This interdisciplinary humanities program engages concepts and new fields of inquiry that emerge at the crossroads of philosophy, anthropology, queer studies, postcolonial studies, and literature. We invite participants to be curious about ideas that are shaped directly as a consequence of crossing disciplinary borders. To speculate is to contemplate, to wager, and to wonder.  To begin speculating on everything we’ll think through the figure of inconstancy (frequent and irregular change), as it has been applied to some humans, all humans, and nature or cosmos generally. We’ll use diffraction as a method, aiming to cross and combine disciplines and discourses with courage and care. We’ll study tendencies, dispositions, manifestations and conceptual infrastructures in philosophical discourses and literary texts that turn towards the catastrophic (a downturn, a sudden ending, a radical change), positing new forms (of writing, being, and thinking) that, among other things, aim to decenter the human and posit non-anthropocentric perception.

Our index will include readings in Queer Ecology, New Materialism, experimental and anti-colonial literature, and early Soviet utopian scientific, philosophical, and architectural projects. Writing practices will entail a focus on the essay as a capacious, multifarious literary form and will include occasional creative writing experiments. We will cultivate the art of the seminar as critical inquiry, and care will be taken to support participants in developing and deepening reading and writing skills. We will participate in a multi-program, bi-weekly lecture series looking at the anthropocene and climate change from multiple disciplinary perspectives. Readings to include works by Oswald de Andrade, Alexander Bogdanov, Giordano Bruno, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Allison Cobb, Claire Colebrook, Michelle Detorie, Thalia Field, Donna Haraway, Robert Kocik, Quentin Meillasoux, Montaigne, Timothy Morton, Lorine Niedecker, Andrey Platonov, Leslie Scalapino, McKenzie Wark, and others.