Time: June 11-12, 2026
Location: John F. Kennedy Institute, Freie Universität Berlin
Organizers: Prof. Dr. James Dorson (Freie Universität Berlin), Prof. Samuel Zipp (Brown University)

Much thinking in the humanities and social sciences has recently and increasingly turned on the problem of interdependence. That interest has been based, very often, on suspicion, critique, or ambivalence about the self. This conference aims to recover the self as a site of historical and ongoing political and aesthetic contestation.

Over the last half-century, a host of historians and critics worked to reveal that the “self” is far from a stable or given category of thought, political economy, biology, or cultural discourse. Many saw the older unitary, liberal, possessive, or bourgeois self as an ideological fiction erected to occlude the multiplicity of human life and the “difference” made by divisions of race, gender, sexuality, and class. Others announced the “death of the subject” and the rise of a fragmented, postmodern self. Still others have embraced a “posthuman” critique of selfhood that views the volition of individual subjects as shaped by their ethical embeddedness in a web of interdependent relations with other human and nonhuman subjects. Recent critics have advanced any number of models for this dispute with sovereign self-possession and the liberal individual: identity in relation rather than in essence (Glissant 1990); world making through entanglement (Tsing 2015); “transspecies selves” (Schwab 2020); the “leaderless swarm” (Hartman 2019); “consent not to be a single being” (Moten 2017); the emergent self of systems thinking (Capra and Luisi 2014); nomadism that “locates the subject in the flow of relations with multiple others” (Braidotti 2013).

This conference will bring together historians and literary scholars to historicize critiques of the sovereign self. For us, these theoretical interventions raise new opportunities to discover debates and struggles with a long history, predicaments that were (and are and will be) lived out at different moments, under different conditions, and through differing terms. Our primary concern is to discover and analyze the persistent influence of interdependence, and to locate its role in the cultural and political formations of contemporary and historical sociality. Interdependence, we believe, should be seen as a vital “keyword” in the sense left to us by Raymond Williams, a concept central to understanding, historicizing, and analyzing the governing ideologies and experiences of our time, from globalization, climate change, and pandemic zoonotic disease, to financialized capitalism, planetary urbanization, networked and algorithmic digital technology, resurgent nationalisms, and emergent social movements.

With this in mind, participants will offer specific case studies, drawn from a range of times and contexts in North America and Europe, that illuminate how selfhood and sociality have interacted historically under different material conditions in changing social formations: in, for instance, the crowd, mass, market, bureaucracy, workplace, community, city, movement, nation, network, or subculture. How do these dynamics shape change over time in any one moment or conjuncture? Can sociality survive without forms of self-possession, normative or otherwise? What is worth preserving, if anything, in the models of autonomy or conscience idealized by liberal self-possession? How have particular actors and texts imagined this possibility, or struggled with it? Can interdependent sociality transcend individualism? Should it?

Participants will analyze moments when sociality emerged to trouble dominant modes of individual self-possession or independent sovereignty. This can reveal the way that selves and persons are shaped by the specific modes of social organization under which life is lived at any one moment. But it can also suggest the way possible modes of sociality and relationality are contoured and shaped by available, valorized, or dissident forms of self-possession as well. And it can suggest the variations of relation between self and sociality within any specific historic formation. We want to linger between selfhood and sociality, to see what unfolding and unnoticed possibilities there are that have been foreclosed by the tendency to privilege either autonomy or relationality.