The Research Center for Planetary Literary and Cultural Studies (CELCP) examines the conceptual, narrative, and historical intersections and differences between multiple, often competing and contradictory, notions of the globe, the world, and the planet. The CELCP is specifically interested in research projects that move beyond received discourses and narratives of cultural globalization, globalism, environmentalism, and the Anthropocene. Instead, it emphasizes pluriversal, multi- and para-disciplinary ways of thinking the planet as a sentient entity and an onto-epistemological, political, cultural, and aesthetic category of knowledge production. The CELCP proposes to study planetary thought as (1) a collaborative activity and research practice; (2) an ethical, historically positioned, decolonial, and critical undertaking that expands extant ideas of planetary habitability; and (3) as an ongoing recalibration of the “commitment of ‘being human’” (Reza Negarestani).
The Center foregrounds the transformative aesthetics and politics of the creative imagination. It invites literary, poetic, and cinematographic speculations about emerging new and non-coercive universals. Planetary thought and practice actively engages with anti-racist and anti-authoritarian narratives and pedagogies that foster social, gender, and environmental justice on a communal and planetary scale.