More-than-human humanities research group!

Tag: Seminars

Mineral Matterings: Encountering Minerals through design w/ Petra Lilja

Petra Lilja, 80% seminar
Mineral Matterings: Encountering Minerals through design

5th June 2023, 13:00-16:00
Room E1, Konstfack and Zoom https://konstfack-se.zoom.us/j/63693025724


Doctoral student on the KTD Programme

Discussant: Dr. Alexandra R. Toland
Date: 5th June, 13:00 – 16:00
Hybrid location: Room E1, Konstfack / Zoom https://konstfack-se.zoom.us/j/63693025724

Seminar title: Mineral Matterings: Encountering Minerals through design
This thesis problematizes an extractivist relation to matter underpinned by dualisms that separates humans from ‘nature’ and which allows for the treatment of matter as mere resource to be exploited. I suggest that critical mapping –exposing design’s invisibilities in terms of abstract and distanced sites of extraction and production– can help diagnosing and understanding this destructive kind of anthropocentrism that underpins the design field as well, and Western modernity and culture at large. Creative approaches like attentively encountering other-than-human worlds and exploring minerals as agential matter and trans-corporeal enactments, emerged in my search to understand mineral matter otherwise. These approaches were developed through two design projects: Mineral Walk and Creative Critical Clay, both situated in sites of past, present or future mineral extraction. In short, the design projects explore the complexities of the extractivist mode of existence as well as the frictions and potentials of adaptively adjusting towards more relational understandings of matter and materiality, with the aim for design practice to be part of more life-affirming systems on Earth.

Petra Lilja
Petra Lilja is an industrial designer and researcher drawing from both art and science in her work. She is affiliated researcher at The Posthumanities Hub and member of Design + Posthumanism Network, engaging with critical posthumanism and feminist new materialism via her design practice, research and teaching. She previously worked as design lecturer and program director of the Design + Change Programs at Linnaeus University. For four years she ran an eponymous galley in Malmö displaying art, design and research. She is a member of the jury of the annual Swedish Design award UNG and its equivalent in South Korea.

Dr. Alexandra R. Toland
Dr. Alexandra Toland is Associate Professor of Arts and Research at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar in Germany, where she directs the Ph.D. program in art and design. She earned her MFA from the Dutch Art Institute of the Netherlands and PhD in landscape planning from the Technical University of Berlin. Alex has published widely on artistic (research) practices as they relate to soil protection, air pollution and the Anthropocene, including the co-edited book, Field to Palette – Dialogues on Soil and Art in the Anthropocene (Taylor and Francis, 2018). She co-chaired the German Soil Science Society’s (DBG) Commission 8 Soils in Education and Society from 2011 to 2015, having organized multiple art exhibitions and film screening events, and is currently the co-chair of the Commission on the History, Philosophy and Sociology of Soils of the International Soil Science Society.

To receive seminar materials in advance, contact Petra Lilja Petra.Lilja@konstfack.se

CEMUS Spring Seminars and Conference (CFP deadline Mar. 1)

Our friends at CEMUS, The Centre for Environment and Development Studies, have some exciting events this year.

Starting on Feb. 9, they have a great seminar line-up for Spring. You are welcome to visit in person in Uppsala or online!

They are also hosting the ClimateExistence conference Aug 16-18 with the Sigtuna Foundation (in Sigtuna). Check out the details on their website and do not forget to submit your application by the March 1 deadline!

Seminar with Dr Otso Kortekangas on “Indigenous avant la lettre. The origins and livelihoods of the Sámi in European scholarly thought 1930–1950.”

Welcome to KTH Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment Higher Seminar with Dr Otso Kortekangas on ”Indigenous avant la lettre. The origins and livelihoods of the Sámi in European scholarly thought 1930–1960”

Time: Mon 2020-02-10 13.15 – 14.45

Lecturer: Otso Kortekangas, KTH, Div. History of Science, Technology and Environment and Stockholm University

Location: Teknikringen 74D, 5th floor, Seminar room

Short excerpt of the abstract:

My project studies the pre-history of the concept indigenous. It shows in
what ways Nordic and European scholars produced the Sámi as precisely indigenous before the term itself was widely in use. When this UN-backed concept gained ground during and following the anti- and postcolonial political processes of the 1960’s, the Nordic Sámi minority could tap in to the global indigenous identity movement.2 This was possible since both the scholarly and, with a certain delay, the popular understanding had gravitated to a direction where the Sámi were considered the original inhabitants of the northern areas of Fennoscandia. Ever since the indigenous label was introduced in the Nordic countries, it has become the first and foremost label and lens through which the Sámi population is studied.

The Posthumanities Hub seminar with Prof. Thomas Hallock (29 March)

Welcome to The Posthumanities Hub seminar with Prof. Thomas Hallock (University of South Florida, USA) on Signing Nature, Memorializing Plantations: Public Memory on the Bartram Trail.

The seminar takes place on 29 March 2019 at 10:15 – 12:00 at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Teknikringen 74D, level 5, SE-114 28 Stockholm).

Abstract:

This essay uses the example of the eighteenth-century naturalist William Bartram, who explored the U.S. South in the 1760s and 1770s, and whose book Travels remains a classic in American environmental and travel writing. Often used as the voice, conscience or even “mascot” of a local place in the American South, Bartram raises questions about what we mean when we read an author on site. Do we use the literature to build geographical understanding? Or is there a geography of literature, with its own (half-imagined) coordinates? Or, if both, what keeps general as well as scholarly writers shuttling between the two? This paper situates the questions within recent scholarship in GeoHumanities and Space Studies, fields that have yet to clarify their own genealogies and agendas. A work in progress, this paper will use the figure of William Bartram to sort out a critical road map for reading geographically.

 

Bio:
Thomas Hallock is Professor of English and the Frank E. Duckwall Professor of Florida Studies at the Univ. of South Florida (USA). He coedited the papers of naturalist William Bartram, and is currently working on a book about space and place in early American literature.

Tom will be in Sweden as part of a larger symposium held at Uppsala University from 27-28 March entitled, “Enlightenment, Nation-Building, and the Practices of Natural History: The Bartrams and Linné.” In addition to several interesting talks, at that symposium there will also be time to discuss the possible formation of a network of Sweden-based scholars working on early American matters. Please let me know if you’d like more information on that symposium and I can forward it along as well.

Facebook event

Tom’s  presentation “Signing Nature, Memorializing Plantations: Public Memory on the Bartram Trail” will be of interest to anyone working in environmental history, literary history, and spatial approaches to either.

If you would like access to the paper Tom will be discussing in the seminar, please email Lauren LaFauci at lauren.e.lafauci [at] liu [dot] se. The talk is open to all, even if you don’t have time to read the paper beforehand!

CHRISTINA RESEARCH SEMINARS at the University of Helsinki

In case you are in/not far from Helsinki, FI, (some of) CHRISTINA RESEARCH SEMINAR talks might be of your interest:

These lectures at University of Helsinki are open to everyone and attendance is free – see the interesting programme of CHRISTINA RESEARCH SEMINAR!

Time: Every other Tuesday at 16-18.
Place: Lecture hall C120, Unioninkatu 38 (Topelia)

CHRISTINA RESEARCH SEMINAR FALL TERM 2018

9.10. Prof. Suvi Keskinen (University of Helsinki, Swedish School of Social Sciences, The Center for Research on Ethnic Relations and Nationalism (CEREN)
”’Crisis’ of White hegemony, Neonationalist Femininities and Antiracist Feminism”

23.10 Dr. Marietta Radomska (University of Linköping and visiting researcher in Art History at University of Helsinki )
“On Bioart, the Non/Living and Promises of Monstrous Futures”

6.11. Prof. Swati Parashar (Senior lecturer, Institute of Global studies, University of GothenburgSweden)
“Postcolonial Anxiety and the Crisis of Masculinity: The Rise of Right Wing Hindutva Movement in India”

20.11. Prof. Ben Griffin (University of Cambridge )
(”TBA”)

4.12. Dr. Thomas Strong (Maynooth University, Ireland)
“Errors in Kinship: Witches, Queers”

Christina Research Seminar is an open advanced seminar focused around interdisciplinary gender studies chaired by Professor Tuija Pulkkinen. The seminar is organized by Gender Studies (University of Helsinki) and is currently a part of the doctoral programme of Gender, Culture and Society (SKY).

For more, see here.

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