of mediating and expressing that would enable us to make sense of those unforeseeable and ungovernable coordinations – alliances, convergences, dissonances and conflicts between beings and forces on various scales. We want to look for these practices of worldmaking in the realm of speculative fabulation, where the pasts uncovered by the rift give rise to more hopeful futures.
The workshop invites scholars and artists/activist working in transdisciplinary, situated and speculative manner to share their work, insights and projects within the thematic scope of the seminar. Its aim is to jointly work on a collected volume to be submitted for publication in the fall of 2026. We will work towards a common theoretical and methodological basis for the volume during an online seminar from March 2025 until January 2026. In the spring 2025 we will be meeting on Zoom on Fridays, from 3.00 p.m. till 4:30 p.m. Central European Time, starting with a kick-off meeting on 7th March. The next meetings will take place on 21st March, 4th April, 25th April, 9th May, 30th May, 6th June and 20th June.
Should you be interested in participation in the seminar, please let us know under one of the email addresses in the heading until 20th February 2025. Together with your submission please state the specific topic that you would like to cover within the thematic scope of the seminar.