Workshop with Bruno Latour: Political Ecology as Practice — A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene

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Master Class and Workshop with Bruno Latour
In response to a joint invitation from The Working Group on Political Ecologies and the School of Art and Art History, leading figure in Science and Technology Studies and Professor at Sciences Po (Paris), Bruno Latour has agreed to offer a four-day long advanced seminar (a “master class”) to a limited group of graduate students and faculty at UIC, who are engaged with questions of the politics of the environment, the Anthropocene and climate change. In this master class, Latour will focus on his recent work entitled Facing Gaia (emerging from Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh lecture series and his upcoming book with the same title), where he addresses the complex relationship between nature and religion in the age of the Anthropocene. The workshop will take place at the end of his advanced seminar, and is meant to complement the conversations and the collaborative work that will take shape in the seminar.

Designed in conjunction with a Humanities Without Walls application entitled “Political Ecology as Practice: A Regional Approach to the Anthropocene,” this workshop will investigate the reciprocal relationship and the disjunction between the metropolitan theories of the Anthropocene, climate change, and the global environmental crisis on the one side; and the experience of local ecological conflicts in various micro-regions around the world, on the other. The central research question to be collectively addressed will be whether the current vibrant theories of the academic/metropolitan center derive from or get inspired by the multiplicity of regional ecological conflicts experienced today. Conversely we ask, in what particular ways, these theories impact various human communities in their relationship to their land, its resources, biodiversity, and heritage. The workshop invited participants to discuss global theories of the Anthropocene and its new ontologies of time and materiality, while investigating their links to regional practices and discourses. The workshop includes presentations by UIC faculty and graduate students who will present comparative studies of place-based politics of the environment in regional contexts, delivering the results from their fieldwork in diverse landscapes. These fieldwork initiatives are developed from existing projects of graduate students and faculty at UIC and the collaborating institution(s).

This event is funded by the Humanities Without Walls Consortium Grant, Institute for the Humanities Cutting Edge Workshops in the Humanities Grant (now Humanities Frontiers), Institute for Environmental Science and Policy, Office of the Dean of the College of Architecture, Design and the Arts, the School of Art and Art History, the Department of English, the Department of Anthropology, Department of Political Science and the Jane Addams Hull-House Museum at UIC.