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Conference day12th June2020Catholic University ofParisThis study day will considerchanges in understanding of space and time that challenge traditional ways ofsituating ourselves as humans at the centre of our own world. In the Westernworld, our centrality was first called into question by the scientificexploration of the cosmos. The vast universe uncovered by Copernicus andGalileo came to supersede the reassuring geocentric model imagined by ancientand medieval thinkers who firmly placed the earth and man at the centre of theuniverse. Biological examinations of our own world, and especially theunderstanding of the mechanisms of evolution, also contributed to this processof decentering. Charles Darwin concluded TheDescent of Man by reminding us that man is a human animal carrying the‘indelible stamp of his lowly origin’.[1]Today, evolutionary biologypositions us as creatures at the end of a flimsy twig on a four-billion-year-oldtree of life. The current climate crisis is a sobering reminder of theprecariousness of our position on that branch, with global warming constantlyreducing the space available for (human) life on Earth and scenarios ofecological collapse pointing to possible human extinction in the near future.And though the emergence of the category of the ‘anthropocene’ sounds like anew, negative reminder of humans’ central place in their world, it does not actuallycounteract the impact of discoveries in the fields of geology and paleontology,which first showed human existence to be a mere sliver in the timeline ofplanet Earth. On geological timescales, the Anthropocene is an event, not anepoch.Beyond questioning our central place in spaceand time, contemporary physics have challenged these categories themselves bysuggesting their particular relevance to human experience. The theory ofrelativity and quantum theory have shown our notions of time and space to bedeeply anthropocentric. As theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli explains, timeas we generally understand it is a point of view that we humans share as aresult of our biology and evolution, our place on Earth, and the planet’s placein the universe – time is a story we are always telling ourselves. In the‘elementary grammar of the world, there is neither space nor time—onlyprocesses that transform physical quantities from one to another, from which itis possible to calculate possibilities and relations.’[2]In short, science has not ceased toexpand our understanding of time and space in ways that are not easilyreconciled with our own embodied experience. These discoveries have had aprofound impact on the way we conceive of humans in time and space. They havechanged our philosophical and critical landscape, and demanded that we rethinkthe category of the human. As Clifford Geertz points out, ‘manis an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun’.[3]This interdisciplinary conference seeks to critically examine how newdiscoveries in our understanding of time and space have kept reconfiguring thisweb of significance – and the place of humans within it. Our inability toapprehend both the infinite and the infinitesimal keeps calling for creativestrategies to reposition ourselves in a world we cannot immediately comprehend.This study day will particularly welcome paperslooking at representations of the human in response to our changingunderstanding of time and/or space, or examining the rethinking of the categoryof the human together with the rethinking of time and/or space. We welcomepapers from a variety of disciplines, such as literature, arts, history,anthropology, sociology, religious studies, philosophy as well as the use ofdiverse theoretical tools.Topics may include, but are not limited to:-&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Representationsof time and/or space in literature and art-&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Narrativestrategies that deal with news ideas of time and/or space-&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Representationsof decentering, past and present (heliocentrism, cosmos, the universe)-&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; The notion of deep time and its representation -&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; The representation of differing forms of time(cyclical, spiral, dreamtime, memory or linear time)-&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Time and space in science fiction-&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Changing representations of time and space inthe age of the Anthropocene -&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Long-term thinking-&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Long nows, short tomorrows-&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;Reworkingsof the place of the human in time and space-&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;The absenceof humans-&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; The construction of pre-worlds, this world,other worlds-&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Non-human, posthuman, transhuman-&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; Artworks that play withscale to question our centrality as humans&#160;&#160;&#160;&#160; This conference daywill be convened by Dr. Estelle Murail and Dr. Delphine Louis-Dimitrov with thesupport of the Faculty of Humanities of the ICP (EA 7403 – UR “Religion,Culture et Société”). It will be held on the 12th of June 2020 atthe Catholic University of Paris (74 rue de Vaugirard, 75006 Paris). Proposals of 300 words and a short biographyshould be sent to Dr. Diane Leblond (diane.leblond@univ-lorraine.fr), Dr. Sarah Gould (sarah.gould@univ-paris1.fr), Dr. Estelle Murail (e.murail@icp.fr) and Dr. Delphine Louis-Dimitrov (d.louisdimitrov@icp.fr) by March 2nd, 2019.This study day is part of the project‘Deconstructing anthropocentrism: Humanities After Humans?’, which is a projectin collaboration between Dr. Sarah Gould (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne,EA 4100 – HiCSA – histoire culturelle et sociale de l’art), Dr. Diane Leblond(Université de Lorraine, EA 2338 – IDEA) and Dr. Estelle Murail (ICP, EA 7403 –UR “Religion, Culture et Société”).You will find more information about the project on the website: https://humanitiesafterhumans.wordpress.com/