Bringing together scholars across time zones and disciplines, the series takes an exploratory approach to environmental issues and aims to allow as many people as possible to access some of the most exciting ideas in the field of environmental humanities and beyond. All are welcome, spread the word!
Upcoming lectures:
Thursday 31 March 2022, 15:30 hrs CEST
Dr Bram Büscher “The Conservation Revolution: moving beyond foundational contradictions in biodiversity protection?”
In his lecture he will focus on his recent co-authored book with Robert Fletcher: The Conservation Revolution. Radical ideas for Saving Nature beyond the Anthropocene (Verso, 2020). Büscher and Fletcher argue that the Anthropocene challenges contemporary conservation models and exposes their deep contradictions. After all: despite massive conservation investments over the last decades, the loss in biodiversity has only intensified. Read More…
Past lectures:
Saturday 1 February 2022, 15:30hrs CET
Dr. Dagomar Degroot “Finding ET (for the first time): The nineteenth-century “discovery” of life on Mars”
The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope promises to open new frontiers in the search for intelligent life beyond Earth. Yet there is nothing new about this search. In the nineteenth century it even seemed as though the search had culminated in the discovery of alien life on a world neighboring our own: Mars. Scientists thought they had uncovered canals crisscrossing the planet that revealed a civilization struggling for water in a changing climate. It was a sensational idea – one that fascinated millions, and would have been impossible without changes in environments on Earth and Mars. These changes, which have not been considered before, reveal the extent to which our search for life beyond Earth is shaped by how we understand ourselves, on Earth. Read More…
Thursday 28 October 2021, 16:00hrs CET
Iva Pesa, “Beyond Resistance and Resignation: Understanding Environmentalism in Africa“The Anthropocene presents itself as a turning point in human history: if current fossil fuel dependency is not reversed and if economic thought is not reconceptualised to question the logic of growth models, the earth’s future will be imperiled. Viewing the Anthropocene from the perspective of sub-Saharan Africa shows the need to ask different questions, which challenge the singular and universal nature of the Anthropocene. Read more…
Thursday 30 September 2021, 20:00hrs CEST
Cate Sandilands, “Mulberries: A Biopolitical Love Story“In cities, plants are our intimate companions whether or not we notice them. Some urban plant intimacies are cherished and encouraged to flourish; others are strictly policed, even outlawed. In this webinar, I will tell two stories about mulberries and intimacy to illustrate why we should think about plants as biopolitical subjects, and also why we should think about botanical intimacies as important sites of both critical feminist/queer inquiry and restorative relationship in the Anthropocene. Read more and register…
Watch the video here: https://environmentalhumanitiescenter.com/2021/10/15/video-entanglements-lecture-catriona-sandilands/
Thursday 3 June 2021, 20:00hrs CEST
Jane Bennett, “Out for a Walk in the Middle Voice”
We are excited and honoured to be welcoming Professor Jane Bennett to our online series. Bennett’s book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Duke UP, 2010) had huge impact on thinking about distributed agency and vital materiality in the Environmental Humanities. In her new book Influx and Efflux (Duke UP, 2020), Bennett picks up the question central also to Vibrant Matter: how to think about human agency in a world teeming with powerful nonhuman influences? This talk will focus on the role of language in acknowledging the trans-specied kinds of agency in the radical entanglement of human and nonhuman activities. Read more…Thursday 8 April 2021, 20:00hrs CET
Rosemary Joyce, “Nuclear Landscapes”
The global nuclear industry has for decades used sites like Stonehenge to justify designs for long-term markers to be placed over nuclear waste repositories to ensure they are not violated in distant, imagined futures. In the US, the result has been a proposal to build a pre-formed archaeological site, a ruin that would qualify for listing as a World Heritage site in the future if it were ever implemented. Alternative proposals, some emerging from the same planning process, others from activism in opposition to the nuclear industry, propose a variety of aesthetic installations as alternative ways of marking the contaminated landscapes under construction. Read more…Thursday 11 March 2021, 16:00hrs CET: Georg Stöger, “Urban Environment in Everyday Life, 18th and 19th century”
In this online lecture I will speak about the changes of urban environment during the 18th and 19th century. In my research project I’ve dealt with a middle size town (Linz in Upper Austria) and tried to study change and persistence in a long term perspective. I was explicitly interested in the collective and individual practices in everyday life that shaped (and were shaped by) the urban environment. In this respect the work of the French sociologist Henri Lefebvre on everyday life and on the production of space offers interesting starting points for an analysis of actors and their logics. Read more…Thursday 11 February 2021, 20:00hrs CET: Cara Daggett, “Petro-masculinity and Climate Defiance”
Far-right movements are on the rise worldwide, and many have embraced both misogynistic and anti-climate action positions. While these resentments are often treated separately, in this webinar, I will discuss their interconnections through the concept of petro-masculinity, which appreciates the historic role of fossil fuel systems in buttressing white patriarchal rule. Petro-masculinity also helps to clarify the appeal of climate defiance, an aggressive stance that I distinguish from the broader category of climate denial. Read more…Thursday 10 December 2020, 16:00hrs CET: Leonie Cornips, “How a Dairy Cow Relates to Other Cows and Humans: The Opening of a Conversation“
This lecture will focus on how the dairy cow within the power dynamics of industrial farming, makes social meaning in her barn by relating to other cows and entering human(s) via a processually emergent quality arising from multiple assemblages of human and nonhuman elements, including material things, artefacts and spaces. Read more…
Environmental Humanities Center Amsterdam 
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