Pluralizing the Anthropocene: The Sustainability of Everything
Pluralizing the Anthropocene
#ConversasComSerralves
Schedule: 18:00 - 19:30
The session will be in English
Registration: Please write to Anabela Silva – a.silva@serralves.pt
Events
will take place online. All welcome but registration required
Tim Ingold (University of Aberdeen)
Moderator: Gonçalo Santos (CIAS/ Sci-Tech Asia)
Sustainability
is about carrying life on, not about the achievement and maintenance of a
steady state. Moreover if it is to mean anything, it must be for everyone and
everything, and not for some to the exclusion of others. What kind of world,
then, has a place for everyone and everything, both now and into the indefinite
future? What does it mean for such a world to carry on? And how can we make it
happen? To answer these questions, I shall take a closer look at what we mean
by ‘everything’. I shall argue that it is not the sum total of minimally
existing entities, joined together into ever larger and more complex
structures, but a rather a fluid and heterogeneous plenum from within which
things emerge as its crumples and folds. How, then, does such an understanding
of everything affect our concept of sustainability?
Related
Gonçalo D. SANTOS is an anthropologist and a leading international
scholar in the field of China studies. His research explores new approaches to
questions of modernity, subjectivity, and social, technological, and ecological
transformation in contemporary China. He is an assistant professor of
socio-cultural anthropology in the Department of Life Sciences and a Researcher
and Group Coordinator in the Research Center for Anthropology and Health (CIAS) at the
University of Coimbra. Prior to joining the University of Coimbra in 2020, he
held positions at the London School of Economics, the Max Planck Institute for
Social Anthropology, and the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Chinese Village
Life Today (University of
Washington Press, 2021) and the co-editor of Transforming
Patriarchy (University of Washington Press, 2017). His research
has been published in leading scientific journals in the fields of
anthropology, science and technology studies, and Asian studies. He is a member
of the Research Group on
Culture and Society, Initiative for U.S.-China Dialogue on Global Issues,
at Georgetown University, and is the founder and the director of Sci-Tech Asia, a transnational research
network that focuses on the relations between technoscience, politics, and
society in Asia and around the world. He is interested in comparative
approaches that draw on Chinese and Asian perspectives and histories to
challenge the hegemonic power of Euro-American epistemologies and narratives of
modernity.