Social Anthropology Seminar - Professor Kath Weston - 30th of September 2019
| Dates: | 30 September 2019 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 18:00 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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| Speaker: | Professor Kath Weston |
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Social Anthropology Seminar
Monday, 30 September 2019
Professor Kath Weston – University of Edinburgh
“Planetary Dispossession: Ecological Inheritance and the Last Generation.”
What sort of world are we leaving to our children?"
“Why have you not taken better care of the environment? You are passing a ruined planet on to us!”
These are rhetorical claims, though hardly idle ones, that have become commonplace in discussions of climate change and ecological damage. On both sides of a putative generational divide, a notion of ecological inheritance frames speculative futures about extinction and the end of generational succession, as well as diagnoses of what currently ails an Earth now conceived on a planetary scale. This talk examines the revival of a transmission model of inheritance in environmental politics in North America, offering as illustrative evidence a series of ethnographic vignettes centred on three pieces of “material culture”: a plastic bag, a bumper sticker, and a totem pole. What financialized assumptions about possession, ownership, authority, and succession inform the trope of bequeathing an ecologically compromised world to a receiving generation that worries it might be the last? What sorts of exclusions are embedded in the notion of ecological inheritance for those who already apprehend themselves as dispossessed? If an ecological inheritance of planetary dispossession for "the last generation" presents itself as a legacy that, like debt bondage, can neither be renounced nor refused, are there alternative ways to live, other than in thrall to the spectre of extinction, regardless of how things turn out?
Second Floor Boardroom 2.016 / 017
Arthur Lewis Building
Time 4:15 to 6:00pm
(Tea and coffee available outside the room from 4:00pm)
ALL WELCOME!
Speaker
Professor Kath Weston
Role: Speaker
Organisation: University of Virginia and University of Edinburgh
Travel and Contact Information
Find event
2.016 / 017
Arthur Lewis Building
Manchester
