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Eva Giraud (Keele University): ‘Matters of (violent-) care in the Manhattan Project Beagle Colony’
This paper critically engages with how feminist theories of care (e.g. Haraway, 2008; Puig de la Bellacasa 2011) have been translated to more-than-human contexts, by taking up recent calls to focus on care’s ‘darker’ and more violent side (Van Dooren 2014; Martin, Myers and Viseu 2015; Giraud and Hollin 2016). It does this with […]
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Jeremy Kidwell (University of Edinburgh): ‘On Killing the Little Ones: Narratives of Violence and Eradication in Bacterial Perspective’
Thom van Dooren has recently drawn attention to the forms of what he calls “violent-care” as an inevitable feature of cross-species care practiced “at the dull edge of extinction.” In this paper, I place this thesis in the wider context of environmental ethics and test the possible limits of his thesis by turning towards […]
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Greg Hollin (University of Leeds): ‘Regimes of violent-care: Democracy, climate change, and rare earth mining in Greenland’
While STS has been slow to problematize care (Martin et al. 2015), such narratives do exist in other disciplines and in relation to topics as diverse as healthcare (Murphy 2015), laboratory practice (Giraud & Hollin forthcoming; Johnson 2015), and conservation work (Van Dooren 2014). What this research consistently notes is that foregrounding alternative objects, […]
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Michelle Keown (University of Edinburgh): ‘The ‘slow violence’ of the nuclearised Pacific’
On 1st March 2014, Marshall Islanders marked 60 years since the devastating US hydrogen bomb test (codenamed BRAVO) at Bikini Atoll in the North Pacific Ocean. A thousand times more powerful than the Hiroshima atomic bomb, BRAVO exposed thousands of Marshallese to radioactive fallout. Still off-limits to its displaced indigenous peoples (due to high […]
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David Higgins (University of Leeds): ‘A flood of ruin’: Romanticism, Deep Time, and Environmental Catastrophe’
The Romantic period saw increasing awareness of the Earth’s changing environment over long periods of geological time and the potential for future catastrophes that might make the planet uninhabitable. These concerns, in conjunction with the global cooling caused by the Tambora eruption of 1815, contributed to several remarkable texts written by Lord Byron, Mary […]
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Nigel Clark (Lancaster University): ‘Speculative Volcanology, Igneous Becomings’
The Earth, observes geologist Jan Zalasiewicz,is `a gigantic machine for producing strata’. A quiescent planet would not have given rise to the concentrations of energy and minerals through which humankind owes its recent escalation in agency. Nor would it likely have birthed a beast such as us in the first place. In this talk […]
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Sonia Ali (University of Glasgow): ‘Excavated Realities’
Turn the Collid-a-scape -what happens when time, space and materials collide? Turn it once again – what do the mirrors reflect? Reverse back – did you catch it the first time? Shake the scope – shape the scape – scar the self A series of pieces involving sculptural tectonics both in the physical, sound […]
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Jacob Barber (University of Edinburgh): ‘The epistemic violence of the Anthropocene’
To consider the epistemic violence of ‘Anthropocene’ I want to explore how the term draws together different epistemologies, spatial and temporal scales. Since the late naughties the term has exerted a fascinating pull on a number of discourses, and by drawing extant debates in to its own orbit and has become near synecdochic for […]
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Deep Time & Violence Keynote: Dr Thom van Dooren (University of New South Wales): ‘The Unwelcome Crows: Hospitality in the Anthropocene’
In this lecture, Thom Van Dooren focuses on a small population of roughly 30 house crows in the town of Hoek van Holland in the Netherlands, likely all descendants of two birds that arrived by ship in the mid 1990s. In 2014, after 20 years of peaceful co-existence, the government of the province of […]
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