Wer nicht will deichen, der muss weichen: a fieldtrip in Nordfriesland

By Martin

Last Thursday Helen and I travelled with Werner Krauss and Dorle Dracklé to Nordfriesland to explore some of the places and politics that make up emerging energy landscapes in the region. Werner and Dorle are both anthropologists who have conducted work on the emergence of renewable energy systems across Europe. Werner in particular has had a long ethnographic engagement with the area which stretches north of Hamburg towards the Danish border; a land of salt marshes, wide open skies, migratory birds, farming communities, coastal trippers and wind turbines. Hailing from Norfolk, we felt an uncanny sense of familiarity in this otherwise strange landscape.

Life in the Anthropocene: reflections on a couple of recent talks

Whenever You Breathe Out, I Breathe In (2014) - David Gasi

By Martin

A couple of talks I attended last week threw up some interesting links and comparisons, and offered some useful snapshots into the direction of travel among those interested in ideas about the Anthropocene and the nature of the human.

Endings: politics, future, world

By Martin.

While Helen has spent much of the last month thinking and writing about democracy, I've been working through a quite random selection of texts as I go about developing some new research projects. These include Amanda Machin's Negotiating Climate Change, Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's After the Future and Timonthy Morton's Hyperobjects. They are all connected with my broad interest in the cultural politics of the future and the mediation of imagined futures through the physical sciences. All of the books either present or challenge particular endings, so I thought it might be interesting to consider them alongside each other, despite them all residing in very different intellectual traditions.

'Society in the Anthropocene' - Reflections

A few weeks ago Martin and I attended the 'Society in the Anthropocene' conference at the University of Bristol, hosted by the Cabot Institute and the journal Economy and Society. More information about the conference, including recordings of many of the talks, can be found here. There is a forthcoming special issue in the journal Economy and Society which will feature many of the papers from the conference. It was a very interesting and enjoyable conference, with a line-up of top academics that read a little bit like an undergraduate geography syllabus - many of my formative academic heroes were there. In this post I will offer some reflections on the conference, following up on the posts that Martin and I wrote back in April.