Prof. Harriet Hawkins is Reader at the Department of Geography in Royal Holloway, University of London. Her research is focused on the advancement of the geohumanities, a field that sits at the intersection of geographical scholarship with arts and humanities scholarship and practice. Empirically she explores the geographies of art works and art worlds. Collaboration underpins her research practice and alongside written research she has produced artist’s books, participatory art projects and exhibitions with individual artists and range of international arts organizations including Tate, Arts Catalyst, Iniva, Furtherfield and Swiss Artists in Labs. Harriet is the author of For Creative Geographies (Routledge 2013) and Creativity (Routledge 2016), co-editor of Geographical Aesthetics (Ashgate 2014). She is also an Associate Editor and member of the founding editorial collective of the new AAG journal GeoHumanities. She is currently leading a project “Creating Earth Futures: Exploring GeoHumanities Approaches to Global Environmental Change” (2016–2018).
Abstract: Our current Environmental crisis, with its often entrenched divisions between nature and culture, can be understood as a crisis of the imagination. A crisis which could be ameliorated by finding better ways to imagine nature and humanity’s relations to it. This lecture uses artistic case studies and creative methodologies to experiment with geographical imaginations and anthropocene fabulations. In doing so it examines the possibilities and the limitations of such environmental re-imaginations. If, as is often claimed, the Anthropocene is thoroughly disorderly of ways of thinking and being – so intensifying the need to come to terms with scrambled understandings of, for example, nature-culture and space-time – this paper explores how GeoHumanities (as itself a disorderly mode of scholarship and practice that yokes geographical scholarship with arts and humanities scholarship and practice) might be up to such challenges. A central proposition of the GeoHumanities offered here is that modes of creative doing are able to develop modes of practice and thinking for Anthropocene times. Developing case study examples this paper explores three tenants of the geographical imagination; entanglement, scale and distance to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of imaginations and fabulations as responses to these disorderly times.
Dr. Dolly Jørgensen is Associate Professor of History of
Environment and Technology in Luleå University of Technology, Sweden.
She is a historian of the environment and technology, interested in how
human technologies shape the world around us and how we come to
understand what is “natural” and what is not, what is acceptable
environmental behavior and what is not. Her research spans from medieval
to contemporary environmental issues. Her primary areas of interest are
human-animal relations, the urban environment, and environmental
policymaking. She has co-edited two major books in the field of
environmental humanities, Northscapes: History, Technology & the Making of Northern Environments (UBS Press 2013), which looks at the making of environments with technologies in the northern reaches of the globe, and New Natures: Joining Environmental History with Science and Technology Studies (University of Pittsburgh Press 2013), which brings ideas from Science & Technology Studies into environmental histories.
One of her fields of predilection is medieval environmental history. She
is interested in how people in medieval Europe have managed various
resources to make the most of their potential. She has looked
extensively at agricultural landscapes and the environment in the early
Anglo-Norman period (1066-1135) in England and Normandy. She has also
published on swine husbandry and agricultural practice in the High and
Late Middle Ages in both city and countryside.
Dolly is currently working on a project about the role of history in the
reintroduction of mammals in Norway and Sweden. She is the President of
the European Society for Environmental History, 2013–2017.
Abstract: Humans see distinctions between artifacts, which are constructed by human hands with human ingenuity, and nature, which we tend to think of as somehow not made by humans even if we acknowledge that little nature is left untouched by humans. An artifact at its core is related to the word artificial, meaning made by human hands through art/craft. The word artificial then is most often used to represent the opposite of natural, a word which then implies not manmade. These distinctions play into how scholars approach environmental humanities topics, which tend to focus on nature as subject and artifact as something that modifies (often negatively) nature. Yet I would argue that the concept of artificial may be misguided if we consider life from the nonhuman point of view. In the environmental humanities we need to shift focus from the artifact’s human producer to its non-human user. We can look to the field of history of technology where a shift has been underway over the last thirty years to focus on the user instead of just the producer. In these newer technology histories, how end users react to, incorporate, and modify the technologies are just as important as the original invention and design. I would like to suggest that environmental humanities scholars also need to make a “user” turn when thinking about new natures and entangled cultures.
Dr. Timothy James LeCain is Associate Professor of History and Director of Graduate Studies at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. He is a historian of the environment and technology who focuses on the ways in which new materialist theories can help us to better understand the past. His forthcoming book, The Matter of History: How Things Create the Past (Cambridge University Press 2017), develops a new theoretical and methodological approach that emphasizes the many ways in which a dynamic material environment creates humans, both as biological and cultural creatures. LeCain’s first book, Mass Destruction (Rutgers University Press 2009), an environmental and technological history of the giant open-pit copper mines developed in the American West in the first half of the 20th century, won the 2010 best book of the year award from the American Society for Environmental History.
Tim has published nearly fifty articles, op-ed pieces, reviews, and other pieces. His most recent major article, “Against the Anthropocene: A Neo-Materialist Perspective,” (2015) argues that the inherent anthropocentrism of this proposed geological epoch tends to reinforce the very same human hubris that caused many contemporary environmental problems in the first place. He has been invited to present papers and talks around the world, including in the past three years, China, Morocco, South Africa, Chile, England, Sweden, Germany, Norway, and the Czech Republic. From 2011 to 2012, Tim was a Senior Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich, Germany. In 2017, he will be a fellow at the Oslo Center for Advanced Study.
Abstract: For much of the previous century, culture has often been defined in opposition to nature, a tendency that only deepened as the cultural and linguistic turns came to stress the centrality of human discourse in shaping and perhaps even creating reality. More recently, however, new scientific and humanistic insights have begun to suggest a far more complex view of culture, one predicated on two key propositions. First, that human bodies and minds are much more deeply embedded in the natural material world than previously believed. And second, that this natural material world is much more dynamic and creative than previously understood. These propositions, if accurate, together suggest a compelling need to develop what we might term a post-anthropocentric “deep culture” that emerges not in distinction from a passive nature, but rather with and through a dynamic nature. This radical new understanding of what it means to be human logically demands a new humanism, and the environmental humanities, post-humanism, and neo-materialism are pointing the way.
Dr. Jamie Lorimer is Associate Professor in Human Geography at the School of Geography and Environment at the University of Oxford. His research interests encompass cultural geography, the geographies of science, the politics of Nature and wildlife conservation. His work explores inherently geographical questions that conjoin the social and the environmental sciences. He employs qualitative, visual, ethnographic and historical methods. He has conducted extensive periods of fieldwork in the UK, Sri Lanka and most recently the Netherlands.
Jamie’s current research focuses on the microbiome – the invisible life in, on and around us. In an ESRC-funded Transformative Research Project, entitled Good germs, bad germs, Jamie is collaborating with colleagues in the School to develop a participatory model for mapping the domestic microbiome. Working with the Food Standards Agency, the project explores how hygiene practices are shaped by an awareness of the inevitability of microbial life in domestic spaces. In other work on the microbiome, Jamie is exploring the emergence of pro-biotic approaches to managing human and environmental health – focusing in particular on the rise of helminthic and other forms of biotherapy for tackling autoimmune and allergic disease.
Jamie’s work explores ‘more-than-human’ and ‘multinatural’ alternatives to the Human as the sole locus of agency and value. In 2015 he published his sensation-causing monography Wildlife in the Anthropocene: Conservation after Nature (Minnesota University Press). He has also published a series of articles on multispecies studies, the Anthropocene, and rewilding and is, without any doubts, one of the most innovative brains in the field of multispecies research.
Abstract: This lecture starts from a history of a group of cows that were ‘back bred’ by two zoologists working with Nazi patronage in Germany in the 1930s. Lutz and Heinz Heck wanted to recreate the aurochs: the extinct antecedent to all domestic cattle. Their cattle were caught up in various plans to ‘restore’ or ‘rewild’ the occupied territories of Eastern Europe. The animals survived the war and have subsequently been deployed in contemporary initiatives to Rewild Europe, becoming central to schemes to restore ‘naturalistic grazing regimes’ akin to those in place at the end of the last ice age. Through a focus on Heck cattle, the lecture will map the shifting conceptions of the wild illustrated in this story – attending to understandings of what the wild is, where it might be found, and who gets to decide. In conclusion, the lecture looks to the future and assesses the potential of rewilding as a new mode of conservation for the Anthropocene: the new epoch initiated when humans became a planet changing force.
Gregg Mitman is Professor of History of Science, Medical History, and Environmental Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and teacher, whose interests span the history of science, medicine, and the environment in the United States and the world, and reflect a commitment to environmental and social justice.
His recent works include Documenting the World: Film, Photography, and the Scientific Record (University of Chicago Press 2016), Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape our Lives and Landscapes (Yale University Press 2007), and Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (rev. ed. University of Washington Press 2009). Mitman is the founding director of the Nelson Institute’s Center for Culture, History and Environment, and he was the president of the American Society for Environmental History in 2013–2015. During the last decade, Gregg has increasingly focused on public humanities projects.
In 2007, he created the Tales from Planet Earth film festival that has brought together artists, academics, and the public to explore and further the power of storytelling through film as a force of environmental and social change. Under his leadership, CHE, in collaboration with Munich’s Rachel Carson Center and Stockholm’s KTH Environmental Humanities Laboratory, hosted an experimental performance, The Anthropocene Slam: A Cabinet of Curiosities, in 2014. The project was repeated in Australia and in Switzerland and a book is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.
Gregg’s current work is a multimedia project – a film, book, and a public history website – exploring the history and legacy of the Firestone Plantations Company in Liberia. He recently co-produced and co-directed In the Shadow of Ebola, an intimate portrait of the Ebola outbreak in Liberia, and The Land Beneath Our Feet, a documentary on history, memory, and land rights in Liberia. For all his fascinating transdisciplinary and innovative work, Gregg has been merited with many different awards, including fellowships from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the John S. Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, among others, and noted book prizes such as the 2012 William H. Welch Medal from the American Association for the History of Medicine and the 2000 Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize from the History of Science Society.
Abstract: SARS. Avian influenza. Ebola. Transgressions across animal/human borders? Industrial diseases of our own making? Causal explanations abound. Ecological perspectives on emerging diseases proliferate, from the dynamics of host-microbe interactions to the cycles of global capital. But new forms of life, and their ecological understanding, have been emerging in industrial landscapes in the making for generations of humans and microbes. How the adaptation and evolution of microbes to engineered worlds has troubled the boundaries of nature and society, challenged questions of agency and causality, and altered concepts of ecology and health is the subject of this lecture.
David Moon is Anniversary Professor in History at the University of York, with a focus on the rural world of the Russian Empire from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. He has worked at different universities in England and Scotland, and visits regularly Russia, the Ukraine, Finland, but also the USA for his research. Today, he is one of the most well-known historians in the field of Russian environmental history.
He started his career researching the history of Russian peasantry. Since the new millennium he got more and more engaged with the Russian steppes, putting them into a transnational, comparative, global context. In 2007, his article “The environmental history of the Russian steppes” was awarded the best article prize by the European Society for Environmental History – a society he has been working for during many years. His latest book The Plough that Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914 (Oxford University Press) was selected as one of ten history books of the year for 2013 by the Financial Times and it was the winner of the Alexander Nove Prize in Russian, Soviet and Post-Soviet Studies awarded by the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies, the same year.
David is the lead investigator at Leverhulme International Network: Exploring Russia’s Environmental History and Natural Resources. At present, he is holding a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2015–2017), working on The American Steppes: Russian Influences on the Great Plains. This project explores the influences from the steppes of Russia and Ukraine on the American Great Plains. His research interests also touch Britain, having led to the publication of a book, co-edited with Peter Coates and Paul Warde, Local Places, Global Processes: Histories of Environmental Change in Britain and Beyond (Windgather 2016). Having been trained as a social historian, David not only works in archives and libraries, but he also does field work to explore the environments he is researching and to engage with scientists who study them.
Abstract: The importance of ‘place’ and
‘nature’ in human and environmental history is a central analytical
theme and methodological approach of our recent research in the
environmental history of Russia and the Soviet Union. Our work
highlights the importance of local environments and the specificities of
individual places to understanding the human-environment nexus. This
focus is accentuated by the fact that we have visited and travelled
extensively in many of the places we write about. Thus, we have gained
first-hand experience of the specificities of local natural systems, and
gained a sense of how these places look, sound, taste, feel, and smell.
We have also met, talked to, interviewed and in other ways engaged with
members of the local populations, specialists in a variety of
disciplines who study them, and people who manage and administer them.
In this way, our research also makes an important methodological
intervention to the research and practice of history: that to write the
fullest history, historians need to embed themselves in the places that
they study. In this way, our work underscores that ‘place’ is both a
topic of study as well as a theoretical model and methodological
approach for scholarship.
I will give in the lecture examples from a recent research project: Exploring Russia’s Environmental History and Natural Resources,
funded by The Leverhulme Trust involving scholars from UK, US, Russian
and Ukrainian universities, which involved field trips and academic
workshops at the Solovetskie islands, St Petersburg, Lake Baikal,
Ulan-Ude, Kyiv, Chernobyl’, Ekaterinburg and the Urals region.
Kate Soper is Emerita Professor of Philosophy at London Metropolitan University and a former Honorary Professor in the Humanities at the University of Brighton. She has published widely on environmental philosophy, feminism, ecocriticism, theory of needs and consumption, and cultural theory. More recent books include What is Nature? Culture, Politics and the Non-Human (Blackwell, 1995), Citizenship and Consumption (co-editor, Palgrave, 2007) and The Politics and Pleasures of Consuming Differently (co-editor, Palgrave, 2008). She has been a member of the editorial collectives of Radical Philosophy and New Left Review and a columnist for the US journal, Capitalism, Nature, Socialism. Her study on ‘Alternative hedonism and the theory and politics of consumption’ was funded in the ESRC/AHRC ‘Cultures of Consumption’ Programme (www.consume.bbk.ac.uk). She has participated since in a number of research projects on climate change and sustainable consumption, most recently as a Visiting Fellow at the Pufendorf Institute, Lund University, Sweden
In response to ecological crisis, there is much anxiety today about the destruction and ‘loss’ of nature. But there are also doubts about what we mean by the term ‘nature’ and what still counts as ‘natural’ in a world so technically controlled and made over by human beings. The lecture will open with some critical reflections on recent approaches to the conceptualisation of ‘nature’ and their implications for a ‘greener’ politics. It will focus in particular on the role of ‘consumerism’ and prevalent conceptions of human prosperity in causing environmental destruction, and present this as a key area for the attention of environmental critics within the humanities.
In exploring these ideas, I shall draw on my current research on ‘alternative hedonism’ and its response to ecological crisis, where I have been emphasising the sensual and spiritual pleasures of escaping the consumerist model of the ‘good life’ and calling for a cultural revolution in thinking about work and time-expenditure as the necessary first stage in building a mandate for a sustainable socio-economic order. The humanities should not, in this context, be charged with a directly political agenda. But they can certainly help to keep open a debate about the nature of prosperity and human well-being, and their input will be essential to any transition to a more stable and rewarding future. I will end with a couple of examples of how a more consumption oriented approach within environmental literary criticism might conduct its readings (drawing on Shakespeare’s King Lear and some aspects of English Romanticism).
Dr. Bronislaw Szerszynski is Reader in Sociology at the Sociology Department in Lancaster University. His research draws on the social sciences, humanities, arts and natural sciences to explore the changing relationship between humans, environment and technology. In recent years he has applied this interdisciplinary approach to various environment and technology issues, such as technological innovation (especially biotechnology) and political economy; urban foodscapes seen in terms of socio-material practices and the moral economy.
He has also become deeply engaged in ongoing debates about the Anthropocene – the proposed new geological epoch in which humans are seen as the determining force in the evolution of the Earth. He has a continuing interest in religion and its complex relations with the ideas and practices of science and technology. His 2005 monograph Nature, Technology and the Sacred (Blackwell) argued that contemporary ideas and practices concerning nature and technology remain profoundly shaped by the religious history of the West. More recently he co-edited the book Technofutures: Transdisciplinary Perspectives on Nature and the Sacred (Ashgate 2015).
Over the years Bronislaw has (co-)organised a number of events with a major arts component. For example, in 2014 Anthropocene Monument, with Bruno Latour and Olivier Michelon used the idea of a monument to the Anthropocene to trigger debate about knowledge and aesthetics in an age of global environmental change. An exhibition of monument designs from thirty artists at Les Abattoirs Museum of Contemporary Art, Toulouse, and a three-day colloquium, chaired by himself and Bruno Latour, with 100 participants including natural scientists, social scientists, humanities scholars and artists. He has also devised his own novel, hybrid genre of performance as a method exploring and communicating complex issues concerning technological and cultural change. So far he has performed three such pieces, each devised in collaboration with other media artists. ‘The Twilight of the Machines’, ‘The Onomatophore of the Anthropocene’ and ‘The Martian Book of the Dead’, performed in various places, use ‘found’ textual genres, fictional future scenarios, video and soundscapes to create an imaginative space in which audiences can engage with possible post-planetary and post-human futures.
Abstract: In this lecture I will develop a way of understanding the ‘deep present’ of the Earth: an approach to the powers and properties of the Earth and its parts that cuts across conventional boundaries between inanimate matter, living things and artefacts, and that thus treats human society and its technology as ‘Earthly’ phenomena enabled and constrained by physical processes. I will explore how this deep present is also conditioned by the planet’s ‘deep past’ – by the contingent trajectory of emergent complexity and self-reinvention navigated by a far-from-equilibrium Earth under thermodynamic imperatives – and how it thus includes ‘virtual’ or potential planetary states that are ‘real but not actualised’ in the Earth. I will also suggest that this approach offers ways of thinking about the ‘deep future’ of an Earth that may yet go through more major transitions and transformations – and indirectly help to prepare human thought for the encounter with extra-terrestrial worlds.