Environmental Humanities Lectures

What happens when people bring their environmental complaints to a body gathered in the name of the world? In this lecture Cheryl Lousley, professor of English and Interdisciplinary Studies at Lakehead University, Canada, discusses the World Commission on Environment and Development's public hearings. 

Bowhead whales have been known to three groups along the Bering Strait over the past two centuries: Indigenous Yupik and Inupiaq whalers, capitalist commercial whalers, and communist industrial whalers. This talk explores how each of these groups imagined different normative relationships with whales and how these ideas shaped interactions between human hunters and whales, and the whales’ own adaptions.

What kind of careful attention to the meaningful lives of other species does film making engender? What sort of perspectives may it open up and/or foreclose? In this talk, filmmaker Asgeir Helgestad and historian of science Ageliki Lefkaditou, draw on three of their documentary projects on climate change and biodiversity loss to discuss how filming may convey the complex relationships that such processes provoke and threaten.

How may we grasp meaning beyond the boundaries of biological species? In this talk philosopher Dominique Lestel, will explore ‘zoo-futurism’ as setting up the basis of an ego-ecology – to incarnate and to feel biodiversity not from the point of view of the first person, but from the point of view of a first person; to feel its richness and importance from a personal point of view.

How might attention to worlds of meaning extend beyond the human, and how may this matter for conservation?  In this lecture, Marianne Lien, Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, explores how worlds, such as specific landscapes, are sustained through reciprocal and ongoing practices and affordances.

In this lecture, Erich Hörl, University of Leuphana, Lüneburg, discusses Bernard Stiegler's reflections on the time of suspension or "being-in-disruption" that define life in the Entropocene, understood as an un-time without world or epoch. 

This event is co-organised with The Seminar of Aesthetics.

In this talk, anthropologist Eben Kirksey, Associate Professor at Deakin University, Melbourne, visits the frontiers of genetics, medicine, and technology to ask: Whose values are guiding gene editing experiments? And what does this new era of scientific inquiry mean for the future of the human species?

How does attention to and stewardship of soils point to alternative frameworks for living and dying? Kristina Lyons, Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, explores the way life strives to flourish in the face of violence, criminalization, and poisoning produced by militarized, growth-oriented development.

What happens when actors with different interests claims access to the same natural and cultural site? OSEH professor II Thom van Dooren explores some of the complexities of conservation in the context of deep histories and ongoing realities of colonization and militarization.

CANCELLED.  We hope to bring Libby Robin back at another time in the future.

How does soil intersect with global justice, conservation ideals and changing environmental sensibilities? Environmental historian and museum curator Libby Robin talks about soil in local and global perspectives, in light of the current Australian summer. 

How to address the double bind between growth and sustainability? In this talk, anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen engages with the climate crisis in Queensland, Australia. He asks how different knowledge regimes identify and interpret facts differently, and how this creates conflicting depictions of the world and solutions to humanity's problems.

How does the Anthropocene manifest in the organosphere? Marco Armiero presents the Guerrilla Narrative project Toxic Bios, a counter-hegemonic exercise aiming to dismantle the Toxic Narratives of the Anthropocene while prefiguring alternative socio-ecological politics.

How is knowledge produced from art, pedagogy and civic engagement in the Environmental Humanities? Hanna Musiol lectures on the need to create spaces for participatory and transmedia collaborations among scholars, artists, students, designers, and community actors.