Description
This seminar  draws on examples of the built environment – including an experimental beagle colony and protest camp infrastructures – to reflect on the ethical challenges posed by theoretical work that used the language of ‘entanglement’ and ‘complexity’ to think about the world.

A growing body of theory has emphasised entanglements between humans and other entities: from animals and plants, to technologies, microbes, and minerals. By situating the human within a more complex web of relations, this work has offered hope for developing new ways of thinking about and acting in the world, which are capable of responding to climate crisis. At the same time, an emphasis on how entangled and complex the world is can be overwhelming. Such approaches make it difficult to determine where responsibilities for particular environmental problems really lie, let alone how to meet these responsibilities. The workshop identifies the promises and pitfalls of this body of theory, by bringing it into dialogue with concrete examples of infrastructures that were designed to navigate complexity (to varying degrees of success). In doing so, it explores what possibilities for action and intervention might exist in entangled worlds.

Eva Giraud is a Senior Lecturer in Media at Keele University. Her research explores tensions between theoretical work that has emphasized entanglement and complexity, and activist practice: with a particular focus on anti-racist, environmental, and animal activism. Her first monograph What Comes After Entanglement? Activism, anthropocentrism and an ethics of exclusion (Duke University Press) was published in 2019.

REFERENCES

19.05.20-Theory-Culture-Society-2016-Giraud-27-4911-1Download

19.05.20-Giraud-Introduction-After-Entanglement11-2Download