Welcome to the joint event hosted by KTH Higher Seminars and The Posthumanities Hub Seminar series:
the seminar with Prof. Cecilia Åsberg (KTH/Linköping University) on:
A Sea Change in the Humanities
The seminar takes place on 28th September 2020 at 13:15 – 15:00.
For more how to access the online event, see: https://www.kth.se/en/abe/inst/philhist/historia/2.78498/hogreseminarium
Abstract:
All through the extended history of Earth, the coast line has been a zone of unrest where waves and tides have forged life and land on this planet. Despite sudden changes to our oceanic environments, the wrack zone by the edge of the sea with its kelp forests, mussel beds, flotsam and jetsam, remains a strange and beautiful place (as noted by Rachel Carson). This is one of the starting points for the research in the oceanic (environmental) humanities project, Sea Change. Another starting point is the possibilities for cooking, curing and curating with kelp explored at Lofoten International Arts Festival in 2019, the artistic duo Cooking Sections (and their exhibition 2021 at Bonniers Kunsthall), and that we are now entering the declared UN Decade of the Oceans (2021-2030). Sea Change is a knowledge- and capacity-building project for feminist posthumanities, aiming to connect science with art, humanities and local people so to catalyze societal transformation on low trophic ways of eating, socializing and thinking, together.
Bio:
Cecilia Åsberg, PhD, Guest Professor of STS, Gender and Environment at KTH Royal Institute of Technology Stockholm; Professor of Gender, Nature, Culture at Linköping University, and since 2008 founding director of the Posthumanities Hub. In 2005 she was the first to defend a PhD in Gender Studies in Sweden (a feminist science study on the popular imaginary of the new genetics), and in 2013 she inaugurated environmental humanities in The Seed Box (Mistra-Formas) research programme as Founding Director. Åsberg has attracted over €6 million in grants for her team; supervised 14 PhD students; published extensively (in Swedish, Dutch, English); given talks and taught gender studies, EH, STS, and posthumanities to BA-MA and PhD students in various positions at a range of international universities, incl Lancaster U, Utrecht Utrecht, NL, and as Fellow of Rachel Carson Centre, LMU, Germany.
Recent publications (in 2020) include:
- ”A Sea Change in the Environmental Humanities”, Ecocene: Cappadocia Journal of Environmental Humanities, no 1, pp. 108-122. Find pdf online: http://www.environmentandsociety.org/sites/default/files/key_docs/1670705783_ecocene-1.1.12_asberg_0.pdf ;
- “Checking in with Deep time: Intragenerational Care in the Registers of Feminist Posthumanities”, with Christina Fredengren. In Deterritorializing the Future: Heritage in, of, and after the Anthropocene, eds R. Harrison, and C. Sterling, London: Open Humanities Press, pp. 56-95. http://openhumanitiespress.org/books/download/Harrison-and-Sterling_2020_Deterritorializing-The-Future.pdf;
- “Is All Environmental Humanities Feminist Environmental Humanities?” with Lauren LaFauci , in Seeing the Woods vol. 1. Link: https://seeingthewoods.org/2020/07/06/is-all-environmental-humanities-feminist-environmental-humanities/ ;
- “Methodologies of Kelp: On Feminist Posthumanities, Transversal Knowledge Production and Multispecies Ethics in an Age of Entanglement”, with Janna Holmstedt and Marietta Radomska. In: The Kelp Congress, edited by H. Mehti, N. Cahoon, and A. Wolfsberger, Svolvær: NNKS Press, pp. 11-23 and
- with Marietta Radomska “Doing Away with Life: On Biophilosophy, the Non/Living, Toxic Embodiment, and Reimagining Ethics.” In: Berger, K. Mäki-Reinikka, K. O’Reilly & H. Sederholm, eds. Art As We Don’t Know It. Helsinki: Aalto ARTS Books, pp. 54-63.