Throughout history, humanity’s achievements, growth, and safety have depended on humans’ unique ability to cooperate in large numbers. Equipped with shared goals, values, beliefs, and myths; humanity created nations, legal systems, social orders, and science practices that improved the health, safety, and prosperity of its members. The need to cooperate globally remains crucially relevant today for revitalizing climate actions, for addressing global hostilities and human rights crises, for dealing with inflation and threats of recession, for equalizing access to basic goods across the world’s populations, and for fostering stability and prosperity.

In recent decades, technological proliferation (the Internet, the smartphone, social media, artificial intelligence) has given individuals unprecedented access to knowledge and influence, seemingly undermining their dependence on existing cooperative (governmental, municipal, social, and media) structures. Heightened by the (pandemic-boosted) ubiquity of remote-living culture, individuals have developed more personally configurable, geographically flexible relationships with cooperative structures (social media platforms, cyber communities, online education sites, dotcom and e-commerce companies, etc.). This has created more multiplicitous societies, in which individuals live and perceive their environments in highly diversified manners, with technologies and societal conventions that allow these perceptions and ways of being to flourish and transform.

With this burgeoning multiplicity, fluidity, and individual empowerment; the natures of collaborative process, cooperation, and collectivity have transformed as well, prompting many questions: What makes for effective collaborations in an environment with many voices? What is collectivity in a multiplicitous world? Is individualistic empowerment deleterious to large-scale cooperation? Or can it make it better, more equitable, more inclusive? How can we reap the benefits of large-scale cooperation (safety, scientific advancements, bettering the world) when our objectives, values, perceptions, and needs are so numerous—and often conflicting. How do humans collaborate/cooperate with the non-human (nature, technology, abstract entities, concepts)? What can we learn about collaborative process, cooperation, and multiplicity from the arts?

Join us and share your ongoing projects, creations, research, knowledge, questions, and experiences relevant to collaborative process, cooperation, and multiplicity from across all fields and practices of the arts and humanities. We welcome abstracts of 150 to 200 words. Proposals may include papers, technological demonstrations, workshops, seminars, readings, games, panels, tutorials, posters, and art presentations that are relevant (but not limited) to: