Anthropocene Campus Lisboa: Parallax

Call for Applications

We welcome applications for the Anthropocene Campus Lisboa: Parallax (ACL: Parallax), taking place at Culturgest in Lisbon, Portugal, between 6 and 11 January 2020. This Campus is organised by the Portuguese research center CIUHCT and is part of the Anthropocene Curriculum initiated by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) and the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG), which has generated two Anthropocene Campus in Berlin (2014, 2016) and several satellite events worldwide.

According to its dictionary definition, parallax is «the effect by which the position of an object seems to change when it is looked at from different positions.» The challenges of the Anthropocene demand research actions that cut across disciplinary barriers to create new modes of making and sharing knowledge. But while a transdisciplinary approach is necessary, we should also restrain from aiming at an integrated framework. On the contrary, new actionable insights may spark only from an open, non-hierarchical and even conflictual exchange, in which multiple, and not necessarily compatible, perspectives on reality are at stake. Taking the parallax effect seriously means not to dismiss it as an error or as “apparent” movement. The movement is there, and we must move to follow it.

The Anthropocene Campus: Parallax uses the parallax effect to engage with issues of environmental and social transformation and collapses highlighted by the term Anthropocene. To that end, we propose to organize a discussion around two intertwined and complementary but often divorced frameworks: on the one hand, systems of social and technological organization, which determine the actions that are possible within a given historical context; and on the other, perception and narrative, which determine our limits for understanding and imagining. Power and discourse are negotiated, challenged, and perpetuated through both means, defining the conditions for living in contemporaneity.

Like previous editions, the Anthropocene Campus Lisbon: Parallax is an interdisciplinary event in which participants will be working in workshop-like seminars hosted by conveners. We welcome and encourage the attendance of students from higher education institutions, scholars from the sciences and the humanities, artists, and activists.

Participants will apply to one seminar topic from each overarching framework—Systems of Social and Technological Organization and Perception and Narrative.

How to apply

We will only consider applications by way of the online application form made no later than September 15, 2019. Applicants must submit a short CV and motivation letter stating their interest in the Anthropocene Campus Lisbon via the application form below.

• Application form
• Official website