{"id":761,"date":"2016-09-22T08:17:01","date_gmt":"2016-09-22T08:17:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/naturenkulturen.de\/?p=761"},"modified":"2024-02-22T14:41:58","modified_gmt":"2024-02-22T13:41:58","slug":"workshop-with-stefan-helmreich-and-heather-paxson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/naturenkulturen.de\/en\/workshop-with-stefan-helmreich-and-heather-paxson\/","title":{"rendered":"Workshop with Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson"},"content":{"rendered":"

INFRASTRUCTURES OF NATURECULTURE IN THE REALM OF THE INTANGIBLE AND INVISIBLE \u2013 Workshop with Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson
\nMon, 31st<\/sup> of October 2016, 14-18h, University of Bremen, \u201cThe Box\u201d, Wiener Str. 7
\n
\nOrganized by the Bremen NatureCultures Lab; supported by the Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research and the artec Sustainability Research Center, University Bremen.<\/p>\n

\u201cInfrastructures of NatureCulture in the Realm of the Intangible and Invisible\u201d<\/p>\n

Against the background of the Lab’s interest in the multiple objects, politics and practices of human and non-human actors that produce NatureCultures, the workshop aims at exploring the often ‚unseen‘ aspects of material NatureCultures. We will take Stefan Helmreich\u2019s and Heather Paxson\u2019s recent research encounters with microbes as a starting point, which they put together in their joint article \u201cThe perils and promises of microbial abundance: Novel natures and model ecosystems, from artisanal cheese to alien seas\u201d (Helmreich and Paxson 2014). We are very excited that we could win both Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson to join our workshop. The workshop will take up a relational angle of (new) materialism, emphasizing that matter\/things do not speak for themselves and never act(s) alone.<\/p>\n

Concerning the production and politics of material NatureCultures, we would like to discuss \u2018the unseen\u2019 quite broadly in relation to:<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Blind spots in research lenses: What are blind spots of e.g. research perspectives, models or model organisms? How are they produced? What is (un\/intentionally) excluded? And what are the (political) gains and losses of blind spots?<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Invisible infrastructures: What kind of infrastructures or processes of infrastructuring are involved in the production and circulation of material NatureCultures?<\/p>\n

\u00b7\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Intangible (aspects of) objects we encounter in our research: How do we encounter and explore matters that are hard to grasp? For example, how do we enter into a multispecies discussion? This point is concerned with what we can learn from such encounters analytically\/conceptually as well as with methodological challenges such encounters might pose (especially in in interdisciplinary\/collaborative settings).<\/p>\n

The workshop aims at generating conversations on these issues and is open for interested scholars and students.<\/p>\n

For REGISTRATION please write to Katrin Amelang – amelang@uni-bremen.de<\/a> – UNTIL 15th of OCTOBER and ADD A PARAGRAPH on your research field and your angle of and\/or position on NatureCultures and the workshop topic.<\/p>\n

—
\nStefan Helmreich is Elting E. Morison Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). His research examines the works and lives of biologists thinking through the limits of \u2018life\u2019 as a category of analysis. He has written two ethnographies on the topic: \u201cSilicon Second Nature: Culturing Artificial Life in a Digital World (1998)\u201d is about computer modeling in the life sciences and looks at the social and simulated worlds of Artificial Life. In \u201cAlien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (2009)\u201d we can follow him to the deep sea and microscopic worlds of marine biologists. Currently he is working on wave science, in domains ranging from oceanography to cosmology to medicine to acoustics to social theory.<\/p>\n

Heather Paxson is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA). She is interested in how people craft senses of themselves as moral beings through everyday activities having to do with family and food. In the anthropology of assisted reproductive technologies, she is known for her ethnographic monograph „Making Modern Mothers: Ethics and Family Planning in Urban Greece“ (2004). More recent is her study of US-American artisanal cheese-making written up in „The Life of Cheese: Crafting Food and Value in America“ (2013), which is as much about craftwork, economy and ecology as about morals, bacterial culture and \u2018microbiopolitics\u2019.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

INFRASTRUCTURES OF NATURECULTURE IN THE REALM OF THE INTANGIBLE AND INVISIBLE \u2013 Workshop with Stefan Helmreich and Heather Paxson Mon, 31st of October 2016, 14-18h, University of Bremen, \u201cThe Box\u201d, Wiener Str. 7<\/p>","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[54,1,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-761","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-54","category-allgemein","category-vergangenes"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/naturenkulturen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/naturenkulturen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/naturenkulturen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/naturenkulturen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/naturenkulturen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=761"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/naturenkulturen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":910,"href":"http:\/\/naturenkulturen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/761\/revisions\/910"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/naturenkulturen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=761"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/naturenkulturen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=761"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/naturenkulturen.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=761"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}