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Ecologies of Death, Ecologies of Mourning: Volume I

International Symposium

23RD MARCH 2023, 13:00 – 18:00

Organised by The Eco- and Bioart Lab, in collaboration with Queer Death Studies Network 

VENUE: ARBETETS MUSEUM (THE MUSEUM OF WORK), NORRKÖPING
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:

Prof. Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK)

Prof. Em. Nina Lykke (Linköping University, SE/Aarhus University, DK)

SPEAKERS:

Dr Evelien Geerts (University of Birmingham, UK)

Prof. Christina Fredengren (Uppsala University, SE)

Dr Tara Mehrabi & Dr Wibke Straube (Karlstad University, SE)

Dr Marietta Radomska (Linköping University, SE)

In the Anthropocene, the epoch of climate change and environmental destruction that render certain habitats unliveable and induce socio-economic inequalities and shared ‘more-than-human’ vulnerabilities, death and loss become urgent environmental concerns. As climate scientists indicate, in order to achieve UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs), a much more radical transformative action is needed from all stakeholders: governments, the private sector, communities and individuals (Höhne et al. 2020).

Simultaneously, planetary environmental disruption, contributing to the mortality of humans and nonhumans, destruction of entire ecosystems, the sixth mass extinction, both abrupt and ‘slow’ violence (Nixon 2011), evoke feelings of anxiety, anger and grief, manifested in popular-scientific and cultural narratives, art, and activism. These feelings are not always openly acknowledged or accepted in society; and the ecological, more-than-human dimensions of death have traditionally been underplayed in public debates. Yet, what we need now – more than ever – is the systematic problematisation of the planetary-scale mechanisms of annihilation of the more-than-human world in their philosophical, socio-cultural, ethico-political and very material dimensions. Only then will it be possible to talk about the issues of responsibility, accountability and care for more-than-human worlds (Radomska & Lykke 2022).

Taking its starting point in critically investigating and challenging conventional normativities, assumptions and expectations surrounding issues of death, dying and mourning in the contemporary world (Radomska, Meharbi & Lykke 2020; https://queerdeathstudies.net/), this interdisciplinary symposium zooms in on more-than-human ecologies of death, dying, grief and mourning across spatial and temporal scales.

The event is combined with the official launch of the four-year research project Ecological Grief, Crisis Imaginaries and Resilience in Nordic Lights (2022-26), led by Dr Marietta Radomska and generously funded by FORMAS: a Swedish Research Council for Sustainable Development.

Detailed Programme: TBA

REGISTRATION:

The participation in the symposium is free of charge, but we have a limited number of seats. If you wish to take part in the event, please, fill out the form: https://forms.office.com/e/Yb4qXpyVtX

Registration deadline: 15th March 2023 or until the event is fully booked.

NB! In case you register and it turns out you can no longer participate, please let us know by sending an email to: ecobioartlab[at]liu.se . In this way we may be able to let in anyone who may be on the waiting list.

Photo/artwork: Marietta Radomska

Reclaiming Futures – Storying Change Festival: a brief visual report

Reclaiming Futures: Storying Change is a FORMAS research project that explores new forms of scientific communication and telling stories about the environment through the joint work of high school students, artists, curators and researchers.  

Reclaiming Futures is a modus operandi, a way to take back the futures from the past settings still shaping the world to come. In particular, Reclaiming Futures is a way to empower young people’s position in the public debate on environmentalism and climate governance. The climate is an issue for more than technocrats, experts, politicians and academics – it is for everybody.

In Reclaiming Futures youngsters and researchers, teachers, film makers, artists, curators and science journalists participate with their special insights into climate- and research communication. During 2021 and 2022 the teenagers and researchers convened for workshops and conversations on today´s climate and environmental situation. The youngsters were trained in efficient cultural communication and taught how to formulate their own stories by images and film making, later to take form in a number of short films and stories of their own making.

Reclaiming Futures is a joint effort of partners: Konsthallen Färgfabriken, The Posthumanities Hub, Kajman Media and KW Produktion. It has been generously supported by FORMAS.

On 2nd April 2022 the project hosted its big event: Reclaiming Futures – Storying Change Science/Environmental Humanities/Anthropocene Festival, which took place at the art centre Färgfabriken (Stockholm), where teenagers and researchers engaged in conversations on climate change, environmental issues and our relationship to ecology. There, young people-turned-filmmakers and artists showed their work dealing with these key issues.

The festival programme was curated and produced by the teenagers themselves! Below we show off a couple of snapshots from this amazing event!

CALL FOR APPLICATIONS: Gender and Sustainability: Introducing Feminist Environmental Humanities – ONLINE PhD course

Gender and Sustainability: Introducing Feminist Environmental Humanities – FAD3115

This electable course in the doctoral program, Art, Technology and Design (7,5 credits) is an educational effort, supported by the KTH Equality Office for the integration of knowledge on gender equity in sustainable development research, provided by the KTH School of Architecture and the Built Environment and the multi-university platform The Posthumanities Hub, with Tema Genus, Linköping University.

Gender and Sustainability: Introducing Feminist Environmental Humanities

The PhD course will be held online, and combines critical and creative perspectives on gender and sustainability from the emerging field of environmental humanities as it overlaps with science, technology, humanities, art and feminist theory-practices. It explores postdisciplinary directions in sustainability from a set of positions in environmental humanities and feminist posthumanities.

The course provides an introduction into the conceptual landscape of feminist environmental humanities, and an orientation into its methodological trajectories across the fields of science, technology, art and design. Notions of different scientific traditions in the past and present, and of inter- and transdisciplinary research are presented and framed in ways that are particularly useful for PhD researchers pursuing environmental humanities/postdisciplinary studies and practice-oriented research in art, technology and design. PhD researchers are provided with an understanding of key concepts – and the relationship between research questions, methods, objectives and outcomes – through lectures, literature seminars, workshops and collaborative project work. The course introduces participants to thinking on situated knowledge practices and ethics amidst a plethora of critical methodologies, qualitative and innovative methods, and performative research practices. On completion of the course, PhD researchers will be provided with tools to critically reflect over the epistemological and ethical challenges inherent to their own research practices and doctoral work, but also in relationship to gender, sustainability and to other actors involved in the very social business of scholarship.


Participants

To be eligible for the course, PhD researchers must have completed a masters’ degree or have an equivalent level of education in STS, history of science, technology and environment studies, gender studies, technology, art or design (such as architecture, planning, civil engineering, arts, crafts, and design) or affiliated subjects within the humanities and social sciences.

Preliminary dates (ONLINE)

Module 1 – Re-inventing nature, re-inventing methodology, February 2, 3, 17, 2022
Module 2 – Doing gender and sustainability: Practice-oriented research, March 18, 2022
Module 3 – Ethics in thinking practice, March 31, April 1, 2022
Module 4 – Gender and sustainability in new registers: Knowledge communication, April 25, 26, 2022

Coordinators and Guest Lecturers

The course will be coordinated and taught by a unique team of teachers, combining gender, sustainability, environmental humanities, feminist posthumanities and practice-oriented research:  

  • Meike Schalk, Associate Professor, KTH School of Architecture, architectural environmental humanities
  • Cecilia Åsberg, Professor, Gender, nature, culture, Linköping University (previously guest professor at KTH)
  • Marietta Radomska, Assistant Professor in Environmental Humanities, Gender Studies, Linköping University, biophilosophy, eco/bio-art
  • Janna Holmstedt, PhD, Swedish Historical Museums, Artistic Researcher

And guest lecturers (TBA).

The course is an open collaboration with the KTH gender network, The Posthumanities Hub, a multi-university research group and platform for feminist posthumanities www.posthumanitieshub.net and Gender Studies, Linköping University.

Application for this Doctoral Course

Deadline for application is 13th of January 2022. (If accepted you receive a notice of acceptance and the course readings by 18th of January.)

Please apply FORMALLY to the PhD course Gender & Sustainability by submitting an APPLICATION to meike.schalk@arch.kth.se

Include the following documents:

  • CV (short bio), one page
  • Letter of motivation, half a page (why you would benefit from this course in your PhD-work)
  • SHORT description of PhD project, one page maximum, with aim and research question, material and practice-oriented/methodological approaches and challenges

WARMLY WELCOME!

‘END OF THE SEA? ART AND SCIENCE FOR MULTISPECIES FUTURES’ WORKSHOP, 13th December 2021.

It is our great pleasure to announce our upcoming event, hosted by The Eco- and Bioart Lab and The Posthumanities Hub, and generously supported by The Seed Box and Åke Wiberg Foundation:

End of the Sea? Art and Science for Multispecies Futures Workshop takes place on 13th December 2021 at 13:15 – 17:00 – on Zoom!

For registration details – see below.

As the planet’s largest ecosystem, oceans and seas stabilise climate, produce oxygen, store CO2 and host unfathomable multitudes of creatures at a deep-time scale. In recent decades, scientific assessments have indicated that marine environments are seriously degraded to the detriment of most near-future human and nonhuman communities. This matters to us, too. Climate change, environmental destruction and diminishing biological diversity form the key pillars of the present more-than-human crisis of planetary proportions. This calls for our attention and for responses from the more-than-human humanities.  

Still, a lot remains unknown at the levels of oceanic shallow waters, its depths and along coastlines. Western cultural imaginaries picture the ocean and the sea as those which wash away, neutralise, conceal and hide in their limitless volume ‘under the surface.’ The ocean and the sea are culturally marked as the spaces of ‘forgetting’: out of sight, out of mind. 

‘End of the Sea? Art and Science for Multispecies Futures’ workshop, hosted by The Eco- and Bioart Lab and The Posthumanities Hub, aims to bring together artists, researchers, writers and other practitioners, who – through their critical and creative, inter- and transdisciplinary practices – explore the boundary areas of the coastline and the estuary, and their accompanying cultural and scientific meanings. The workshop will zoom in on the wrack zone – particularly in the context of the Baltic Sea – with its low-trophic communities of algae, mussels and other species not only as key actors in the polluted, warming waters of climate change, but also as catalysts for new co-creations, collaborations, creativities and environmental imaginaries. What happens at (before? after?) the end of the sea? How can humans be a more caring and attentive ecological force for multispecies futures by the edge of the sea?  Join us on 13th December to find out!  

The workshop has been generously supported by The Seed Box and Åke Wiberg Foundation (for ‘Havshumaniora’).

The Eco- and Bioart Lab connects artists, artistic researchers and other practitioners, as well as doctoral students whose practice and research focus on art and the environment in their broadest understanding. EBL opens up a transdisciplinary space, where artistic practice converges with philosophy, cultural theory, art studies, visual culture, queer death studies and posthumanities in synergy and as equally legitimate voices. 

The Posthumanities Hub is a research group and a multi-university platform for postdisciplinary and more-than-human humanities, for philosophy, arts and sciences informed by advanced cultural critique and creativity. In our research, we specialise in the more-than-human condition and inventive feminist materialist approaches to it. We work to meet up with pressing societal challenges, across the natureculture divide and target specific cases. Curiously, creatively and critically. 

The event is co-curated by Dr Marietta Radomska and Prof. Cecilia Åsberg.

SPEAKERS:

Sarah Blissett (independent artist and researcher, UK)

FRAUD (Audrey Samson and Francisco Gallardo, UK) 

Fiona Hillary (RMIT University/The Algae Society/The Centre for Projection Art/The Journal of Public Space, AU)

Ase Brunborg Lie (independent artist, NO)

Julia Lohmann (Aalto University, FI)

Natalie Lowrey (Deep Sea Mining campaign (DSMC)/Aid/Watch, AU) and mirko nikolić (Linköping University, SE)

Nina Lykke (Linköping University, SE/Aarhus University, DK)

Lena Tasse (Linköping University, SE)

REGISTRATION:

In order to take part in the event, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 10th December 2021 at noon (CET) the latest.

The Zoom links will be sent to you on 12th December in the evening.

Call for abstracts: Queer Death Studies Reader. Edited by Nina Lykke, Marietta Radomska and Tara Mehrabi

The field of Queer Death Studies

The planned reader will gather a wide range of contributions to the field of Queer Death Studies (QDS). This is an emerging, transdisciplinary field of study which takes research on death, dying, and mourning in new directions, inspired by feminist, posthumanist, decolonial, anti-racist, queer, trans, body- and affect-theoretical scholarship, art and activism (Radomska, Mehrabi and Lykke 2020). What distinguishes QDS from conventional Death Studies such as death sociology or anthropology of death is an overall critical focus on the framing of death and extinction in the contemporary world through Anthropocene necropolitics (Mbembe 2003, Lykke 2019) and necropowers of post/colonialism, racial and extractivist capitalism. Death is approached as an ethico-political issue that is embedded in global power structures. QDS pays attention to systematic, necropolitical productions of death, in dialogue with ethico-political critiques emerging from political movements for social, environmental and planetary justice and change. QDS is also based on critiques of the dichotomous divides, characterising Western modernity, and is marked out through a critical focus on normativities and exclusionary notions of the human, casting the death of those who differ from the normative human subject in terms of gender, racialisation, migration status, class, geopolitical situatedness, able-bodiedness, and species as less grievable or disposable and not counting at all (Butler 2004). In short, QDS aligns itself with critiques of the intra-acting multiplicity of hierarchising divides between appropriate and in/appropriate/d others (Minh-ha 1989), articulated by social, environmental and planetary justice movements.

The Call

With this call, we invite abstracts from researchers, students, artists and activists who see their research and activities as aligned with critiques of the necropowers operating in the contemporary world, and who want to contribute to queering, decolonising and posthumanising death and the onto-epistemololgies and politics conventionally framing death.

QUEERING, DECOLONISING AND POSTHUMANISING

The verbform, queering, which we use here, encompasses a wide range of meanings. It refers to (1) open-ended deconstructing of normativities and processes of normalisation in various forms, as well as (2) undoing of heteropatriarchy, heteronormativity, binary gender and sexualities governed by reproductive biopowers or, in other words, the normative heterosexual matrix. Queering death is thus on the one hand understood as a critical strange-making, and defamiliarising, which may imply affirmative openings of other horizons than Christian and Cartesian dualist approaches to death, for example a focus on the vibrant entanglement of growing and decomposing (Radomska 2017; Lykke 2022). On the other hand, queering means critically focusing on the ways in which misogyny, trans- and queerphobia lead to social as well as physical death, and how violence and hate crimes towards non-normative individuals seek to render their lives and deaths non-grievable (Puar 2007; Chen 2012; Snorton 2017). Together with this broad spectrum of meanings, we also want to emphasise that queering should be understood in its intersections with decolonising and posthumanising efforts

Decolonising death involves critically dismantling the violent necropowers of colonisation, racial and extractivist capitalism, which for centuries have made death become ”life’s quiet companion” (Lehman 1997) for racialised and indigenous people worldwide, as well as confronting the over-arching racisms which continue to produce (physical, social and cultural) death along racialised lines. Moreover, decolonising death signals a turn towards pluritopic hermeneutics (Tlostanova and Mignolo 2009), i.e. hermeneutics which do not universalise Western modern frameworks, and which reevaluate indigenous philosophies, cosm-ontologies and sensibilities. In terms of life/death thresholds, this implies critically-affirmatively shifting the meanings of death, for example, substituting conceptualisations and imaginaries of death as a final endpoint within a chrononormative linear temporality, and instead opting for understandings, situated in geo- and corpo-political frameworks outside of Western modernity (e.g. Smith 1999; Anzaldua 2015).

Posthumanising death refers to the systematic problematisation of the planetary-scale mechanisms of annihilation of the more-than-human world in their ontological, epistemological and ethico-political dimensions. It involves critical analyses of the human/nonhuman divide and power differentials that have allowed for the reduction of the nonhuman to mere resource and instrument for human endeavours. Furthermore, the posthumanising move entails unpacking philosophical and cultural meanings of extinction and the ways in which it fundamentally disrupts life processes in relation to time, death and generations (e.g. Rose 2012); it draws attention to environmental violence, environmental grief, as well as nonhuman death manufactured en masse through anthropocentric habits of consumption and mechanisms of extractivism.

Consequently, posthumanising death takes seriously the issues of responsibility, accountability and care for/in dying more-than-human worlds, while remaining grounded in radical critiques of human exceptionalism, and affirmative embrace of alternatives (eg. Braidotti 2013; Haraway 2016; MacCormack 2020).

Formats and deadlines:

We call for abstracts of approximately 300 words, to be accompanied by a bio-note of approximately 200 words, as well as by a title of the proposed chapter and an indication of how the chapter relates to the below main themes to be covered in the reader.

Please, send your abstract etc to ninly[at]fastmail, cc: <marietta.radomska[at]liu.se> and <Tara.Mehrabi[at]kau.se>

Abstract DEADLINE: 1st NOVEMBER, 2021

We will respond to your abstract by MID-JANUARY 2022, and foresee submissions of FIRST DRAFT CHAPTERS by August 1, 2022.

We plan a reader with around 50 contributions, including a few reprints of classics. Scholarly as well as creative and artistic contributions are welcome! We hope together with contributors to build a reader which will be significant and agenda-setting for the field

THEMATIC CLUSTERS:

*Queering Death: Rethinking life/death ecologies

*Histories of necropowers and Anthropocene necropolitics

*Decolonising death

*Posthumanising death

*Demedicalising death

*Politics and Ethics of Mourning

*Alternative Spiritual, Aesthetic and Arts Activist Approaches to Death and After-life

The International Network for Queer Death Studies

The idea for the reader grew out of the international network for Queer Death Studies, which was founded in 2016, (see https://queerdeathstudies.net/). The network has organised several workshops and an international conference at Karlstad University, Sweden, in 2019.

We have earlier published two special journal issues of Australian Feminist Studies (2020, Vol 35 (104)), and Women, Gender and Research (2019: Issue 3-4).

REFERENCES

Anzaldua, G. E. (2015), Light in the Dark/Luz en Lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Reality, Spirituality, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Braidotti, R. (2013), The Posthuman, Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.

Butler, J. (1990), Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, London, New York: Routledge.

Butler, J. (2004), Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence, New York, NY: Verso.

Chen, M. Y. (2012), Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering and Queer Affect, Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Haraway, Donna (2016), Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press.

Lehman, G. (1997), ‘Life’s Quiet Companion’, in G. Carey and R. Sorenson (eds), The Penguin Book of Death, 223–232, Ringwood: Penguin Australia.

Lykke, N. (2019), ‘Making Live and Letting Die: Cancerous Bodies between Anthropocene Necropolitics and Chthulucene Kinship’, Environmental Humanities, 11 (1): 108–36.

Lykke, N (2022), Vibrant Death. A Posthuman Phenomenology of Mourning. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

MacCormack, Patricia (2020a), The Ahuman Manifesto. Activism for the End of the Anthropocene. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

Mbembe, A. (2003), Necropolitics, Public Culture, 15 (1): 11–40.

Minh-ha, T. T. (1989), Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism, Bloomington and Indianapolis IN: Indiana University Press.

Puar, J. (2007), Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Durham: Duke UP-

Radomska, M., T. Mehrabi, and N. Lykke (2020), Queer Death Studies: Death, Dying and Mourning From a Queerfeminist Perspective, Australian Feminist Studies, 35(104): 81-100.

Radomska, M. (2017), Non/living Matter, Bioscientific Imaginaries and Feminist Technoecologies of Bioart, Australian Feminist Studies, 32 (94): 377-394.

Rose, D. B. (2012), Multispecies knots of ethical time, Environmental Philosophy, 9(1): 127–140.

Shildrick, M (2020) Queering the Social Imaginaries of the Dead, Australian Feminist Studies, 35(104): 170-185.

Smith, L.T. 1999. Decolonizing Methodologies. Research and Indigenous Peoples. London and New York: Zed books.

Snorton, C.R (2017), Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Tlostanova, M. and W. Mignolo (2009), On Pluritopic Hermeneutics, Trans-Modern Thinking, and Decolonial Philosophy, Encounters, 1 (1): 11–27.

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