This event is by invitation only
The onset of the Anthropocene has led scholars to question long held ideas about agency, sentience, and subjectivity. As early as 1576, Montaigne challenged human claims of superiority over other living beings on the basis of the supposed uniqueness of the faculty of reason. Montaigne’s comments resonate with recent work in anthropology, sociology, and philosophy that explores the concept of human agency together with the vitality and interconnectedness of not only living beings, but even inorganic matter. Scholars such as Philippe Descola, Bruno Latour, Michael Marder, Jane Bennett, Tim Ingold, and Donna Haraway have developed new frameworks for considering both the “animacy” of the natural environment and the agency of its non-human things, leading Eduardo Kohn to proclaim that “The living world is enchanted.” Such speculation about the more-than-human world is gaining particular importance in the age of climate crisis, where the intersecting impacts of human and environmental actors have become a matter of profound concern. The colloquium explores the relevance of this developing body of work for landscape history and theory. Engaging with recent work in new materialism, the plant humanities, actor-network-theory, post-humanism, “plant-thinking,” and deep ecology, we will ask why the human subject has historically enjoyed such privilege and how that privilege has created a binary between nature and culture in our historic and contemporary understanding of landscape.
Colloquia-archs:
Luke Morgan, Monash University
D. Fairchild Ruggles, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Speakers
Georges Farhat, University of Toronto
Rethinking the Culture-Nature Binary in Landscape History
Rosalyn LaPier, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Ancient Plants of the Prairies: Kipitáaakii’s ‘Lost Crops’
Mihnea Mircan, freelance contemporary art curator
Landscapes of Transformation
James T. Roane, Rutgers University
Plot
Vanessa Watts, McMaster University
Indigenous Places: Scapes of Understanding
Rebecca Zorach, Northwestern University
Totally Insensible to its Beauties: On Kant, Garden Aesthetics, and the Music of Birds
