- Convenors:
-
Sana Chavoshian
(Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO))
Nasima Selim (University of Bremen)
Charline Kopf (University of Oslo)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Network:
- Network Panel
Short Abstract
This panel explores para-human formations across vegetal, elemental, and atmospheric worlds, tracing tensions between para-meters of normativity and para-matters of affect and excess to shed light on and intervene in disfigured ecologies.
Long Abstract
Anthropology as a discipline centers on the question of what it means to be human. Recent posthumanist theories venture into what it means not to be human. At this intersection, we propose a para-human turn, to engage the tension between the parameters, the disciplinary, methodological and normative thresholds that define the measurable; and para-matters, the affective, quasi-material and more than human forces that exceed such collaboration. This panel asks how these measures and excesses reconfigure what counts as knowledge, collectivities and relations.
The earth and the sky, scarred by capitalist extraction, militarization, and human ambition, bear irreversible damage. Yet regimes of repair—through reform, regulation, activism, and reparation—often separate harm from profit. The illusion of repairability masks catastrophe, turning loss into data and disaster into management. This panel explores how disfigured ecologies and injured webs of life (do not) regenerate, forming new collectives through atmospheric, elemental, and vegetal relations.
In a world filled with “negative ecologies” (Bond 2022), we seek para-human formations and practices that accompany anthropological and speculative imagination in the face of disfiguration and possible ir/reparability. Drawing on witnessing, experimentation and confabulation, we seek to bring ethnographic insights in conversation with current anthropological debates around the Anthropocene.
By foregrounding the agency of air, dust, and vegetal breathing companions, we ask the participants how the notion of the “para human” can possibly transform anthropocentric modes of research, representation, and engagement.
Through multimodal, poetic, and performative contribution, participants are invited to design and cultivate “para-human” methods. Attending both the measures and the matters, this panel seeks to imagine a para-human anthropology that breathes with the atmosphere, listens to roots, and learns from the extended intelligence of nonhuman life.