Sawyer Seminar's Militarized Ecologies Workshop


 Humanities Center     May 19 2017 | 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM Humanities Gateway (HG) 1010

Militarized Ecologies Workshop, May 19, 10am-5pm
Sponsored by the 2016-2017 Sawyer Mellon Seminar, Documenting War and the Center for Global Peace and Conflict Studies, UCI

This one-day workshop will bring together social scientists and humanities scholars to present works-in-progress on the topic “militarized ecologies.” 

Much of the theorizing and writing about global climate change highlights the centrality of capitalism and its so-called externalities, yet fewer thinkers have addressed how military capital, or militarization and its excesses, has also been integral to the processes associated with the “Anthropocene." Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, in The Shock of the Anthropocene, offer the neologism “Thanatocene” to extend the framing of the Anthropocene beyond industrialization and capitalism, to include militarism, war economies, and technologies of death. Taking this as a starting point, but eschewing the epochal and anthropocentric tendencies of much Anthropocene scholarship, this workshop will raise questions about how militarization and ecologies, in material and immaterial ways, are indispensable to how we understand human impact on the planet’s biogeophysical processes.

The workshop seeks to pose questions regarding the mutual imbrications of capitalism and militarization as two processes that have evolved in close coordination, not just in terms of the political-economic convergences of Eisenhower’s military-industrial complex, but also in terms of mutant ecologies, multispecies worldings, and emergent assemblages that are entangled with U.S. empire. What is the relationship between ecologies, broadly defined, and diverse histories and spaces of militarization/securitization—in the context of the U.S.’s “empire of bases,” and processes of securitization, criminalization and militarization in everyday life?

Speakers:
Amahl Bishara, Anthropology, Tufts University
Darcie DeAngelo, Anthropology, McGill University
Lindsey Dillon, Sociology, UCSC
Bridget Guarasci, Anthropology, Franklin and Marshall College
Eleana Kim, Anthropology, UCI
Kristina Lyons, Feminist Studies and Anthropology, UCSC
Valerie A. Olson, Anthropology, UCI
Simone Popperl, Anthropology, UCI
Bettina Stoetzer, Global Studies and Languages, MIT
Juanita Sundberg, Geography, University of British Columbia
Leah Brooke Zani, Anthropology, UCI


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