BremenNatureCultureLab

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Vergangenes: 2018

Next NatureCultures Lab! Reading and Discussion Session on Alf Hornborg

Mon, 18.6.2018 | 12:15-13:45 | SFG 2210

 

Alf Hornborg (2017) Artifacts have consequences, not agency: Toward a critical theory of global environmental history. European Journal of Social Theory 20(1), 95-110.

This article challenges the urge within Actor-Network Theory, posthumanism, and the ontological turn in sociology and anthropology to dissolve analytical distinctions between subject and object, society and nature, and human and non-human. It argues that only by acknowledging such distinctions and applying a realist ontology can exploitative and unsustainable global power relations be exposed. The predicament of the Anthropocene should not prompt us to abandon distinctions between society and nature but to refine the analytical framework through which we can distinguish between sentience and non-sentience and between the symbolic and non-symbolic. The incompatibility of posthumanist and Marxist approaches to the Anthropocene and the question of agency derives from ideological differences as well as different methodological proclivities. A central illustration of these differences is the understanding of fetishism, a concept viewed by posthumanists as condescending but by Marxists as emancipatory.

 

Workshop “Global Ethnography. Marketization in Everyday Life: Concepts, Methods, Ideas”

15th & 16th of June 2018 with Koray Çalışkan, Elizabeth Saleh und Nikolas Schall

The Workshop focuses on the ethnographic study of global economies and markets, their coming into being and their consequences. Koray Çalışkan’s work on global cotton will be compared to case studies of very different „global commodities“: among them Matsutake gourmet mushrooms (Anna Tsing), scrap metal (Elizabeth Saleh), more cotton (Nikolas Schall), Bitcoins (Koray Çalışkan) and human sperm and egg cells (Michi Knecht). We will discuss the academic and political relevance of new empirical research that shows the dynamic processes of price realization, the contributions of scientific propositions in the making of markets, the daily interventions and negotiations as well as the importance of seeing markets as a continuous relationship of power. We will also work on methodological, epistemological and conceptual questions of “global ethnographies” and the development of „global ethnography research designs“ that blend rigorous ethnography with rich theoretical analysis.

 

With: Koray Çalışkan, (Boğaziçi University, Political Sciences and International Relations), Elizabeth Saleh (American University of Beirut) & Nikolas Schall (IRTG Diversity, University of Trier)

Venue: Academy for Continuing Education, Bremen University, Central Area, Bibliothekstrasse 2a, Room No B0770

Concept & Contact: Michi Knecht (University of Bremen), Souad Zeineddine  (a.r.t.e.s Graduate School for the Humanities Cologne, University of Cologne) and Lilli Hasche (University of Bremen)

 (Email: knecht@uni-bremen.de / szeinedd@uni-koeln.de)

Workshop: „Uncanny Futures: Speculative Ecologies of Waste“

Hanse-Wissenschaftskolleg (HWK), Delmenhorst, 15-16 March 2018

Foto: Sven Bergmann

The international workshop is organized by Sven Bergmann and Franziska Klaas from the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research at Bremen University and Yusif Idies from the Institute for Geography at Münster University.

It is funded by the University Bremen within the frame of the Research Project „Knowing the Seas as NatureCultures: Understanding the role of collaboration, experiment and reflexivity in interdisciplinary marine research and in knowledge practices and material politics with regard to ocean plastics“.

Workshop participation is already closed, for a program see:

http://www.h-w-k.de/index.php?id=2260

Vortrag von Annekatrin Skeide am 08. Januar 2018

How many bodies can we have? – Methodische und methodologische Überlegungen zu phänomenologischen und materiell-semiotischen Körperkonzeptionen

Mon, 8.1.2018 | 12:15-13:45 | SFG 2210

 

Phänomenologische und materiell-semiotische Konzeptionen von menschlichen Körpern erscheinen zunächst in ihren Vorannahmen, Interessen und Resultaten unterschiedlich, wenn nicht unvereinbar. In den material semiotics handelt es sich um Körper-im-Werden (bodies-in-becoming/bodies-in-progress), die in Praktiken hergestellt werden, an denen menschliche und nichtmenschliche Akteure gleichsam beteiligt sind. Der phänomenologische Eigenleib (corps propre), also der gelebte und gespürte Körper, verankert den Menschen in der Welt und ermöglicht Erfahrung. Er ist, im Unterschied zum von außen wahrgenommenen Körper, immer schon da. Eine Möglichkeit wäre nun, diese Körper nebeneinander bestehen zu lassen, als bodies we are, bodies we have und bodies we do (Mol and Law 2004).

In meinem Vortrag möchte ich jedoch mithilfe meines ethnographischen Materials zu Hebammenpraktiken in Deutschland darüber nachdenken, wie diese Körper zusammengebracht werden können. Besonders interessant erscheint mir daran, dass die bodies we do unter Berücksichtigung von experiences-in-practices etwas an ihrer unausweichlichen Vorläufigkeit verlieren, während die bodies we are, umgekehrt, destabilisiert werden. Phänomene wie ‚Wehen‘ und ‚Wehenschmerz‘ können somit als experiences-in-practices beschrieben werden, an deren Entstehung und mehr oder weniger vorläufigen Stabilisierung über die Zeit bestimmte Techniken, Dinge und Umgebungen beteiligt sind.

Mol, Annemarie, and John Law. 2004. “Embodied Action, Enacted Bodies: The Example of Hypoglycaemia.” Body & Society 10 (2–3): 43–62. doi:10.1177/1357034X04042932.

Annekatrin Skeide is PhD candiate at the University of Amsterdam (Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Programme group: Anthropology of Health, Care and the Body).