CANCELLED - Munro Lecture - Professor Anna Tsing: 'Feral atlas and the more-than-human Anthropocene'

As with most things, we humans are unable to do the Anthropocene (in all its terrors) all by ourselves. This talk offers a suite of methods for the study of the Anthropocene as more-than-human. Neither the all-or-nothing vision of a unified planetary imaginary nor the foolishly fantasized safety of local redoubts are our best guides; instead, the talk argues, 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.

The event is free, but ticketed. Please reserve tickets at the Eventbrite link. Open to all and will be followed by a reception.

Professor Anna Tsing

Currently Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (1952) is an internationally renowned anthropologist. In addition to over forty articles, Prof Tsing is the author of several award-winning books, including In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (1994) and Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (2005). In 2010, Prof Tsing received a Guggenheim Fellowship for her project On the Circulation of Species: The Persistence of Diversity, an “ethnography of matsutake,” a mushroom highly prized by the Japanese. Her most recent, multiple award-winning book,The Mushroom at the End of the World (2015), traces the commodity chain of the matsutake. In 2013, Prof Tsing was awarded a five-year Niels Bohr Professorship at Aarhus University in Denmark to establish a transdisciplinary program encompassing the humanities, natural sciences, social sciences, and the arts in an exploration of what has been called the "Anthropocene", i.e. the geologic epoch defined by human disturbance of the earth’s ecosystems.

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