ASCA Political Ecologies Workshop

 Starting date: Annual

 Political Ecologies seminar organized by Jeff Diamanti and Joost de Bloois

For registration or further information, please contact the organisers, Jeff Diamanti and Joost de Bloois (j.diamanti@uva.nl; j.g.c.debloois@uva.nl).

This year, the ASCA Political Ecologies Seminar consists of a curriculum and speaker series on “The Ecology of Forms.” Through reading groups, masterclasses, and public lectures from international scholars and artists engaged in the creative and theoretical study of ecological relation and crisis, this year’s seminar will move through distinct but overlapping forms that focalize contestation and collectivity across a multitude of vectors: economic, legal, environmental, architectural, infrastructural, cultural, and so on. Forms can include anything from a watershed, general strike, or class action lawsuit; subsea mine or natural gas pipeline; or an assembly of bodies in the thick of a morning commute. Forms put into relation on the terms of their arrangement, historicity, and materiality. Some more obviously than others. Maybe there are new forms emerging amidst the crumbling in of the present. Maybe there are some that we tend to overlook because they’re so sedimented into our experience of the world that we forget they are themselves provisional and mutable. And maybe there are forms that we want to expose for the conceit of their (abrasive) arrangements: the oil terminal, for instance, or the fossil fueled family. Furthermore, we will ask which new forms of (non-academic) writing and thinking are needed to tackle such issues. We will look into different forms of writing and visualizing possible ‘ecologies of form.’ Part of the idea is to gather theoretical concepts around situated and historically contingent forms that materialize a polis in place. But we’re also interested in exploring the animacy and nonhuman force of forms into domains of humanistic and social scientific inquiry. Graduate students and faculty from all disciplines are encouraged to attend.