About the lecture:
2025: Even privileged knowledge workers are now directly affected by catastrophic events. Soil exhaustion, water and air pollution, species extinction, rising oceans, new sicknesses, new neo-imperial threats of violence, the increasing mainstreaming of racist politics, and yes, increasingly precarious working conditions: these are some of the consequences of capitalist extractivism. Just reading such a partial list can feel exhausting and trigger despair.
What transferable lessons on cultivating livability can we take from our own empirical evidence and theorizing, e.g. on soil remediation and air pollution activism? This talk connects the anthropogenic soils fund of knowledge to insights from my ethnographic, arts-based and transdisciplinary research in Central Asia. It explores the use of understanding soils in forming more-than-academic life and labour, less vulnerable to despair. The talk is intended as an impetus for a collective visioning space, informed by our own research results.
Location
This will be a hybrid event, but we encourage you to attend in person if you can!
Zoom-link
Click here to attend Zoom meeting
Meeting ID: 685 9263 9811
Passcode: 956295
About the Presenter:
Jeanne Féaux de la Croix holds a PRIMA research professorship at the University of Bern. As an environmental anthropologist, she pursues transdisciplinary research to support environmental justice around water and energy concerns. Jeanne currently leads the research project Social Ocean Energy: A Social Learning Approach to Global Marine Renewable Infrastructures (link) and is building collaborations on Asian and American coasts.
She is the author of 'Iconic Places in Central Asia: the moral geography of pastures, dams and holy sites' (Transcript, 2017). Other recent publications include 'The Central Asian World' with Madeleine Reeves (Routledge 2023), and 'Environmental Humanities in Central Asia' (Routledge 2023) with Beatrice Penati. Current engagements include work with the Environmental Justice Network and the Alliance for Critical Scholarship in Solidarity.
Jeanne defended her PhD at the University of St. Andrews, then pursued a Postdoc at the Zentrum Moderner Orient (Berlin, 2010-13) and led several research groups at the University of Tübingen (2014-2022). She has also held teaching positions at the American University of Central Asia (Bishkek) and Humboldt University (Berlin). Jeanne has a particular interest in political ecology, technology and the development of intervention methods such as civic science that support an equitable human future on Earth. She has led multi-partner research on the Naryn and Syr Darya rivers as well as environmental movements.