At Duke U in January

The Program in Literature invites you to attend
The Collapse of Traditional Knowledge: Economy, Technology, Geopolitics

A conference sponsored by The Literature Program at Duke University
January 26-28, 2007

In recent years, a seismic shift in the organization of the world's economies, cultures, political and social formations, and processes of knowledge production seems to have taken place. Although we are interested in the latter and in the transformation of the ways in which the world's knowledges are organized, categorized, materially produced, institutionalized, circulated, and consumed, we also seek to inquire into the relationship of those practices to larger social, cultural, economic and political trends. Thus, rather than focusing solely on the subject of the corporate university, or the decline of book culture, or even on the transformation of knowledge production by new technologies, we would like to think structurally about the relationships among the various factors creating this overwhelming sense of seismic shift - a shift that suggests to some that all forms of traditional knowledge (including what might be called "literary" knowledge) are outmoded and therefore open to renovation and to others that such forms must be protected and conserved at all costs.

Our aim, finally, is to push the analysis of the relationship between what we have tentatively labeled "the collapse of traditional knowledge," and the emergency posed by specific social, economic, and cultural conditions. Those conditions, we believe, simultaneously demand and enable alternative practices that might be characterized as thinking "otherwise." We hope to find a way to join the various conversations that have preoccupied us, sometimes individually, sometimes collectively, in such a way that we might reflect critically on the conditions of possibility for our own thinking while exploring how those conditions function both as constraints - as new forms of discipline - and as tendencies toward a potentially new course for the generation of thought about the world.

Guest Speakers include:
Linda Alcoff
Judith Butler
Thomas Elsasser
Avery Gordon
Lewis Gordon
Sheila Jasanoff
Christopher Newfield
Boaventura de Sousa Santos
Saskia Sassen

For a more detailed schedule and program, please go to the Program in Literature's website, http://literature.aas.duke.edu

Mark your calendars and plan to join us for this special weekend event! For questions, please contact Maria Maschauer at (919) 684-5255 or mamascha@duke.edu