Year Zero: More-Than-Human-Worlding After 1945

1945 marks the end of a world war, the rise of decolonized states, the beginning of an unruly geological epoch. Please join us for this symposium with six extraordinary scholars who cross disciplines to examine intersecting materialities and unprecedented logics of this postwar rupture, a Year Zero in which humans, nonhumans, and machines were violently remade. 
 
We ask: how did new imaginaries and practices emerge from the industrialized bodies of plants, animals, and chemicals of this historical moment? How did the structural transformations of the second World War reorient the dynamics of ecologies, markets, and machines? What kinds of interdisciplinary methods, genres, and collaborative practices may be crafted to articulate these complex co-emergences, or what feminist scholars call worlding? 
 
Thinking of security and affect through nuclear ruins (Masco), ecological consequences of growth paradigms (Livingston), queer postcolonial bodies through chemical fertilizers (Agard-Jones), remaking of a global South through oranges (Saraiva), smartness and resilience through infrastructure (Halpern), and the emergence of metadata after the war (Gitelman), this symposium gathers together a striking array of critical-creative practices for tracing more-than-human worlding and inhabiting their relentless, differential trajectories.