In an intensive six-week course of study, faculty members and graduate students from around the world, in the humanities and social sciences, explore recent developments in critical theory. Participants work with the SCT’s core faculty of distinguished scholars and theorists in one of four six-week seminars. Each faculty member offers, in addition, a public lecture and a colloquium (based on an original paper) which are attended by the entire group. The program also includes mini-seminars taught by scholars who visit for shorter periods. Finally, throughout the six weeks, distinguished theorists visit the SCT as lecturers. --- A Political Ecology of Things Jane Bennett Professor of Political Science, Johns Hopkins University The nonhuman turn — in continental philosophy, geography, rhetoric, feminism, digital media, architectural design, and political/literary/anthropological theory — adds new twists to old questions about material agency, vital force, animism, and body-intentionality. This seminar will explore various “new materialisms” and their historical antecedents, with an eye toward their political potential for forging a post-consumerist ecological sensibility. In the wake of disillusionment with deep ecology (for its image of Nature as a harmonious whole) and also with shallow policy-oriented environmentalism (for its inattention to metamorphoses in natural processes and to affects and technologies of sensibility-formation), a coalition of artists, thinkers, writers, and activists have gathered around the term “eco-materialism.” Eco-materialists seek more sustainable modes of consumption and production (in part) by enhancing human sensitivity to the effectivity of nonhuman things and the assemblages they form with and within humans. Our archive will include the artworks of Song Dong and Cornelia Parker, and readings from Lucretius, Paracelsus, Henry Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze, Octavia Butler, William Connolly, Michel Serres, François Jullien, and Timothy Morton. We will also consider critiques of eco-materialism. --- The School of Criticism and Theory was founded in 1976 by a group of leading literary scholars in the conviction that an understanding of theory is fundamental to humanistic studies. Today, in an unparalleled summer campus experience, the SCT offers faculty members and advanced graduate students in the humanities and social sciences a chance to work with preeminent figures in critical thought — exploring debates in and across literary studies, political theory, history, philosophy, art, and anthropology; examining the role of ideological and cultural movements; and reassessing theoretical approaches that have emerged over the last fifty years. Cornell also offers participants the resources of one of the great research libraries in the United States.