Schedule 9th International Degrowth Conference

Dominant neoliberal economic paradigm is clearly exploitative towards all kinds of resources. Alternative paradigms mainly aim to stop being exploitative towards (some) humans. Dominant paradigm is dehumanizing, alternative paradigms are anthropocentric, neither of them constitute an answer to the swirl of the crises of the Anthropocene.

I argue that Critical Posthumanism together with Actor-Network Theory can assemble a proposition of an applicable posthumanist management, inclusive and anti exploitative towards both human and non-human actors, and immanent to effective application of degrowth.

But “combining degrowth with posthumanism looks good only on paper”, is what I have learned on the occasion of my first contact with one of the leaders of the degrowth movement in my country. Not only that, try matching both terms “posthumanism” and “degrowth” in the title of a paper in Google Scholar and you get nothing. This also calls for further exploration.

In the paper I am showing the results of posthumanistic analysis of chosen concepts from the most popular Polish website on degrowth, reinterpreted by looking at them through the lens of posthumanistic management: humanistic deanthropocentrization, non-anthropocentric subjectivity, radical symmetry in distribution of agency and dignity.

Inclusion/exclusion of both human and non-human actors is political and has social and natural effects. Stopping human mastery in political economic thinking and doing is, I argue, crucial for degrowth not to reflect the failures of the system that it tries to fix and to propose a sufficiently good answer to the crises of the Anthropocene, especially the climate-ecological catastrophe.

Info

Day: 2023-08-31
Start time: 17:15
Duration: 00:15
Room: ZV-8-1
Type: Paper Presentation
Theme: Resilience building through degrowth

Links:

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