About the Course
This course will think critically about the Anthropocene and its presence in contemporary art, thought, and philosophy. Man-made ecological crisis has taken center stage in art today, depicting injustice not only between humans, but increasingly across species. At the same time, in philosophy, new realities emerge around the clock, premised on there being a Great Outdoors, a nature-in-itself independent of human beings. On these views, the universe should be a democracy of objects that includes inanimate and animate nature, human and nonhuman, but, alas, humans have failed to decolonize their relation to nature: they continue to impinge upon, crowd out, and destroy the earth in an apocalyptic present.
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​We’ll rethink this paradigm of contemporary Anthropocene discourse, considering how it tends to screen nature screaming, in a double sense: it projects ecological disaster anthropomorphically – through the eyes of humans grappling with their own history and experience of suffering – and thus obscures what may be wrong with how we redress not just interspecies relations in the universe, but also interhuman relations, since the two might be related, if not the same.
About the Professor
Rohit Goel is Director/Professor of the Bombay Institute for Critical Analysis and Research (BICAR). He is the co-editor of Lacan contra Foucault: Subjectivity, Sex, Politics (Bloomsbury) and has taught courses in critical theory, historiography, and politics at the University of Chicago, Sciences Po Paris, the American University of Beirut, and Jnanapravaha Mumbai. Rohit received the Fulbright IIE and Center for Arabic Study Abroad (CASA) fellowships to pursue years of Arabic language study in Syria and was awarded the Fulbright DDRA and Andrew C. Mellon Fellowship for PhD dissertation research in primary sources in Lebanon. He completed his BA from Harvard College and, as Harvard University’s Paul Williams Fellow to Emmanuel College, was granted an MPhil in Social and Political Sciences from the University of Cambridge.
Certificate
Students will receive a Certificate of Completion upon successful attendance of a course or a Certificate of Completion and Letter of Evaluation if they successfully attend and complete the final assignment. Those who complete three courses (attendance and writing) in the Theoretical Explorations track over two calendar years are eligible for a BICAR Diploma in Theoretical Explorations.
Refund Policy
We will refund your mode of payment — minus a 25% processing fee — if you choose not to take this course after the first session. Or, you can ‘roll over’ your balance to another or future BICAR course without a fee deduction.
Register
Our website payment portal will be up and running soon; till then, we can facilitate two modes of payment – either direct bank transfer to our Indian account for students registering from here in India or we also have a PayPal link for students registering from abroad.
To register, please select the mode of payment relevant to you:
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