“Beyond Humanism: Cyborgs – Animals – Data Swarms”
23 – 27 September 2019
Call for Papers - Deadline: 16 June 2019
During the last five decades, public, intellectual, and academic debates have created an increased
awareness of so-called transhumanist discourses and social movements accompanied by a diverse body
of theoretical works in philosophy, social sciences, and humanities which can broadly be described as
posthumanist. Building on a three year long tradition (CSIA 2015–17) of interrogating what it means to
be human in the 21st century from an interdisciplinary anthropological perspective, the Cologne Summer
School of Interdisciplinary Anthropology 2019 relaunches under the title Beyond Humanism: Cyborgs
– Animals – Data Swarms. It picks up where the last CSIA left by taking a closer look at what a transand
posthumanist agenda actually implies and how it relates to classic understandings of what it means
to be human.
Organized by the Collaborative Research Center 806 “Our Way to Europe” and the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate
School for the Humanities Cologne, we invite PhD students and early postdocs from all disciplines
whose academic interests follow similar perspectives and questions to join us for an intense week of
interdisciplinary exchange and controversial discussion. Not simply dismissing new modes of
humanisms as mere social phenomena in an age of accelerated technological and cultural transformation,
we aim at taking them seriously in order to understand better the shifts in contemporary concepts and
controversies about the human being.
