The More-Than-Human Humanities focus series aims to attend to human differences entangled with environmental justice, information technologies, AI, synthetic biology, surveillance systems, species extinction, and drastic ecological change. It draws attention not only to the creativity and potentiality of this reinvention of arts and humanities, but also to that which limits or wounds conditions of life on earth. It addresses the question of how we may learn to live with those wounds and limitations in everyday practice. The titles in the series provide insight into the state-of-the art humanities research in a changing world.
If you have an exciting idea for a book proposal for this book series, please contact the book series editors:
Cecilia Åsberg, Prof Dr Gender, nature, culture at Linköping University, Sweden. Director The Posthumanities Hub – cecilia.asberg@liu.se
Marietta Radomska, Dr Assistant Professor Gender and Environmental Humanities, at Linköping University, Director the Eco- and Bio Art Lab – marietta.radomska@liu.se
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 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.
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.
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!
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
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.
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.
