Unexpected Agents: Considering agency and subjectivity beyond the boundaries of the human (1800 — the Present)

* A One-day International postgraduate symposium at the University of Birmingham
* Friday 24 June 2011
* Keynote Speaker: Sarah Kember (Goldsmiths, University of London)

‘Anything that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is an actor - or, if it has no figuration yet, an actant’

(Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social, 2005)

This symposium aims to acknowledge and yet exceed Latour’s and others’ focus upon the agency of objects to envision how authors, theorists and cultural producers have imagined and re-imagined the potential agencies of a wide range of entities, to which and to whom access to power is conventionally seen as foreclosed. It will explore how this over-looked but fascinating trope persists across genres and historical boundaries, from non-human agents in computer games to the role of objects in nineteenth-century fiction, and from the agency of animals on TV advertising to the that of the dead in the work of Sarah Waters.

Register Online at: http://bit.ly/unexpectedagents