Thursday 7 June 2018, 4:30-6:30PM
LHA Research Hub (19.2072)
GUEST LECTURE: 4.30 – 5.30pm
MASTER CLASS (open to all LHA HDR students): 5.30- 6.30pm, please contact Su Ballard for the reading “Microbes”
Lecture: Of Walls, Borders, and Roads: Posthuman Mobility in the Anthropocene
It is difficult to speak of the Anthropocene and changes to our planet because of the need to shift our view between multiple levels. We cannot stay at one for long. From the micro and the macro, from microbes to biospheres; we must be able to switch lenses from the human to the nonhuman. Often it is scale, rather than levels, that illuminates relationalities in novel ways and demonstrates that it is difficult to articulate these relations in their complexity within traditional disciplinary boundaries and understandings of scale based on smooth capitalist economic structures. Our economies of ecological destruction and the intimacies of shared vulnerabilities exist even if we may not be able to see or count each other across that divide of who, or what, is counted, or even countable, in our human systems. Using the effects of walls and roads on other-than-human communities, this talk will stress that responding to Anthropocene challenges will mean seeing agency in nonsmooth, nonrepresentational ways while simultaneously taking into account the nonhuman and the biosphere, as well as the human.
Masterclass: In this short discussion focused workshop Stefanie will expand on ideas presented in her recent essay “Microbes” from Making Things International 1: Circuits and Motion (ed. Mark Salter, University of Minnesota Press, 2015) and work with students to connect this piece to the larger framework of the Anthropocene. Attendees are expected to have read the text, and will be invited to share their thoughts.
Stefanie Fishel teaches in the Department of Gender and Race Studies at the University of Alabama specializing in political theory and global politics. Her research interests include the gendered and racialized experiences of violence; theories of biopolitics and posthumanism; critical animal studies; and global environmental theory centering on climate change and the Anthropocene. Her book, The Microbial State: Global Thriving and the Body Politic (2017), is available through the University of Minnesota Press. She recently wrote “Politics for the Planet: Why Nature and Wildlife Need Their Own Seats at the UN” for The Conversation.