J. Irwin Miller Symposium “Aesthetic Activism”

This symposium, convened by Mark Foster Gage, explores emerging positions that cast aesthetics as the primary discourse for social, ecological, and political engagement. In contrast to commonly held opinions that these issues are antithetical to the aesthetic, recent work in aesthetic theory across multiple disciplines suggests that such political and ontological problems may be best addressed as aspects of aesthetic experience. An interdisciplinary group of philosophers, scholars, media theorists, artists, curators, and architects will speculate on how a reignited discourse on aesthetics is prompting new insights into our relationships with not only objects, spaces, environments, and ecologies, but also with each other and political structures in which we are all enmeshed.