UPDATE: This is event has been canceled.
The WVU Humanities Center welcomes Dr. Anna Tsing to campus on March 25 at 7 p.m. in Brooks Hall, room 125 to discuss Feral Atlas, one component of her transdisciplinary program encompassing the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences and the arts in exploration of the "Anthropocene,” the geologic epoch defined by human disturbance of the earth’s ecosystems.
All students, faculty, staff and community members are welcome to attend.
Her talk, “Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Antropocene,” is related to interactive, web-based experiment in environmental storytelling. Feral Atlas combines art, science, and humanities perspectives to reveal the un-designed effects of human infrastructure projects. At the heart of the site will be a series of reports by researchers on particular "were" ecologies, that is, ecologies that have been encouraged by human infrastructures, but which develop and spread beyond human control.
This discussion offers a suite of methods for the study of the Anthropocene as more-than-human. It argues that the Anthropocene is patchy. Anthropocene patches are not like jigsaw puzzle pieces, however, they emerge at incompatible scales, they overlap, they do not cover everything. Imperial and industrial infrastructures show the scale and position of patches. Infrastructures stimulate feral effects, and these feral effects make up the more-than-human Anthropocene.
Tsing is Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz and Niels Bohr Professor at Aarhus University in Denmark, where she codirects Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene. Her recent books include “The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibilities of Life in Capitalist Ruins” (2015) and “Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection” (2004) both from Princeton University Press.