Scrapbooking the Wasteland—A Posthumanist Terror Management Theory Toolkit

Are you interested in critical posthumanism and the creative arts? Did you see images from our zine-making workshop and wish you’d been able to join us? Now is your chance! Our next Creative Posthumanism workshop will be on Wednesday, 1st June 2022, from 2-4pm at Winchester School of Art. This week, our theme (and the focus of our collaborative making project) is ‘Scrapbooking the Wasteland—A Posthumanist Terror Management Theory Toolkit’.

From the event description:

“The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters.” (Antonio Gramsci)

As we navigate the wasteland of brutal yet naturalised inequalities, defined by various theorists as either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, ours is a fragmented collective memory in process. Old rites and rituals fail here: over the pandemic, even mourning has been posthumanised (Nina Lykke). Chrononormativity (Elizabeth Freeman), too, falls apart: from queer asynchronies to crip time, we need more sophisticated tools to map out the destruction. To make sense of the multiple knots in the outdated narrative of linear progression in history upheld by the humanist tradition, we must carefully pull at all the different tangled threads. From ecological grief to alienated labour, we must confront the remains of extraction practised on a scale that not only shapes future possibility but even calls it into question, threatening to chew up and spit out all forms of being-in-the-world that stand in the way of necrocapitalism (Subhabrata Bobby Banerjee).

What we propose is scrapbooking as a co-expressive re-worlding emergent strategy. If we are to live in a monster culture (Jeffrey Jerome Cohen), we cannot hope to keep the monsters at bay but must make space for weird multispecies assemblages in a xenofeminist framework.

The five areas of concern for our workshop are the mix of extractive practices that (re)produces wastelands and the four acute stress responses: fight, flight, freeze, and fawn. We will attempt to reconfigure the relationship between our own situated embodiments and technological developments from a more-than-human ethical perspective, acknowledging the affect behind our response and confronting the biases that hold us back.

We’re especially excited to feature two guest facilitators, Angela YT Chan and Cristina Diamant, both critical makers and co-directors of the London Science Fiction Research Community (among other things).

Attendance is free and accessibility and access information can be found on the Eventbrite page—register now! People of all backgrounds and levels of experience with making are welcome.

More workshops in the ‘Creative Posthumanism’ series will follow shortly.

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