Symposium: "Eco-temporalities and Geo-politics"
October 13 & 14, 2022 (U of Cologne)
The workshop "Eco-temporalities and Geo-politics" takes place in cooperation with MESH and is co-funded by the Competence Area IV, University of Cologne, and the AG Eco Media.
Organizers: Verena Wurth, Friederike Ahrens, Sarah Mund, Lorenzo Gineprini, Felix Lussem (members of the Environmental Humanities Reading Group of a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School)
Venue: a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne, Room Skyfall
For Zoom login, please contact ehrg-artes@uni-koeln.de.
Conference Program
First day: Thurday 13 of October
9:30 - 10:00 | Coffee and registration |
10:00 - 10:45 | Opening and greetings by Kate Rigby (MESH) and Andreas Speer (a.r.t.e.s.) |
10:45 - 11:00 | Break |
11:00 - 12:30 | Panel Eco-Aesthetics I
|
12:30 - 13:30 | Lunch at Bistro Lindenthal - Herbert-Lewin-Straße 650931 Köln |
13:30 - 15:00 | Panel Eco-Conflicts
|
15:00 - 15:30 | Break |
15:30 - 17:00 | Keynote Lecture by Michelle Bastian (University of Edinburgh): Engaging with phenology to sense more-than-human climate change temporalities |
17:00 - 17:30 | Closing session |
Second day: Friday 14 of October
10:00 - 10:30 | Coffee |
10:30 - 12:00 | Panel Eco-Justice
|
12:00 - 13:00 | Lunch at the "Skyfall" room |
13:00 - 14:30 | Panel Eco-Aesthetics II
|
14:30 - 15:00 | Break |
15:00 - 16:00 | Recap and closing remarks |
“This is an age in which new ghosts, new monsters, new fears, new hopes haunt the imagination of what used to be called ‘the future’ but is actually ‘the present,’ above all for peoples of all living species and other Terran entities who endure in a large part of the world now.” (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro 2019: S296)
“The Anthropocene has reversed the temporal order of modernity: those at the margins are now the first to experience the future that awaits all of us.” (Amitav Ghosh 2016: 62-63)
Our current eco-social crises are rooted in a progressivist and productionist temporality, a narrative that often entails restless techno-capitalist advancements and a blinkered focus on future profits on a global scale. In our workshop “Eco-temporalities and Geo-politics”, we seek to develop different modes of thinking about and engaging with these discourses.
In our workshop we want to consider these ideas intersectionally and connect them with past, present and future aspects of environmental racism as well as human and nonhuman displacement beyond nationalist imaginaries of climate migration. What humans might experience as slow violence can, in geological timescales, be a sudden intrusion that entangles human history with planetary history in unforeseen ways. With “anthropogenic” climate change, the earth system itself - or Geos - has transformed from a stable background for human action to a political actor on all imaginable scales. In this sense, we understand geo-politics not as territorial interests of nation-states but as a terrestrial endeavor. What can a politics of “Nonlife” (Povinelli 2016) and “animacies” (Chen 2012) look like beyond the solutionist tunnel vision of technical feasibility? Can we go beyond linear understandings of time by framing eco-social crises as cyclical, repetitive catastrophes? Can slow arts of noticing temporal diversity (Tsing 2015) and paying attention (Stengers et al. 2013) contradict the urgency to act that is imposed on us by the geological crisis? How can we accurately account for the tensions between figurations of the “bigger picture” and localized problems, and vice versa? In our workshop we will explore how the Environmental Humanities can contribute to these questions and how they can include the geological/terrestrial along the ecological/environmental.