Symposium- Stuff: Anxieties and Aspirations of the Material World
Feb 8, 2019, 9:30AM–6PM

Symposium- Stuff: Anxieties and Aspirations of the Material World

Audrey Flack (American, b.1931), Queen, 1975; Dye transfer photograph. Courtesy of the University of Pennsylvania Art Collection. Gift of Seymour Passman.
About

This symposium asks us to reconsider our relationship with stuff: the materials and matter that surround us on a daily basis. Stuff speaks to both the promises and perils entangled in things. Through the lenses of aspiration and anxiety, the program will reflect on the creation, use, preservation, discarding, and collection of stuff across geographic and temporal contexts. In doing so, the symposium brings together an interdisciplinary group of scholars to examine these themes and probe the ethics, promise, and recalcitrance of human engagement with the material world.

For more information, visit the Wolf Humanities Center website.

This symposium is a program of the Wolf Humanities Center’s 2018-19 Forum on Stuff and is co-sponsored with the Wolf Humanities Center and the Departments of Anthropology, History, History and Sociology of Science, History of Art, and Music; McNeil Center of Early American Studies; and the Penn Program in Environmental Humanities.