CENTRE FOR RESEARCH IN MODERN EUROPEAN PHILOSOPHY
MIDDLESEX UNIVERSITY
Event Date: 16-17 April 2010
Ciné Lumière, The French Institute
17 Queensberry Place, London, SW7 2DT
From Structure to Rhizome
Transdisciplinarity in French thought, 1945 to the present: histories, concepts, constructions
In the final decades of the twentieth century, the ‘great books’ of postwar French theory transformed study in the humanities in the Anglophone world. These books were all, in one way or another, transdisciplinary in character. Yet their reception has primarily taken place in an array of specific disciplinary contexts, isolated from a broader understanding of the intellectual dynamics, forms, significance and innovative potential of transdisciplinarity itself. This conference aims to redress this situation. Each speaker will reflect on the transdisciplinary functioning of a single concept in French thought since 1945, with respect to a founding text, a particular thinker or a school of thought.
————————————————-
Andrew Barry – Network
Andrew Barry is Reader in Geography at Oxford University and a Fellow of St Catherine’s College. He is the author of Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society (Athlone, 2001) and co-editor of Foucault and Political Reason (University of Chicago Press, 1996) and The Technological Economy (Routledge, 2005). He was the co-investigator (with Georgina Born and Marilyn Strathern) on the ESRC project ‘Interdisciplinarity and Society’ (2004–6), and co-author (with Georgina Born and Gisa Weszkalnys) of ‘Logics of Interdisciplinarity’, Economy and Society 37: 1 (2008).