| booklet-final.pdf |
The theme of this year’s PSL, Ec/o/ntologies, explores how debates, methods, and epistemologies informing the emergent interdisciplinary field of Environmental Humanities might help confront and retool collective responses to the dire planetary exigencies of the mounting climate crisis. A central contention of ec/o/ntologies is that the ongoing collapse of human-planetary relations has made the bracketing of natural history from human history, the distinction between life and nonlife, nature and culture, increasingly untenable politically, intellectually and on the level of everyday existence.
Ec/o/ntologies instead centers the enmeshment of the biological, geological and meteorological, as well as the intersections of bio/necropolitics and ecocide, which anthropocentrism -the privileging of the human perspective and human existence, at all and any cost- systematically ignores and masks. As unsettled historical legacies of settler colonialism, racism, speciesism, and imperialism become overlayed by contemporary capitalist practices and technologies of resource extraction, privatization, and ecocide, it becomes imperative to learn to live otherwise with the compounding and everyday fallout of climate chaos, mass extinction events, zoonotic pandemics, and biospheric disasters that together delimit the ecological conditions of human habitability in a more-than-human world.
Ec/o/ntologies provisions an experimental space-time to consider these collective dilemmas of world-un/making by expanding our field of engagement: i.e., from relations among humans, however attuned to the power dynamics and histories of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy, to encompass -and be encompassed by- the more-than-human, the entire material, multi-species cosmos: Gaia. One vital way ec/o/ontologies proposes to invoke Gaia as this expanded field of engagement and encompassment is by grounding questions of environmental, historical, and racial justice in an interdisciplinary reckoning with feminist, anticolonial, indigenous, and black activist genealogies of thought and practice regarding the ethics of inheritance, stewardship, commoning and repair. Likewise, during the summer lab experiments in commoning and mutuality indebted to these genealogies will be explored in conversation with a range of situated, local natural resource struggles and ecological interdependencies to hone the practical, political, but more-than-human coordinates for a more capacious and planetary ethic of survivance.
Ec/o/ntologies instead centers the enmeshment of the biological, geological and meteorological, as well as the intersections of bio/necropolitics and ecocide, which anthropocentrism -the privileging of the human perspective and human existence, at all and any cost- systematically ignores and masks. As unsettled historical legacies of settler colonialism, racism, speciesism, and imperialism become overlayed by contemporary capitalist practices and technologies of resource extraction, privatization, and ecocide, it becomes imperative to learn to live otherwise with the compounding and everyday fallout of climate chaos, mass extinction events, zoonotic pandemics, and biospheric disasters that together delimit the ecological conditions of human habitability in a more-than-human world.
Ec/o/ntologies provisions an experimental space-time to consider these collective dilemmas of world-un/making by expanding our field of engagement: i.e., from relations among humans, however attuned to the power dynamics and histories of capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy, to encompass -and be encompassed by- the more-than-human, the entire material, multi-species cosmos: Gaia. One vital way ec/o/ontologies proposes to invoke Gaia as this expanded field of engagement and encompassment is by grounding questions of environmental, historical, and racial justice in an interdisciplinary reckoning with feminist, anticolonial, indigenous, and black activist genealogies of thought and practice regarding the ethics of inheritance, stewardship, commoning and repair. Likewise, during the summer lab experiments in commoning and mutuality indebted to these genealogies will be explored in conversation with a range of situated, local natural resource struggles and ecological interdependencies to hone the practical, political, but more-than-human coordinates for a more capacious and planetary ethic of survivance.
