To decompose is to live too, I know, I know… (Beckett, Molloy)

This seminar invites papers, across interdisciplinary and comparative interventions, that consider rot seriously: as a material process, temporal disturbance, or a biopolitical problem. Rot is everywhere: in the body, in the building, in the word used too many times, in the institution, in the relationship nobody has ended, in the archive, in the soil, in the pipe beneath the street, in the state of the world. Rot is rarely allowed to speak. It is dated, deferred, deodorised—managed into invisibility through infrastructures that promise control over time, matter, and life itself. Contemporary systems seek to render decay legible, predictable, and governable. Yet rot persists—not as rupture, but as a slow, ambient condition that exceeds its management.

Consider Michel Foucault's account of biopolitics that describes the administration of life as a modern technology of power. This seminar asks what it would mean to extend that account to the administration of life's undoing. If waste and spoilage have their own governing and internal logics, they also have their own counter-archive: what discard studies scholars have more recently theorized as the afterlives of the supposedly finished. Rob Nixon's notion of slow violence offers one vocabulary for thinking rot's temporality; Lauren Berlant's account of slow death offers another, while Jasbir Puar’s offers the taxonomy of debility and ability. 

How is decay variously governed, postponed, or aestheticized across everyday and institutional contexts? What forms of life (and afterlife) emerge in spaces designed to arrest transformation? We are particularly interested in work that engages rot beyond spectacle, attending instead to its cross-cultural and continuous presence. 

Treating rot, here, as not an endpoint, but a condition of suspension, we invite papers that address, but are not limited to, the following topics:

• Rot in translation: vocabularies of spoilage across languages 
• Colonial and postcolonial regimes and their archives as classificatory afterlives
• Critiques of waste, wasted life, and the politics of displacement 
• Rot’s recuperation into future productivity versus its resistance to repair
• Illness, debility, and bodily breakdown as forms of rot 
• Collocating environmental humanities and decay
• Precarity, bureaucratic decay, and capitalist ruins
• Infrastructures of postponement, and memory
• Fragment, scrap, and collage as an aesthetics of rot
• Literary and cinematic aesthetics of ruin, spoilage, and slow disappearance
• Scholarly burnout and institutional rot 
• Brainrot and its various valences
• Revisiting theories of the e(rot)ic