Eco-Humanities Online Lecture Series

Thursday, 2nd December, 5.00 p.m. - 6.15 p.m. Irish time

Jason Groves, University of Washington

Registration Link: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/eco-humanities-online-lecture-series-tickets-195796621967

Implicated Language, Implicated Ecologies: Paul Celan and the Eco-Poetics of Memory 

When Paul Celan declares in his most famous text on his poetics, “the poem remains open to time, time can enter, time participates,” he also offers an early articulation of an Anthropocene poetics. Beginning with his 1959 Sprachgitter (Language Mesh) collection, Celan’s poetry increasingly demonstrates an openness to deep time and a receptivity to the ways in which the Shoah is registered not only in various landscapes but also in geological processes. My talk will attend to the ways in which this poetry collection accounts for and performs the making-present of the past that is constitutive of memory, namely with an understanding of memory and commemoration as an ecological and multispecies practice. Additionally, I will consider how Celan’s ways of commemorating the Jewish and anti-Jewish ecologies of Auschwitz—environmentally, ecologically, geologically, biogeochemically, planetarily, and linguistically—bear methodological and poetic similarities to recent studies by contemporary Black poets and theorists, including Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Tiffany Lethabo King, and Christina Sharpe, of how the longue durée of the Middle Passage is mediated through oceanic archives and the element of water.  

Jason Groves is Associate Professor of German Studies at the University of Washington. His research areas include ecocriticism, interdisciplinary nineteenth-century studies, and the environmental humanities. His monograph, The Geological Unconscious: German Literature and the Mineral Imaginary, appeared with Fordham University Press in July 2020. From 2016-2019 he co-organized the Cross-disciplinary Research Cluster on the Anthropocene, and he currently co-organizes the Colloquium on Transcultural Approaches to Europe, both at the Simpson Center for the Humanities.

 

University College Cork Eco-Humanities Research Group 

Workshop:  

Agency, Onto-Epistemology and the ‘more-than-human’ 

Wednesday 12 January 2022 (online workshop), 9.45am – 4pm GMT 

 

The University College Cork Eco-Humanities Research Group is delighted to host an online inter-disciplinary workshop to explore diverse notions of the agency, ontology and epistemology of the non-human, or ‘more-than-human,’ in the context of contemporary ecological crisis.  

All are welcome at this workshop.  Attendance at the workshop is free but advance registration is required – please register for the Workshop through Eventbrite here: 

https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/agency-onto-epistemology-and-the-more-than-human-workshop-tickets-223916208407

The full programme (including schedule and abstracts) can be accessed here

 

Speaking the Predicament: Words and Stories for the Anthropocene - Online Symposium - 16th December 2021 

Eco-Humanities lunchtime seminars

Date: 3 February 2022

Time: 1-2 pm (Irish Time)

Number of speakers: 2

Laurence Davis (Government and Politics, l.davis@ucc.ie)

Title: "Gustav Landauer, Revolutionary Romanticism, and Utopia"

The social philosophy and revolutionary praxis of Gustav Landauer (1870-1919) is paradigmatic of socialist revolutionary romanticism, understood as a worldview combining aspects of socialist theory and romantic anti-modernism, and committed to the more-or-less explicit belief that communist socialism must break fundamentally with industrial/bourgeois civilisation in the name of premodern social, cultural, ethical, or religious values. In this short presentation I elucidate Landauer's critique of the ideology of progress and consider some of its radical political implications in the context of global ecocide.

Miranda Corcoran (English, miranda.corcoran@ucc.ie)

Title: "Dark-Uncanny and Dark-Sweet: Dark Ecology in We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Elizabeth: A Novel of the Unnatural"

This paper focuses on two gothic novels, Shirley Jackson’s We Have Always Lived in the Castle (1962) and Ken Greenhall’s Elizabeth: A Novel of the Unnatural (1976), that imagine the interconnection between the human and the nonhuman as dark, sinister, and even deadly. Here, I draw on philosopher Timothy Morton’s conception of “dark ecology”, the idea that ecology is “dark” because it requires us to consider how we, as humans, are intimately connected with all sorts of nonhuman entities, from trees and flowers to insects, fungi and decaying matter. Ecology, in this sense, does not privilege the human, nor is it necessarily beautiful. I argue that rather than romanticising the relationship between their characters and the natural world, these novels evoke some of the ways in which humanity’s imbrication with the more-more-than-human world can be “dark-depressing”, “dark-uncanny”, and “dark-sweet” (Morton 5).

Registration Link: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/ucc-eco-humanities-lunchtime-seminar-series-tickets-255190550807

Eco-Humanities lunchtime seminars

Date: 3 March 2022

Time: 1-2:15 pm (Irish Time)

Number of speakers: 4

Crystal Addey (crystal.addey@ucc.ie)

Title: Ancient Greek Philosophy and Contemporary Environmental Crisis: Relational Philosophy, Late Antique Theurgy and Contemporary Indigenous Traditions

Abstract: Are ancient Greek philosophy and religions useful for thinking through and dealing with contemporary environmental crises? Environmental philosophers have examined the ethical, political and cosmological dimensions of the current environmental crises we face. However, ancient Greek philosophy is often blamed for instigating anthropocentric worldviews, ethics and cosmologies. Plato and Neoplatonist philosophers such as Plotinus are often charged with contributing to this anthropocentrism by ontologically separating humans from other animals and the natural world through their metaphysical dualism. Yet some scholars have argued that a more ecocentric perspective in line with – and prefiguring – some of the concepts and frameworks evident within deep ecology can be found in the works of Plato and Plotinus. However, to date, theurgy (a type of religious ritual used by Neoplatonist philosophers in late antiquity) has been almost entirely overlooked within these debates, in line with its broader marginalisation within the history of philosophy. Turning the lens on Neoplatonic theurgy and the practices and worldview exemplified by it, I consider if theurgic frameworks may have any relevance for the current environmental crises we face, by examining: (1) the ecocentric nature of the theurgic worldview and the relationship it envisages between human beings and animals, plants, and the natural world in relation to the divine; and (2) the parallels and points of contact between theurgic/ancient polytheistic-philosophical worldview(s) and contemporary indigenous worldviews.

Jenny Butler (j.butler@ucc.ie)

Title: Guardians of the Earth: Eco-Cosmology and Contemporary Paganism

Abstract: Contemporary Pagan cosmology is holistic, resting on the fundamental notion that a spiritual energy infuses all that exists and as such this religious movement has been described by some scholars as a form of modern animism. Based on ethnographic research with practitioners of witchcraft and druidism, this presentation explores the special status of the natural world in contemporary Irish Pagan discourse and practices, and the connection between environmental activism, “Earth healing” rituals, and spiritual worldviews.

Gert Hofmann (g.hofmann@ucc.ie)

Title: Prolegomena for a Poetics of the Body as a Theory of Eco-human Writing

Abstract: The Poetics of the body conceives of a poetic theory of subjectivity which reflects critically on cognitive science and eco-science as the lead sciences of our age. I call this theory “eco-human”, because it hopes to offer an alternative to the discourses of transhumanism and posthumanism. The Poetics of the Body is an ethically marked poetic which, based on an elementary body-awareness, aims at overcoming the fundamental anthropocentrism of all prevailing human traditions of scientific knowledge and philosophical understanding. It is a theory that shows affinities and sympathies with Emmanuel Lévinas’ humanistic ethics of “the other human”, but expanding it to the presence of the other life as the other subject – not as another object of cognitive appropriation.

Kian Mintz-Woo (mintzwoo@ucc.ie)

Title: On the Importance of Climate Civilization Collapse

Abstract: In this paper, we consider the implications of anthropogenic climate change driven civilization collapse (climate collapse, for short) for climate ethics. First, we argue that climate collapse is a real possibility: many experts believe that 4°C could lead to collapse, and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest (2021) assessment report’s high-emission socioeconomic pathways include that level of warming in their very likely (66-100%) range by 2100. Second, we argue that taking the risk of climate collapse seriously challenges two longstanding assumptions in climate ethics: (a) stable governance capable of promoting justice will exist in the long-term, and (b) current generations receive little or no benefit from climate change mitigation. This paper then argues that rejecting these assumptions matter, because their rejection explains how urgent climate action can be practically justified, or even required, for currently living people.

Registration Link: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/copy-of-ucc-eco-humanities-lunchtime-seminar-series-tickets-274711729177

Date: 7th April, 2022

Time: 17:00 - 18:30 p.m. (Irish Time)

Title: "Some Precious Dream": Energy Futures in Contemporary Irish Fiction 

Speaker:  Sharae Deckard, Associate Professor in World Literature, UCD

Registration Link: 

https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/some-precious-dream-energy-futures-in-contemporary-irish-fiction-tickets-303352975917

  

Future Humanities Institute Inaugural Lecture Series

Burning Up With Rilke: Elegy, Ecology, Action

Thursday 13 October 2022 @ 5 pm in Boole 4

Speaker: Prof. Caitríona Ní Dhúill, Department of German, SLLC / ERI

Respondent: Prof. Astrid Wingler, School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences / ERI

An open discussion and wine reception will follow the lecture and response

How do we read major works of literature and art in new ways in the face of climate change, and how does the practice of attentive reading help us to navigate an increasingly uncertain future? Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies – completed a century ago, the same year in which Eliot’s The Waste Land and Joyce’s Ulysses were published – serve in this lecture as a challenge to the ‘Future Humanities’ in an era of ecological crisis. The lecture asks how we can encounter Rilke’s poems on their terms and our own, while disentangling our readings from outmoded discourses of mastery and mystery and from the industrious gatekeeping of professionalised philology. Finding ourselves at the crossroads between ecocidal destruction and necessary transformation, we can do worse than slow down, acknowledge our differences, and learn to read with more care. Rilke’s Elegies can allow us to do precisely that; what we do after we read them is up to us. 

Contact: j.kapalo@ucc.ie

Anthropocene Austria special issue launch

Title: 'Anthropocene Austria: book presentation'

17.2.23 @ 16:00 (GMT) / 17:00 (CET/MEZ) register here to receive the link.

Text: This online event marks the publication of the latest volume of Austrian Studies. 'Anthropocene Austria' examines the presence of the now well-established paradigm of the Anthropocene — which perceives humanity as a geological force that leaves an indelible trace on the fabric of the planet — in Austrian literature and culture. In eleven wide-ranging contributions, the volume highlights the entanglements of Austrian literature, film and contemporary culture with environments and ecologies in the age of climate breakdown. Join us for an online launch and discussion with the editors Dr Nicola Thomas (Lancaster University) and Prof. Caitríona Ní Dhúill (University College Cork / University of Salzburg), in conversation with Prof. Dr. Eva Horn (University of Vienna / Vienna Anthropocene Network). 

Vienna Anthropocene Network event in cooperation with University College Cork Eco-Humanities Research Group. 

Austrian Studies is a peer-reviewed yearbook published by the Modern Humanities Research Association.

Table of contents, 'Anthropocene Austria' (Austrian Studies volume 30):

Introduction      

Caitríona Ní Dhúill and Nicola Thomas

Gardening as an Ecological and Educational Project: Stifter’s Anticipation of Anthropocene Thinking and Aesthetics in Der Nachsommer

by Axel Goodbody

‘So lange die Natur so bleibt’: The Alpine Abstract in Stifter’s ‘Bergkristall’

by Stefanie Heine and Brian Alkire

Anthropocene Realism: On Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Erde, and the Limits of a Cumulative Aesthetic

by Alexis Radisoglou

Portrait of a Hoping Species: on the Anticipatory Realism of Nikolaus Geyrhalter’s Homo Sapiens

by Rafael Dernbach

‘Ein Mann, dem die Welt vertraut’: Kurt Waldheim’s Global Legacy in Ruth Beckermann’s Waldheims Walzer

by Dora Osborne

Doom and Bloom: Friederike Mayröcker’s Anthropocene Lateness

by Nicola Thomas

Plant Ontology, Non-Human Becoming and Acoustic Materiality in Oswald Egger’s 'Herde der Rede'

by Teresa Ludden

Soundwalks Through the Anthropocene: The Acoustic Landscape in Josef Winkler's Der Stadtschreiber von Kalkutta (2019)

by Daniela Dora

Nature and the ‘National Brand Austria’: Contested Concepts in Raphaela Edelbauer's Das flüssige Land and Robert Seethaler's Ein ganzes Leben

by Rebecca Wismeg-Kammerländer

In Echo’s Cave: Gendered Guilt and Anthropocene Repercussions in Texts by Christoph Ransmayr and Valerie Fritsch

by Conor Brennan

An Interview with Philipp Weiss

by Caitríona Ní Dhúill

 

Thursday 23^rd February 2023   5.00-5.30pm (1700-1730)

Register here

Benjamin Gearey (Department of Archaeology, University College Cork)

Report on COP 27

Benjamin Gearey will present a brief and informal report about COP 27, which he attended as a member of the UCC delegation.

Benjamin Gearey is Lecturer in Environmental Archaeology in the Department of Archaeology at University College Cork. He has a wide range of research interests focussed on wetland environments and especially the archaeological and palaeoenvironmental records of peatlands. He is currently editor of The Journal of Wetland Archaeology and elected member of the scientific advisory board, Joint Planning Initiative, Cultural Heritage and Global Change, Europe

Thursday 2^nd March 2023   4.00-5.15pm GMT (1600-1715)

Register here

Ecological grief in ancient Mediterranean culture:

Aelius Aristides, Philostratus and the Smyrna earthquake of 178 CE

Jason König (School of Classics, University of St Andrews, and Co-director of the St Andrews Centre for Ancient Environmental Studies)

My goal in this lecture is to ask what we can gain from bringing ancient responses to environmental damage into dialogue with their modern equivalents. I start by looking at some similarities and differences between ancient and modern representations of ecological grief. To what extent are modern versions of that phenomenon anticipated in the literatures of classical antiquity? How far can we use that comparison to shed new light on both ancient and modern conceptions? How far can we reconstruct ancient experiences of ecological grief, and are there ways in which that process can act as a resource for environmental thinking in the present? As a case study for those questions I look at the work of the second-century CE Greek orator Aelius Aristides and especially his responses to the Smyrna earthquake of 178 CE, and at Philostratus’ famous depiction of the emperor Marcus Aurelius’ grief on hearing news of the destruction of the city.

Jason König is Professor of Greek at the University of St Andrews, and co-director of the St Andrews Centre for Ancient Environmental Studies. He works broadly on the literatures and cultures of the Roman empire, and on the history and representation of human-environment relations in classical antiquity. His books include The Folds of Olympus: Mountains in Ancient Greek and Roman Culture (Princeton University Press, 2022).

 

Thursday 30^th March 2023   4.30-5.45pm BST/DST (1630-1745)

Laurence Davis and Matt York (Department of Government and Politics, University College Cork)

Anarchist Ecologies: Grounded Utopias and the Deep Commons

Register here 

The Eco-Humanities Research Group at University College Cork aims to explore how work in the humanities can help individuals and communities, including communities of researchers in the social and natural sciences, to navigate the growing demands of contemporary ecological crises. In this joint public lecture, Laurence Davis and Matt York share their respective research on two distinct but closely related conceptual tools intended to facilitate radically transformative political imagination in a time of ecological collapse.

In the first part of the lecture, Laurence Davis will elucidate the concept of ‘grounded utopias’. His chief argument is that utopian imagination, long derided as either hopelessly impractical or dangerously idealistic, can contribute meaningfully to much wider processes of urgently necessary ecological and social regeneration. However, it can do so only if it first comes to grips with utopia’s own complicity with modern conceptions of progress and perfectibility that have legitimized settler colonialism, the genocide of Indigenous peoples, the violent subordination of women and racial and sexual ‘others’, ecocide, and a ‘grow or die’ form of civilization that is now threatening the very existence of all life on the planet. In his remarks Davis will critically analyze (1) ‘transcendent’ forms of utopian thought and imagination that have historically inspired and helped to maintain interlinked systems of domination ranging from capitalism to industrialism, colonialism, patriarchy, and megatechnics; and (2) ‘futures thinking’ of the sort that has guided and informed a range of contemporary academic research projects. By way of a radical and transformative constructive alternative, he will draw on a range of literary (William Morris, Ursula K. Le Guin, Starhawk) and social movement (Zapatistas in Mexico, Rojava Revolution in northern Syria) case studies, as well as philosophical reflection by relatively neglected German/Austrian-Jewish revolutionary romantic thinkers (Gustav Landauer, Martin Buber), to sketch the contours of and argue for a terrestrial ecotopianism that can help humanity build beyond the Necrocene.

Inspired by such grounded utopias and building on the growing body of work that repositions love, care, and solidarity relations as central to social reproduction and fundamentally constitutive of society, Matt York will then discuss his research on the Deep Commons.  This ongoing enquiry works to broaden our understanding of what constitutes revolutionary transformation towards a far more comprehensive redefinition of our social ecologies across all spheres of life.  Critically, the aim is to extend the concept of ‘commons’ far beyond the mere management of resources with which humans have a relationship of stewardship, and to radically reimagine human-nature relations within our more-than-human conditions.  Drawing on a recent collective visioning project involving a global cross-section of anti-capitalist, ecological, feminist, and anti-racist activists, Matt will explore how such a radical interrelationality might thus serve as the basis for a co-emergent relational ethics of solidarity and care.

Laurence Davis and Matt York lecture in the Department of Government and Politics at University College Cork. Laurence has published widely on political theory and ideologies, focusing on radical political thought, including anarchist and utopian studies, democratic and revolutionary theory, and the politics of art, work, ecology, love, and social change. He is a Series Editor of the Manchester University Press Contemporary Anarchist Studies Series, Western Europe editor of the international journal Interface: a journal for and about social movements, and a founding member and current co-convenor of the Anarchist Studies Network of the UK Political Studies Association. His publications include the books Anarchism and Utopianism (Manchester University Press, 2014) and The New Utopian Politics of Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (Lexington Books, 2005). Matt York’s Love and Revolution: A Politics for the Deep Commons is forthcoming from Manchester University Press in March 2023. He currently facilitates the Deep Commons collective visioning project: www.deepcommons.net.

Thursday 11^th May 2023  4.00-5.15pm BST/DST (1600-1715)

Sarah Bezan (Department of English and Digital Humanities, and Radical Humanities Laboratory, University College Cork)

Thylacinema: De-Extinction as Multi-Medial Adaptation

Register here

Julia Leigh’s award-winning novel The Hunter (1999) and its cinematic adaptation directed by Daniel Nettheim (2011) exemplify how narratives of extinction become, in the words of Stephanie S. Turner, “open-ended” in the wake of “genome time” (2008). Building on Turner’s critique, I examine how extinction narratives have also become multi-medial in a biotechnological age. In 2011, for instance, de-extinction scientist George Church and geneticist Seth Shipman utilized the gene editing tool CRISPR to successfully encode Edward Muybridge’s famous 1889 film of a galloping horse in bacterial DNA. Anticipating the genomic sequencing of the extinct thylacine, Rachel Berwick’s art installation Hovering Close to Zero (2000-2006) likewise reconfigures Muybridge’s zoopraxiscopic grid in order to break down the frames of footage of the next-to-last thylacine, Benjamin, from Hobart Zoo in 1936. In Berwick’s thylacinematic work, the thylacine is reanimated as it emerges out of, and extends beyond, the stop motion frames of the cinematic grid. Along with Berwick’s installation, Nettheim’s film and Leigh’s novel showcase the cross-pollinatory potential of genomic and creative adaptations. This multi-mediality also generates new ways of thinking about aura in the age of biocybernetic reproduction (WJT Mitchell). Drawing from theoretical work on the expressions of DNA codes (Judith Roof) and creative adaptations of animals in text and film (Linda Hutcheon, Akira Lippit, Antoine Traisnel), I argue in these re-creative adaptations of the thylacine, montage and repetition become the modes through which to re-sequence, but more importantly to temporally extend and multiply, the narratives of extinct species.

Dr Sarah Bezan is Lecturer in Literature and the Environment in the School of English at University College Cork, where she is a founding member of the Radical Humanities Laboratory. Her work broadly examines the entangled social and ecological dimensions of species loss and revival in contemporary settler colonial literature and digital media/arts. Sarah is co-editor with Robert McKay of the recently published volume Animal Remains (Routledge 2022) and with James Tink of Seeing Animals After Derrida (Rowman & Littlefield 2018) along with special issues on “Sex and Nature” (Environmental Humanities 2022), “Coastal (Post)humanities” (Anthropocenes 2022), and “Taxidermic Forms and Fictions” (Configurations 2019). Her first book, Dead Darwin: Necro-Ecologies in Neo-Victorian Culture, is under advance contract with Manchester University Press

Thursday 1^st June 2023  4.00-5.15pm BST/DST (1600-1715)

Simone Horstmann (Institute of Catholic Theology, Technical University of Dortmund)

To Believe in the Wild. A Rereading of the Biblical Dominion Mandate

Register here

The so-called mandate of human dominion over (other) animals (Gen 1:28) is certainly one of the most controversial and much discussed verses in the Bible. In the context of the Anthropocene, especially in the face of man-made violence against animals, its precarious meaning is once again intensified. While the classical critique of the dominion mandate had mostly attempted to analyse its historical consequences, to trace its exegetical and intra-textual meaning or even to excuse it apologetically, the lecture will be concerned with examining the deeper meaning of that religiously connoted speciesism which is expressed in the dominion mandate: In the form of an alterity-theoretical re-reading of Gen 1:28, the question will be explored to which experiences of wildness, unruliness and uncontrollability of animals Gen 1:28 responds and how these experiences are still morally relevant today. This approach is thus less concerned with questions of later text reception than with reconstructing the hidden pre-texts of Gen 1:28: The dominion mandate is thus treated as a "palimpsest" (Gerard Genette) - as a text that bears witness to another, erased text. Inspired by Levinas and Foucault, the aim is to sketch out a knowledge archaeology of creation theology that pursues the question of how the present-day, ultimately biopolitical violent relationship of humans to other animals is based on experiences that must be re-read and theologically re-evaluated, especially in the Anthropocene.

Simone Horstmann, Dr. phil., is a research associate at the Institute of Catholic Theology at the Technical University of Dortmund (North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany). Her work focuses on the areas of a post-anthropocentric theology and questions of animal ethics. Recent publications focus on "Religious Violence against Animals" and "Interspecies Learning".

Thursday 12^th October 2023:  4.00-5.15pm (DST/BST)

Khan Touseef Osman (University of Salerno)

Nation, Nature and Narrative in the Time of the Planetary Crisis: Eco-political Consciousness in Contemporary Bangladeshi Anglophone Novels

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/st887z2z

Amitav Ghosh in his novel Gun Island (2019) and non-fiction work The Nutmeg's Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021) has written about the increased trend of Bangladeshis taking perilous routes and passages to make it into Europe illegally despite their country being widely celebrated as a neoliberal economic success. The lecture begins by identifying this as the Bangladesh paradox and attempts to explore the maximized precariousness of a large section of Bangladeshi population as a result of the acceleration of capitalist modernity in recent decades. The dispersal of Bangladeshis appears to be a symptom of the planetary crisis – one whose origin Ghosh traces back to settler colonialism and its metaphysic of inertness that imagines a rift between the agentic human subject and the “brute” nature, evolving into a full-blown disaster on a planetary scale due to the unrestrained capitalist acceleration in the age of neoliberalism. In his analysis, the maximized precariousness of Bangladeshis is a consequence of the structures of colonialism being perpetuated, yet masked, by hegemonic neoliberal modernity in a world sharply divided between the Global North and South, wreaking havoc on the human and non-human inhabitants of their nation. It is this politics of invisibility that the eco-politically conscious works of the Bangladeshi-origin, multiply-rooted authors attempt to subvert through novels like Arif Anwar’s The Storm (2018), Numair Atif Choudhury’s Babu Bangladesh! (2019) and Tahmima Anam’s The Bones of Grace (2016). These novels bring to the surface the multidirectionality of violence experienced within the affective order of the everyday in such a location of the Global South as Bangladesh, but, more importantly, they deconstruct the cartesian dualism between subjectivity and objectivity, steering clear of the nature-culture binary, often through their deep ecological awareness. In my reading of these novels, nationhood in the Indian subcontinent has emerged as a consequence of the biopolitical manipulation of identities within a colonial framework and has carried the metaphysic of inertness to impossible extremes in the post-independence context. My lecture will conclude by commenting on the representational aspects of eco-politically conscious literatures rooted, at least partially, in the Global South that gesture towards an understanding of reality where the category of the uncanny is an essential constituent.

Dr. Khan Touseef Osman is a South Asian academic and researcher. He did his PhD in Literary Studies in English at the University of Kashmir. Dr. Osman also worked as a Postdoctoral Researcher in Studies in Historical Trauma and Transformation at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He is now finishing another PhD in the area of Comparative Literary and Historical Studies at the University of Salerno, Italy. Dr. Osman has received several prestigious scholarships, such as South Asia Foundation scholarship, Andrew Mellon Foundation postdoc fellowship and the University of Salerno scholarship in its XXXV cycle. He has taught and done research at Asian University for Women (AUW) and some other universities at home and abroad.

Thursday 7^th December 2023, 4.00-5.15pm (GMT)

Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (University of Maryland), and Andrew Frederick Smith (Drexel University)

Climate Crisis as Relational Crisis: Centering Indigenous Feminist Conceptions of Responsibility in Environmental Discourse

Register here: https://tinyurl.com/yf8pppfc

It is commonly assumed that we currently face a climate crisis insofar as the climatological effects of excessive carbon emissions risk destabilizing advanced civilization and jeopardize cherished modern institutions. The threat posed by climate change is treated as unprecedented, demanding urgent action to avert apocalyptic conditions that will limit or even erase the future of all humankind. In this essay, we argue that this framework—the default climate crisis motif—perpetuates a discursive infrastructure that commits its proponents, if unwittingly, to logics that ultimately reinforce the dynamics driving climate change and its attending injustices. By centering Indigenous feminist environmental discourses, which privilege the role of richly interweaving networks of responsibilities composing extended more-than-human kinship arrangements, we contend that climate crisis is instead primarily a manifestation of devastating multidimensional relational disruptions of Indigenous lands and lives. More pointedly, it is a rebound effect of centuries of accumulating colonial injustices against responsible lifeways that are critical for socioecological adaptability and responsiveness. Framing climate crisis as relational crisis hereby creates discursive space for much needed transformational Indigenous feminist visions for justly and effectively addressing climate change.

Shelbi Nahwilet Meissner (Luiseño & Cupeño) is an Indigenous feminist philosopher. Shelbi researches, teaches, and consults on Indigenous research and evaluation methods, cultural and language reclamation, Indigenous epistemologies, Indigenous feminist interventions in critical social work, and land-based feminist coalition-building. Shelbi is fascinated by the intersections of Indigenous knowledge systems, caretaking, power, and trauma. Shelbi is a proud first-generation descendant of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, and is of both Luiseño (Payómkawichum) and Cupeño (Kúupangaxwichem) descent. She is an assistant professor in the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Maryland College Park and the founding director of the Indigenous Futures Lab, a hub of Indigenous feminist research and evaluation.

Andrew Frederick Smith, kinless (i.e., a settler/colonizer/occupier), is a professor of philosophy and environmental studies at Drexel University in Philadelphia. He also is department chair of the Department of Biodiversity, Earth and Environmental Science. His recent research is inspired by the pursuit of what Kim TallBear calls “settler ontocide,” which has led him to focus on the philosophical dimensions of Indigenous ecological knowledge systems, Indigenous climate/food justice, and Indigenous feminisms. His latest book is The Threefold Struggle (SUNY 2022).