TEMPORAL BELONGINGS
  • Home
  • About
  • Resources
    • The Library
    • Presentations
    • Interview Series
    • Working Paper Series
    • Related Projects >
      • Scoping Study
      • Pilot Projects
      • Time and Alternative Economies
  • Events
    • Timely methods for novel times
    • The Material Life of Time
    • The Material Life of Time Pilot
    • The Social Life of Time >
      • Registration
      • Keynotes
      • Programme
      • Venue
      • Accommodation
    • Temporal Design >
      • Presentations
    • Immortality and Infinitude >
      • Presentations
    • Power, Time and Agency >
      • Presentations
    • Methods Festival >
      • Presentations
    • Time in the Archives
    • Hope and Community Futures
    • Temporal Conflicts >
      • Presentations
    • Community Connectivities >
      • What we got up to...
      • Presentations
      • Collaborative Sessions
  • Contact

News, CFP, Events & more

CFP RGS IBG 2018 Excavating multispecies landscapes: temporalities, materialities and the more-than-human Anthropocene

9/5/2018

 
Call for papers: RGS-IBG Annual International Conference, Cardiff University, 28–31 August 2018
 
Excavating multispecies landscapes: temporalities, materialities and the more-than-human Anthropocene
 
Session organisers: Aurora Fredriksen (University of Manchester) and Charlotte Wrigley (Queen Mary, University of London) 
 
Along with eroding coastlines (Matless 2017) and the ‘blasted’ ruins of capitalist development (Tsing 2017), nonhuman beings are key signals of the Anthropocene in landscapes. Changing migration patterns, novel colonisations, extinctions, adaptive mutations and hybridisations make legible the material transformation of landscapes through melting ice, warming seas, desertification, toxification. The current or threatened absence of once present species fold in remembered, forgotten and imagined pasts and alternately apocalyptic and redemptive futures into a present of haunted, spectral landscapes (e.g., Whale and Ginn 2017; Gan et al 2017: G1). This is evident in popular imaginaries of the Anthropocene as human induced environmental catastrophe – in visions of a ‘silent spring’ (Carson 1962), ‘insectageddon’ (Monbiot 2017), and coral reef ‘graveyards’ and ‘ghost towns’ – that foreground the absence of once present nonhuman beings in beloved landscapes. It is also evident in projections for a so-called ‘good Anthropocene’ that envision a near future in which technoscientific progress and human ingenuity are able to ‘turn back time’ and/or alter the future by returning long absent nonhuman species to landscapes through restoration, rewilding or de-extinction initiatives. As the Anthropocene invites a reassessment of humanity’s place in the geologic timescale, nonhumans become intricately entangled in these shifting temporalities: cryobanks stash endangered species’ DNA as a future safeguard against extinctions (Chrulew 2017) whilst melting ice reveals prehistoric carcasses and thousands of years of fossilised climate data. 
 
Beyond total absence or abundant presence, there are smaller, sometimes stranger ways that nonhuman beings make the Anthropocene legible in landscapes: old trees calling out in flower for symbiont animal pollinators that are now absent, signalling a loss of synchronous time and cascading transformations of place (Rose 2012); hybrid polar-grizzly bears wandering the edge of exposed shores once covered in ice extending out to sea; a type of bacteria found only in the rectums of geese digesting toxic waste from mines (Hird and Yusoff 2018); and long dormant microbiotic pathogens from the deep past re-emerging as permafrost melts in arctic landscapes. In these and many other possible examples, carefully attending to the signs writ into landscapes by nonhuman beings can unsettle anthropocentric narratives of the Anthropocene centred on the history of Modern (western) humanity and its future dissolution or redemption, calling forth more ambivalent, multivocal narratives of multispecies worldings in flux (DeLoughrey 2015).
 
This session invites contributions that engage with the ways in which nonhuman beings signal the Anthropocene in landscapes. Potential themes include (but are not limited to):
 
• Changing and novel nonhuman agencies in response to the material transformation of landscapes
• Absence/presence of nonhumans and folded temporalities in haunted/spectral landscapes
• Landscapes as multispecies worldings 
• More-than-human affects in landscape encounters
• Speculative futures for more-than-human landscapes
• Transmogrification and monstrous landscapes
 
We especially encourage contributions that unsettle anthropocentric and/or occidental readings of the Anthropocene in landscapes.
 
Please send abstracts of no more than 250 words to aurora.fredriksen@manchester.ac.uk andc.a.wrigley@qmul.ac.uk by 5 February 2018.
 
References:
Carson, R. (1962) Silent Spring. New York: Houghton Mifflin. 
 
Chrulew, M. (2017) “Freezing the Ark: The Cryopolitics of Endangered Species Preservation” in J. Radin and E. Kowal (eds.) Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, 283–305. Cambridge: The MIT Press.  
 
DeLoughrey, E. (2015) ‘Ordinary futures: interspecies worldings in the Anthropocene’ in Global Ecologies and the Environmental Humanities: Postcolonial Approaches, edited by E. DeLoughrey, J. Didur, A. Carrigan. London: Routledge.
 
Hird, M. and Yusoff, K. (2018) [forthcoming] ‘Traversing Plateaus in Microbial-Mineral Relation’. The American Association of Geographers: Annual Meeting, April 10-14, New Orleans. 
 
Gan, E., Tsing, A., Swanson, H., Bubandt, N. (2017) ‘Haunted landscapes of the Anthropocene’ in A. Tsing, H, Swanson, E Gan and N. Bubandt (eds) Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet. Minneapolis: Minnesota. 
 
Whale, H. and Ginn, F. (2017) “In the Absence of Sparrows.” In A. Cunsolo and K. Landman (eds) Mourning Nature: Hope at the Heart of Ecological Loss and Grief, 92–116. London: Routledge.
 
Matless, D. (2017) ‘The Anthroposcenic’. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 42(3): 363–76. 
 
Monbiot, G. (2017) ‘Insectageddon: Farming Is More Catastrophic than Climate Breakdown’. The Guardian, October 20. URL: http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/oct/20/insectageddon-farming-catastrophe-climate-breakdown-insect-populations.
 
Rose, D. B. (2012) “Multispecies Knots of Ethical Time.” Environmental Philosophy, Special Issue “Temporal Environments: Rethinking Time and Ecology”9 (1):127–40.
 
Tsing, A. (2017) The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Comments are closed.

    Announcements

    New article published reflecting on our online conference, and how we designed for conviviality.

    What's this? 

    Our curated listing of events and news related to time, temporality and social life.

    If you would like your event considered for inclusion contact us.

    RSS Feed

    Archives

    January 2023
    December 2022
    November 2022
    February 2022
    November 2021
    September 2021
    June 2021
    May 2021
    November 2020
    October 2020
    September 2020
    August 2020
    June 2020
    May 2020
    April 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    November 2018
    October 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    September 2016
    July 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016

    Categories

    All
    Anticipation
    Arts
    CFP
    Cities
    Economics
    Embodied Time
    Environment
    Future
    Geography
    Globalisation
    Jobs
    Material Time
    Media
    Special Issue
    Technology And Time
    Time And Agency
    Urbanism

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • About
  • Resources
    • The Library
    • Presentations
    • Interview Series
    • Working Paper Series
    • Related Projects >
      • Scoping Study
      • Pilot Projects
      • Time and Alternative Economies
  • Events
    • Timely methods for novel times
    • The Material Life of Time
    • The Material Life of Time Pilot
    • The Social Life of Time >
      • Registration
      • Keynotes
      • Programme
      • Venue
      • Accommodation
    • Temporal Design >
      • Presentations
    • Immortality and Infinitude >
      • Presentations
    • Power, Time and Agency >
      • Presentations
    • Methods Festival >
      • Presentations
    • Time in the Archives
    • Hope and Community Futures
    • Temporal Conflicts >
      • Presentations
    • Community Connectivities >
      • What we got up to...
      • Presentations
      • Collaborative Sessions
  • Contact