This event will be hosted in offline format. RSVP to attend in person.
Since the 2010’s, energy humanities has become a growing field in Slavic Studies and beyond, seeking to explore the intricate connections between energy, culture, and society. However, in this exploration, energy’s thermodynamic counterpart has been neglected – the idea of entropy as an irreversible process resulting in the complete dissipation of energy and the end of all useful work.
In response to this, the workshop suggests starting a conversation on entropy humanities with an interdisciplinary workshop between literary and cultural studies, art history, the history of science, science and technology studies, philosophy and adjacent disciplines. While focusing on Russia and Eurasia, the workshop also invites researchers on other regions.
The aim of the workshop is to reintroduce entropy into today’s environmental, ecocritical and new-materialist conversation: as a principle that is pervading the world, its energy flows, its biological and cultural systems. Just as energy humanities have been familiarizing literary and cultural studies with the forces of nature, entropy humanities should address culture’s sensibility for and negotiation with the fatigue of natural forces.
