Last November Thesis Eleven ran a major event in Chengdu with our friends and colleagues at Sichuan University. Our guest of honour was Agnes Heller. This event in Melbourne, with a follow up in Sydney was to be the return, or next phase. Agnes died 19 July 2019. These events will remember and celebrate her work, directly and indirectly. Our guest of honour in her absence will be Professor Fu Qilin from Sichuan University, leading Chinese expert on Heller’s work.

We call for papers under the broad horizons of these arcs, modernity and civilisation, working within and beyond the fields engaged by Thesis Eleven over the last forty years. Agnes Heller’s theories of modernity and its competing logics offer one frame of reference. The Western discourses she worked within also reach back to the Greeks and beyond. The narratives and interests inhabited by our Chinese colleagues reach into new modernities and back to long Chinese traditions of civilisation. These are possible parameters for papers. We are open to suggestion for other ideas.

Papers will be run across two days including a special session on Heller and art, with Emily Floyd and Nikos Papastergiardis on the 20th of November we will conclude these events with the annual Agnes Heller Lecture delivered by La Trobe Sociology and co-sponsored by Thesis Eleven. In addition, we will run a separate day of papers on Lukacs, on Thursday 21th November. Separate notices will follow for all these events.

These events will be followed by a two day event ‘Modernity: Past, Present and Future’ 24-5th of November at the University of Sydney.

Please complete the form below to submit a proposal for a paper: