“Aesthetics, Care, and Action” Symposium
Nomad 2024: The Infinite Sky
18 Sep 2024,
University of Central Asia, Naryn Campus, Kyrgyzstan
The “Aesthetics, Care, and Action” Symposium is a by-invitation event, limited to a select group of participants. Participants will be asked to respond to the following provocation, exploring it in the context of aesthetics education.
Provocation
At a time of unprecedented social, environmental, and economic challenges, including catastrophic climate change, and the Faustian compact we seem to be making with AI, the symposium, held as part of Nomad 2024: The Infinite Sky Festival offers a space to reflect on the character, value, and relevance of aesthetics in the contemporary world. Aesthetics has undergone various theoretical guises in past centuries. As transcendental judgement in Baumgarten and Kant, an instrument of social change and revolution in Marxism, unconcealment in Heidegger, experience in Dewey, force in Menke, political arkhè in Rancière, everyday affairs in Saito et al, aesthetics proves an elusive concept enmeshed in a dynamic heterogeneity of outlooks and discourses. As Derrida (1981) maintains, there is as much concealed as there is revealed in every theory, and this can only be shown through deconstruction. The history of aesthetics thus entails histories of deconstruction, dismantlement, unfoldment, and yet the conclusive delineation remains distant, delayed, if not impossible. In this context, we invite scholars of aesthetics to reflect on the following questions:
- Does aesthetics’ turn to the embodied, the experiential, and the everyday outside the arts, in fact conceal a lingering attachment to an ethically vacuous notion of pleasure?
- Is beauty the quality and value to which aesthetics is still exclusively oriented?
- Does aesthetics call for a rethinking of its fundamental character and function beyond any singular quality or class of objects?
- How does aesthetics respond to people, planet, and profit in an age of anxiety, distraction, violence, and galloping consumerism?
- Does an ethics of care and compassionate action require an aesthetic framework? If so, what would such a framework look like?Could it offer a key to action at a time when Kantian disinterest is an unaffordable luxury?
- Could a reimagined aesthetics help us makesense of life in a post-human, post-material world?
- Crucially, what would be the learning and teaching implications of a reimagined aesthetics for the discipline itself and for the broader field of education?
Submission and Presentation Requirements
Each speaker will take part in a four-person session. The sessions will begin with a fifteen-minute presentation by each participant, followed by a 90-minute moderated round-table discussion. Through a rigorous blind review eight papers (between 4,000-6,000 words) will be published in a special issue of the University of Illinois Journal of Aesthetic Education in Q2, 2025. (editor: Prof. Tracie Constantino, Provost, California Institute of the Arts)
- Abstract submissions: May 1, 2024
- Full papers: November 1, 2024
- Review: January 31, 2025
- Full text: March 31, 2025
For further information please contact:
- Dr Soheil Ashrafi, University of Central Asia, Co-chair, soheil.ashrafi@ucentralasia.org
- Dr Michael Garbutt, UNSW Sydney, Co-chair, m.garbutt@unsw.edu.au
Please send your abstract to: nomad@ucentralasia.org.
