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Guernica por
Pablo Picasso (1937)
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The IAFOR
International Conference
on Global
Studies 2018
"Fearful Futures: Cultural Studies and the Question of
Agency in the Twenty-First Century"
We have reached a moment
in international history that is one of potential paradigm shift. It is a moment
when a problematic, but at least blandly progressivist, pro-multiculturalist
movement toward “cosmopolitanism” (as Kwame Anthony Appiah might use the term)
is being threatened by a far more destructive and potentially genocidal
ethno-nationalism, the ferocity of which is fuelled by economic disparity,
religious intolerance and retrograde ideologies regarding gender, race and
sexuality. The possible global futures we face are fearful, indeed.
In this context,
cultural studies has a unique role to play in tracing the genealogy of the
present moment and charting different paths forward. As never before, cultural
studies is called to return to its activist roots, to diagnose the ideologies
driving hatred and intolerance, and to posit different models of social
engagement and organisation. Looking to the past, what do we learn about the
challenges of today? How does culture replicate itself (or critically engage
itself) in the classroom, in literature, in social media, in film, in the
visual and theatrical arts, in the family, and among peer groups? How do we
rise to the challenge of articulating a notion of human rights that also
respects cultural difference? How do cultural representations of the
environment abet or challenge the forces driving climate change? What are the
roles and responsibilities of the individual activist as teacher, writer,
social scientist and community member?
This international and
interdisciplinary conference will bring together a range of academics,
independent researchers, artists and activists to explore the challenges that
we face in the twenty-first century. While we have every right to fear the
future, we also have agency in creating that future. Can we commit to a
cosmopolitanism that celebrates difference and that challenges social inequity?
On our ability to answer to that question affirmatively likely hangs our very
survival.
How can writers respond when the
future looks fearful?
Featured Panel Presentation: Philip Ball, Gloria Montero and
Professor Liz Byrski
As the writer
Nancy Kress remarked, "Fiction is about stuff that’s screwed up".
She’s probably right, in the sense that some of the best writing has arisen
from historically turbulent times – whether its focus was on the past, present
or the future. Turbulent times have tended to produce equally turbulent
responses from writers, often obliging them to use the future as a metaphor for
the present – think Orwell’s 1984 written in 1948 as a contemporary response to
totalitarianism. How fearful did the future look back in 1948 to Orwell, and
how fearful does it look to us now, in 2018?
The news
that we are on the brink of apocalypse may indeed be fake, but there is
undoubtedly a current sense of unease about the future, in sharp contrast to
the post-conflict era of the 1960s and 1970s when everything seemed possible,
we made love and not war, and technology appeared to be offering us infinite
horizons.
Enter the
writer, to try to make sense of it all, or to just reflect and even comfort us.
Maybe in troubled times, more people look to both fiction and non-fiction as
succour, as a way of testing out their own hypotheses. The success of Yuval
Noah Harari’s recent Homo Deus would seem to be proof of this – offering us an individual
interpretation of how a fearful future might look, but also of how it might be
avoided. On a more modest scale, with our future allegedly so fearful, what can
writers offer now?
