Register Here

Important Information

New Mexico has two main airports: the Santa Fe Regional Airport and the Albuquerque International Sunport.

If you fly to Albuquerque, a shuttle can take you to Santa Fe. There is also a train called the Rail  Runner.

The conference will take place at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, which is located in downtown Santa Fe.

There are many hotels nearby, which are within walking distance. 

The affordable ones include Motel 6, El Sendero Inn, and the Sage Hotel.

 The fancier hotels include the Rosewood Inn of the Anasazi, La Fonda on the Plaza, and the Inn of the Five Graces.

Please note that the entire conference will be documented via videography & photography.

Keynotes

Conference Location

The conference will be held at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center at 201 W. Marcy St., Santa Fe, NM 87501 (see map below). 

We will be in the following rooms: Lamy/Peralta & Kearny.

Parking at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center Municipal Garage is $12/day.

Conference Program

Downtown Map

Call for Papers

Radical Humanism

call for papers

Deadline for Submissions: May 31, 2023. Extended to June 30, 2023.

Decision: July 31, 2023

Name of Organization: The Department of Arts & Human Sciences at Northern New Mexico College

Conference Chair: Robert Beshara

Date: September 8-9, 2023

Time: 8 am – 5 pm

Location: Santa Fe Community Convention Center, Oga Po’geh, Nuevo México, Turtle Island

Keynote Speakers: Lewis Gordon, Bedour Alagraa, Caveh Zahedi, and Matthew Flisfeder

Introductory Speakers: Robert Beshara, Matthew Martinez, David Lindblom, and Ana X. Gutiérrez Sisneros

The International Conference on Radical Humanism invites scholars to submit proposals for papers, which critique bourgeois, liberal, and/or Eurocentric humanism(s) from the perspectives of Indigenous studies, Black studies, and/or postcolonial/decolonial studies and using concepts from Marxism, anarchism, critical theory, psychoanalysis, and/or Africana, Asian, and Latin American philosophies.

Central Themes:

o   What is radical humanism? And why is it relevant today?

o   Key theorizations include (but are not limited to) Frantz Fanon’s “new humanism,” Raya Dunayevskaya’s “Marxist humanism,” Paulo Freire’s “revolutionary humanism,” Edward Said’s “radical humanism,” C.L.R. James’s “decolonial humanism,” Jean-Paul Sartre’s “existentialist humanism,” and Achille Mbembe’s “critical humanism”

o   What is the place of radical humanism in prefigurative (or utopian) politics?

o   How can we reinvigorate the “human sciences” (Geisteswissenschaft) by shifting the geography of reason (Lewis Gordon)?

o   Critiques of bourgeois, liberal, and/or Eurocentric humanism(s)

o   Critiques of antihumanism, transhumanism, and/or posthumanism

o   Our relationship with the more-than-human world (David Abram)

o   Anthropocene or capitolocene (Jason Moore)?

o   The possibility of ecocentric humanism in response to charges of anthropocentrism

o   New humanism after Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, and C.L.R. James

o   Marxist or dialectical humanism (Dunayevskaya, Anderson, Kołakowski)

o   Critical humanism after the Frankfurt School (Fromm, Marcuse, Benjamin)

o   Revolutionary humanism and pedagogy after Paulo Freire

The aim of the conference to problematize and expand the Euromodern conception of the “human” in order to document and develop critical epistemologies, ontologies, and methodologies that honor the complexities of humans around the world, particularly Indigenous, Black, and Global Southern humans, who have been historically excluded from the category of “human.” We encourage papers on radical humanism that assume a worldly, or pluriversal, vision. We expect critical reflexivity when it comes to your citational practices (i.e., you can cite Euromodern thinkers, but you cannot uncritically cite them while ignoring non-European thinkers), and as such we highly recommend the following reading list to contextualize our dialogue:

Achille Mbembe & Deborah Posel (2005) A critical humanism, Interventions, 7:3, 283-286.

Adamson, A. (2019). CLR James’s Decolonial Humanism in Theory and Practice. The CLR James Journal.

Durkin, K. (2014). The radical humanism of Erich Fromm. Springer.

Fanon, F. (1952/1967). Black skin, white masks. Grove.

Freire, P. (1970/2018). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Bloomsbury.

Fuchs, C. (2021). Cornel West and Marxist humanism. Critical Sociology, 47(7-8), 1219-1243.

Gagne, K. M. (2007). On the obsolescence of the disciplines: Frantz Fanon and Sylvia Wynter propose a new mode of being human. Human Architecture: Journal of the sociology of self-knowledge, 5, 251.

Gogol, E. (2004). Raya Dunayevskaya: Philosopher of Marxist-Humanism. Wipf and Stock Publishers.

Gordon, L. R. (1995). Fanon and the crisis of European man: An essay on philosophy and the human sciences. Psychology Press.

Gordon, L. R. (2000). Du Bois’s humanistic philosophy of human sciences. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 568(1), 265-280.

Gordon, L. R. (2007). Through the hellish zone of nonbeing. Human Architecture: Journal of the Sociology of Self-Knowledge, 5-12.

Gordon, L. R. (2018). Disciplining as a human science. In Shifting Corporealities in Contemporary Performance (pp. 233-250). Palgrave.

Johnson, P. (1994). Feminism as radical humanism. Routledge.

Maldonado-Torres, N. (2008). Lewis Gordon: Philosopher of the human. The CLR James Journal, 14(1), 103-137.

Mignolo, W. D. (2015). Sylvia Wynter: what does it mean to be human?. In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (pp. 106-123). Duke University Press.

Nissim-Sabat, M. (2008). Lewis Gordon: Avatar of Postcolonial Humanism. The CLR James Journal, 14(1), 46-70.

Parker, E. A. (2018). The Human as Double Bind: Sylvia Wynter and the Genre of “Man”. The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 32(3), 439-449.

Radhakrishnan, R. (2007). Edward Said’s literary humanism. Cultural Critique, 13-42.

Said, E. W. (2004). Humanism and democratic criticism. Columbia University Press.

Sartre, J. P. (1945/2007). Existentialism is a Humanism. Yale University Press.

Scott, D. (2000). The re-enchantment of humanism: An interview with Sylvia Wynter. Small Axe, 8(120), 173-211.

Wynter, S. (2003). Unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: Towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—An argument. CR: The new centennial review, 3(3), 257-337.

Wynter, S., & McKittrick, K. (2015). Unparalleled catastrophe for our species? Or, to give humanness a different future: Conversations. In Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (pp. 9-89). Duke University Press.

Abstracts:

If you wish to propose a paper, or a panel of 3 presenters, please submit a title, a 300-word abstract, and a short biographical note via this Google form. Participation is limited to around 50 presenters. Registration fee: free!