In this online meeting, we will do a close reading of excerpts ‘Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene’ to discuss the traces of more-than-human histories through which ecologies are made and unmade.
The meeting will start with a short presentation giving context to the topic, the text and the author, and will be followed by collective reading and informal discussion.
No previous knowledge of the topic, or the publication is necessary. Instructions on how to access the text will be sent to participants in advance.
About the editors of ‘Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet’
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (1952) is a professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a Niels Bohr Professor in the Department of Culture and Society at Aarhus University in Denmark. She is the author of In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1993), Friction (2005) and The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015).
Heather Anne Swanson is an Associate Professor in the Anthropology Department at Aarhus University, as well as Co-Director of the AU Centre for Environmental Humanities (CEH). Swanson is a co-editor of two recent books, Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practice of Multispecies Relations (Duke UP, 2018) and Arts of Living on a Damaged Plant (Minnesota UP, 2017). She has written widely about environmental issues (especially fisheries management), interdisciplinary collaboration, and more-than-human methods in the humanities and social sciences.
Elaine Gan is interested in mapping worlds otherwise. Her transdisciplinary practice combines methods from art, science, and digital/environmental humanities to study the timing and temporal coordinations of more-than-human socialities. Through writing, drawing, interactive media, and installation, Gan explores historical materialisms and temporal coordinations that emerge between species, machines, and landscapes, with a particular interest in plants and fungi.
Nils Bubandt is an anthropologist who has learned to be equally at home with witches, protesters, and mud volcanoes. A professor at Aarhus University, he is co-convener of Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene (AURA), with Anna Tsing, and works to animate descriptions of the Anthropocene with the voices of spirits. In his book Democracy, Corruption, and the Politics of Spirits in Contemporary Indonesia, he portrays the life of spirits at the heart of modern politics.
About Posthuman Reading Group
Posthuman Reading Group is a series of regular monthly gatherings addressing feminist debates about human relationships with non-humans, the environment and technology. The meetings are held online through Zoom and they are spaces for collective reading, thinking, learning and interdisciplinary exchange between participants. The reading groups are always open to all.
Access notes
The event will happen on Zoom – a link will be emailed to attendees. This event will be live captioned, transcription will be available afterwards and it will be recorded for archival purposes. For help with how to set up Zoom and accessibility enquiries, email info@nncontemporaryart.org.