Multi-Species Encounters and the Environment University of St Andrews Anthropology Society Multi-Species Speaker Series

The University of St Andrews Anthropology Society Multi-Species Speaker Series presents ‘Multi-Species Encounters and the Environment' on Thursday 26 November from 4pm to 5.30pm (GMT).

From the perspective of natural sciences, the human elements of environmental conservation are often overlooked – especially in relation to western centric ontologies. The second webinar in the Anthropology Society Multi-Species Speakers Series considers relationships between humans and the environment in the Anthropocene/Cthulhucene. Join us for the exciting webinar as we look beyond nature/culture binaries and unpack how – from elephants to orangutans to plants – mediated relationships constitute spatiotemporal and speculative environmental landscapes.

Speakers:

Dr. Liana Chua

Liana Chua is Reader in Anthropology at Brunel University London. She has worked with indigenous Bidayuh communities in Malaysian Borneo since 2003, looking initially at Christian conversion and ethnic politics and more recently at development, displacement and environmental change. She currently leads two projects on orangutan conservation: POKOK, an anthropology-conservation collaboration that seeks to mitigate orangutan killing and human-orangutan conflict in rural Borneo, and Refiguring Conservation in/for 'the Anthropocene': The Global Lives of the Orangutan (European Research Council Starting Grant), a multi-sited ethnography of the global nexus of orangutan conservation in the Anthropocene. Her other interests include materiality, visual anthropology and anthropological knowledge practices and politics.

Dr. Ursula Münster

Ursula Münster is associate professor of environmental humanities at the University of Oslo and the director of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities (OSEH). Her research combines approaches from multispecies studies, political ecology, feminist STS, and environmental anthropology to study how more-than-human relationships change and evolve in the Anthropocene. Her long term ethnographic fieldwork in South India has focused on protected forests and the effects of resource extraction and forest management on human-wildlife relationships. Her focus on interspecies conflict and care in India contributes to debates on conservation and the possibilities of coexistence in anthropogenic environments. She has a recent paper titled “Weedy Belongings: Lantana camara, teak, and elephants in a postcolonial landscape” that has been published in The Feral Atlas – https://feralatlas.supdigital.org.

Dr. Franklin Ginn

Franklin Ginn is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geographical Sciences at the University of Bristol. His research interests are in cultures of nature, environment-society relations and philosophical questions concerning the nonhuman. He is currently leading/working on three research projects: The work that plants do: a project investigating the socio-technical and science-fiction speculative approaches of plants ‘beyond Earth', Glacial flour power: A collaborative GCRF project examining the potential of glacial flour as a novel fertiliser in high-mountain agriculture in the Himalaya, and Anthroposcenes/Chthulucenic landscapes: a series of essay-based works on the entanglements of nature and culture in the Anthropocene, including cinematic apocalypse, posthumanism, and forthcoming work on the Firth of Forth near Edinburgh featuring pandas, gannets, plant explorers and sheds.

If you have any concerns about accessibility or have any questions about the event, please don't hesitate to contact us via email on [email protected] or on Facebook @anthrosoc, Instagram @anthsocstandrews, or Twitter @anthsocsta.

For updates on the event, please visit our Facebook event: https://fb.me/e/353VneGNP