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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

ANIMA MUNDI – requiem for a vanishing

Invitation, dears.

ANIMA MUNDI is a 4-channel video installation and performance by gustaf broms BENHUSET (The Bone House), Stockholm March 11–27, 2022 12:00–20:00 daily. 

“Being in a time and place, where identification with the thin membrane of skin, as container of self, is slowly dissolving, as borders between beings evaporate, the environment disintegrates into a myriad of sentient beings.” ~gustaf broms  

The project ANIMA MUNDI grew out of a series of actions in the forest in Vendel, Sweden. These meetings of organic bodies create a dialogue between species that weaves a story without words. These filmed interactions become the material for a 4-channel video in a room somewhere between installation, sound, performance and video, in which the artist makes an 18-day action as a dialogue with moving image.   The working title ANIMA MUNDI usually translates as ‘world soul.’ In Timaeus, Plato wrote “Therefore, we may consequently state that: this world is indeed a living being endowed with a soul and intelligence……a single visible living entity containing all other living entities, which by their nature are all related.”

PH & EBL Webinar on ‘MAKING SANCTUARY’ with Dr Bayo Akomolafe, 10th March 13:15-15:00 CET

We are pleased to invite you all to the upcoming Posthumanities Hub and The Eco- and Bioart Lab Webinar on “MAKING SANCTUARY” with Dr. Bayo Akomolafe.

The event takes place on 10th March 2022 at 13:15-15:00 CET on Zoom (for registration, see below).

The webinar is organised in collaboration with the Tema Genus Higher Seminar Series.

“Making Sanctuary”

Abstract:

The Afrocene is the glitch in the algorithms of progress, the crack on the modern tarmacs that flatten the wilds, the disability of ontology – a crip-onto(ethico-epistemo)logy that speculates about and murmurs with the animist meanderings of blackness (where blackness is the decolonial unsettling of stability in its racializing flows). The Afrocene is failure. The failure of Man. Fire on the mountain. This failure, however, is alive and teeming with experimental life-deaths, the unthought, the unspoken, nomadic archetypes, diasporic identities, queer bodies, amniotic gods, and multispecies constellations in an always ‘teenage’ indetermiverse. In this talk, Bayo Akomolafe uses his concept of the Afrocene to bracket the anxieties of the Anthropocene; to suggest that climate chaos is the intensity of a cartographical project dedicated to centralizing unbothered continuity; to tell the story of the slave ship and its unexpected guest; to move beyond critique and identitarian tropes (without abandoning them) in order to signal a different politics of descent and of becoming-fugitive; to theorize what a postactivism might look like; to trace out a different therapeutic-political ethnography of losing one’s way in order to find it; and, to embark on an animism of the peri-feral: an invitation to the task of making sanctuary as the world ends once again.   

Bio:

Bayo Akomolafe (Ph.D.), rooted with the Yoruba people in a more-than-human world, is the father to Alethea and Kyah, the grateful life-partner to Ije, son and brother. A widely celebrated international speaker, posthumanist thinker, poet, teacher, public intellectual, essayist, and author of two books, These Wilds Beyond our Fences: Letters to My Daughter on Humanity’s Search for Home (North Atlantic Books) and We Will Tell our Own Story: The Lions of Africa Speak, Bayo Akomolafe is the Visionary Founder of The Emergence Network and host of the online postactivist course, ‘We Will dance with Mountains’.

www.bayoakomolafe.net

www.emergencenetwork.org

REGISTRATION:

Please, register for the event by clicking the link:

https://liu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5Aod–rrjIuGNLP7oKe2HIOC8jF616aZ0Fs

short version: https://bit.ly/3MhdNyy

PH & EBL Webinar on “Saturation Epistemologies”, 14th February, 17:15-19:00 CET

We are pleased to invite you all to the upcoming Posthumanities Hub and The Eco- and Bioart Lab Webinar on “SATURATION EPISTEMOLOGIES” with Melody Jue (UC Santa Barbara) and Rafico Ruiz (Canadian Centre for Architecture).

The event takes place on 14th February 2022 at 17:15-19:00 CET on Zoom (for registration, see below).

Webinar on ‘Saturation Epistemologies’ with Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz

In this presentation, Melody Jue and Rafico Ruiz discuss saturation epistemologies in their recent collection Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke Press, 2021). Poised as an alternative framework to object-focused inquiries and metaphors of entanglement, saturation points us to those situations where substances are not so easily isolated or tangled but may be materially or figuratively co-present. While saturation starts as a form of watery thinking, they show how it also draws our attention to thresholds, phase changes, and precipitates of matter. 

Melody Jue is Associate Professor of English at UC Santa Barbara. She is the author of Wild Blue Media: Thinking Through Seawater (Duke 2020) and co-editor (with Rafico Ruiz) of Saturation: An Elemental Politics (Duke 2021). Her articles have appeared in Grey Room, Configurations, Media+Environment, Women’s Studies Quarterly, and Resilience.

Rafico Ruiz is a researcher and curator. His work addresses infrastructure building in the Arctic, post–global warming ice, and practices of settler accountability. Ruiz is the author most recently of Slow Disturbance: Infrastructural Mediation on the Settler Colonial Resource Frontier (2021), and the co-editor (with Melody Jue) of Saturation: An Elemental Politics (2021), both published by Duke University Press. His articles have appeared in Communication +1Continuum, the Journal of Northern Studies, and Resilience. He is currently the Associate Director of Research at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montréal, and the co-curator of the upcoming exhibition ᐊᖏᕐᕋᒧᑦ / Ruovttu Guvlui / Towards Home.

REGISTRATION:

Please, register for the event by clicking the link:

https://liu-se.zoom.us/meeting/register/u5crdO2oqzkvGtUi_Da_SlyDcQQIlKLyKuy6

PH and EBL Webinar on ‘MORE-THAN-HUMAN LITERACY & FEMINIST POSTHUMANITIES’, 13th January 13.15-16 CET

Dear all,

We trust you’ve had a rewarding and relaxing holiday/end-of-the-year break and that you are entering 2022 with new energies!

To make this start of the year very special, we have a truly exquisite treat for you, namely, The Posthumanities Hub & The Eco- and Bioart Lab webinar on ‘MORE-THAN-HUMAN LITERACY & FEMINIST POSTHUMANITIES’ with several wonderful speakers!

The event takes place on 13th January (Thu) at 13:15 – 16:00 CET.

REGISTRATION:

In order to take part in the event, please register by sending an email to the.posthumanities.hub@gmail.com by 12th January 2022 at noon (CET) the latest.

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

MORE-THAN-HUMAN LITERACY & FEMINIST POSTHUMANITIES

This webinar presents the practices of feminist posthumanities as developed in the registers of human-animal studies and more-than-human literacy by our sister group in Finland. How can reading and writing participate in the formation of ethical interspecies relations, motivated by an ethics of care and responsibility, echoing recent requests for a relational ethics in multispecies societies and more-than-human worlds?

The talks presented are:

Sanna Karkulehto (presenter) and Nora Schuurman: 

Learning to Read Equine Agency: Sense and Sensitivity at the Intersection of Scientific, Tacit and Situated Knowledges

Aino-Kaisa Koistinen: Caring with a Carnivore – On the Vegan Poetics of Cat-Writing

Kaisa Kortekallio: More-than-Human Reading and Vegetal Agency

Nóra Ugron: 

Meditating with Marine Mammals – Against the Rising Sea Levels of Climate Crisis and Systemic Violence in Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Creative Nonfiction

About the presenters:

Sanna Karkulehto is Professor of Literature at the University of Jyväskylä and the School of Resource Wisdom (JYU.Wisdom), Finland, and Adjunct Professor in Gender Studies (University of Lapland, FI) and Cultural Studies (University of Oulu, FI). She has published recently on, e.g., planetary wellbeing and representations and politics of gender, power, and violence, aiming at enhancing ethical encounters with others and preventing violence, abuse and exploitation of others. Her most previous publications include co-edited anthologies Reconfiguring Human, Nonhuman and Posthuman in Literature and Culture (2020, Routledge, ed. with AK Koistinen & E Varis) that was shortlisted for the ESCL Collaborative Research Award, and Violence, Gender and Affect. Interpersonal, Institutional and Ideological Practices (2021, Palgrave Macmillan).

Aino-Kaisa Koistinen is Postdoctoral Researcher in Contemporary Culture Studies and the School of Resource Wisdom (University of Jyväskylä, FI), Adjunct Professor in Media Culture (University of Turku, FI), and a poet and teacher of creative writing. Her research interests include affect, violent fiction, popular culture, feminist posthumanism, ecocriticism, monster studies, and creative research methods. Koistinen is part of the international Monster Network and The Ecocritical Network for Scandinavian Studies (ENSCAN). In 2022, she will be working on her postdoctoral project “Reading the Anthropocene – Ecological Literacy as Creative Practice” exploring the role of creative writing in the creation of ecologically sustainable futures.

Kaisa Kortekallio is a post-doctoral scholar at the University of Jyväskylä and the School of Resource Wisdom (JYU.Wisdom). Her work bridges cognitive narratology and posthumanist approaches to literature and philosophy, with a focus on ecological speculations and more-than-human reading. She has published on New Weird, climate fiction, readerly experientiality, seasonal feelings, and close reading. Kortekallio is a member of the research consortium Instrumental Narratives: The Limits of Storytelling and New Story-Critical Narrative Theory (Academy of Finland 2018–2022).

Nora Schuurman is Academy Research Fellow and Adjunct Professor of Human–Animal Studies at the University of Turku, Finland, as well as Adjunct Professor of Animal Geography at the University of Eastern Finland. She specialises in human-animal studies and animal geographies. Her main area of expertise is human-animal relationality, and her research focuses on, for example, interspecies care, animal agency and death, especially in contexts of equestrianism and pet cultures, as well as eco-nationalist discourses concerning animals. She has published widely on these topics, including a co-edited anthology Affect, Space and Animals with Jopi Nyman (2016, Routledge).

Nóra Ugron is a Doctoral Researcher at the University of Turku, Finland, and a network coordinator of ELMO – Eastern European Left Media Outlet, queer-feminist poet and activist for housing justice in the Social Housing NOW! movement in Cluj-Napoca, Romania. In her activist and artistic work she aims for building resilient communities and networks of anti-capitalist resistance, based on mutual care and comradeship in the Eastern European region. In her PhD thesis she researches SF practices and kin literacy in artistic and literary works, as well as in liberating activist knowledge production. The thesis looks at works from different geopolitical locations that encompass transformative visions regarding our relatings to each other and to the world. Her research interests are feminist posthumanism, SF, climate fiction, queer theory and decolonial thinking.

Image used in the poster: courtesy of Nóra Ugron

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