Dr Marc Kosciejew of the Department of Library, Information, and Archive Sciences delivered an invited keynote response on 9 June 2017 at the 8th Annual Conference on the New Materialisms: “Environmental Humanities and New Materialisms: The Ethics of Decolonizing Nature and Culture” at UNESCO Headquarters in Paris. He had the honour and privilege to serve as an invited keynote addresser along with globally renowned scholars including Bruno Latour and Rosi Braidotti.
This international peer-reviewed conference was part of the preparation process for the World Humanities Conference (August 2017). The Conference was organised by New Materialism: Networking European Scholarship on ‘How Matter Comes to Matter’, European Cooperation in Science and Technology (COST), Action IS1307; in association with Laboratory of Social dynamics and spatial reconstruction (LADYSS), and UNESCO.
Dr Kosciejew’s invited keynote response was to keynote lecture of Dr Kathryn Yusoff (Queen Mary University of London) on 'Towards a Thousand Black Anthropocenes'. His response, entitled 'The Role of Documentation in Materializing Racial and Ethnic Identities', extended Dr Yusoff’s lecture by presenting a case study of Apartheid South Africa and its documentary regime, exploring the important role played by documentation – that is documents and documentary practices – in materializing information about individuals’ official racial and ethnic identities.
Dr Kosciejew sincerely thanks the New Materialism COST Action, especially its chair Professor Iris van der Tuin (Utrecht University) and vice-chair Professor Felicity Colman (Kingston University, London), and UNESCO for this invitation and opportunity.