Program

The Biopolitics of America

Bodies, Environments, and the Liberal Imagination

International Conference, Würzburg, July 28-30, 2016

Thursday, July 28, 2016

14:00-14:30 Hannes Bergthaller (Taichung) & Catrin Gersdorf (Würzburg): Welcome and Introduction

14:30-15:30 Catriona Sandilands (Toronto): “A Vegetative State? Plant Biopolitics”

15:30-16:00 Coffee Break

16:00-17:00 Leerom Medovoi (Tucson): “Biopolitics Beyond the Body”

17:00-18:00 Gabriele M. Schwab (Irvine): “Radioactive Ghosts: Precarious Lives in Nuclear Ecologies”

19:00 Conference Dinner

Friday, July 29, 2016

9:00-10:00 Andrew S. Gross (Göttingen): “The Biopolitics of Anticommunism: Pastoralism, Selfhood, and the Conservative Imagination”

10:00-10:30 Coffee Break

10:30-11:30 Nigel Hatton (Merced): “Parks for Some, Prisons for Others: The Spatial and Racial Politics of Incarceration and Recreation in the United States”

11:30-12:30 Mark Rifkin (Greensboro): “Carceral Space, Fugitive Motion, and Indigenous Ecologies”

12:30-14:00 Lunch

14:00-15:00 René Dietrich (Mainz): “Humanness, Forms of Life, and the Land: The Biopolitical Logics of Settler Colonialism and Literary Sites of Disruptive Relationality”

15:00-16:00 Sladja Blažan (Würzburg): “’Nature will arise, and will be heard’: Death and the Regularization of Native American Lives in Early American Literature”

16:00-16:30 Coffee Break

16:30-17:30 Student Projects on Biopolitics, Human Rights, and Environmental Justice (supervised by Heike Raphael-Hernandez & Catrin Gersdorf, Würzburg)

19:00 Wine Tasting & Dinner at Bioweingut Wallrapp (Theilheim)

Saturday, July 30, 2016

9:00-10:00 Christopher Breu (Normal): “Materializing Time and Occupying Space: The Reconfiguration of Biopolitical America in Karen Yamashita’s I Hotel”

10:00-10:30 Coffee Break/Brunch

10:30-11:30 Sabine Sielke (Bonn): “Self-Optimization, Adaptation, and the Newly Conventional US-American Novel: On Franzen, Eggers, and the Like”

11:30-12:30 Karin Hoepker (Erlangen-Nürnberg): “Ethopolitics: Narrating the Biomedical Self”

12:30-13:00 Closing Discussion