This podcast features a talk by Dr Patrick Anthony who is Irish Research Council Fellow at University College Dublin.

The event was part of Dr Sarah Comyn's Irish Research Council MINERALS Laureate project and associated seminar series on Methodologies concerning Extractivism. 

https://imperialminerals.ie/

Patrick Anthony's talk -"Underlands, Empires, Atmospheres: Extractive Histories of Environmental Science" - took place in UCD Humanities Institute on November 7 2023, and was introduced by Dr Ge Tang.

About Patrick:

Patrick Anthony is a social historian of science and environment in central Europe and the World in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His research ranges from German mining and working-class families in natural history to transimperial networks of earth and atmospheric science that linked Central Europe to commodity frontiers in the Americas and northern Eurasia.

He is currently an Irish Research Council Fellow at University College Dublin. Here, he is pursuing a project called Anthropocene Frontiers: The Climate of Conflict in Siberia and the Steppe, a study of how settler colonial violence in the marches of the Russian Empire generated knowledge about climate and the human capacity to change it. In fall 2024, he will begin a Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellowship at Uppsala University.

His forthcoming book, Unearthed: Science and Environment Across Mineral Frontiers, is an archaeology of environmental sciences assembled through mining industries that linked central Europe to empires in the Americas and northern Eurasia.

His research has been published in journals such as Isis, Journal of the History of Ideas, Historical Journal, and Journal of Social History.  After receiving his Ph.D. from Vanderbilt University in 2021, he was a DAAD Prime Fellow at Ludwig-Maximillians-Universität, Munich, a Visiting Scholar at the University of Cambridge, and a Junior Core Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Central European University in Budapest.

Patrick Anthony - Underlands, Empires, Atmospheres: Extractive Histories of Environmental Science

This podcast features a talk by John Barry who is Professor of Green Political Economy at Queen's University Belfast.

The event was part of UCD Humanities Institute's 'Rethinking Crises' Forum and took place on 10 November 2023. 

Professor Barry's talk was entitled 'The Imagination, Hope and the Planetary Crisis’

John Barry - The Imagination, Hope and the Planetary Crisis

"Underworlds and undercurrents: Approaching extractive history from below" by Dr Adam Bridgen from Durham University.

The event was part of Dr Sarah Comyn's Irish Research Council MINERALS Laureate project and associated seminar series on Methodologies concerning Extractivism. 

Adam Bridgen's talk -"Underworlds and undercurrents: Approaching extractive history from below" - took place in UCD Humanities Institute on April 17 2024, and was introduced by Dr Sarah Comyn.

Adam Bridgen - Underworlds and undercurrents: Approaching extractive history from below

This podcast features a talk by Dr Siobhan Angus from Carleton University.

The event was part of Dr Sarah Comyn's Irish Research Council MINERALS Laureate project and associated seminar series on Methodologies concerning Extractivism. 

Siobhan Angus's talk -"Photography and extraction: Ways of seeing/ways of knowing" - took place in UCD Humanities Institute on April 25 2024, and was introduced by Dr Sarah Comyn.

Siobhan Angus - Photography and extraction: Ways of seeing/ways of knowing

This podcast features a keynote from 'Nonhuman Animals in the Age of Extinction and Mass Production', a UCD Environmental Humanities Conference which took place in May 2024. The conference was generously funded and supported by the UCD College of Arts and Humanities and UCD Humanities Institute.

The second keynote speaker was Dr. John Miller from University of Sheffield. His keynote was entitled: Between Animal and Ecological Futures.

John Miller - Between Animal and Ecological Futures

This podcast features a keynote from 'Nonhuman Animals in the Age of Extinction and Mass Production', a UCD Environmental Humanities Conference which took place in May 2024. The conference was generously funded and supported by the UCD College of Arts and Humanities and UCD Humanities Institute.

The first keynote speaker was Dr. Sarah Bezan from University College Cork. Her keynote was entitled 'Rekindling Fictions and the Thermocultures of Extinction'.

Sarah Bezan - Rekindling Fictions and the Thermocultures of Extinction

This podcast features a talk by Dr Jarrod Hore from University of New South Wales, Sydney.

The event was part of Dr Sarah Comyn's Irish Research Council MINERALS Laureate project and associated seminar series on Methodologies concerning Extractivism. 

Jarrod Hore's talk - "Earth Science from the Geological South" - took place in UCD Humanities Institute on June 19 2024, and was introduced by Dr Sarah Comyn.

Jarrod Hore - Earth Science from the Geological South

Has the idea of the end of the world captured your imagination? Ted Toadvine’s book The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology contends that a preoccupation with the world’s precarity relies on a flawed understanding of time that neglects the past and present with the goal of managing the future. Toadvine integrates insights from phenomenology, deconstruction, critical animal studies, and new materialism to argue for a new philosophy of time that takes seriously the entangled temporal events spanning cosmic, geological, evolutionary, and human durations. Here Toadvine is joined in conversation with David Morris and Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault.


Ted Toadvine is Nancy Tuana Director of the Rock Ethics Institute and professor of philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University.

David Morris is professor of philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal.

Benjamin Décarie-Daigneault is a graduate student of philosophy at The Pennsylvania State University.


REFERENCES:
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (body of works including Phenomenology of Perception)
Immanuel Kant
Dipesh Chakrabarty
Michel Serres / The Incandescent
Martin Heidegger
Jacques Derrida
Jean-Luc Nancy
Jerome Miller
Henri Bergson
Edmund Husserl
James Playfair
James Hutton (Hutton’s Unconformity)
John Sallis / Stone
Adam Frank, Marcelo Gleiser, and Evan Thompson / The Blind Spot
Jane Bennett
Donald S. Maier / What’s So Good About Biodiversity?
Ferdinand de Saussure
Émile P. Torres / Human Extinction
Rachel Carson / Silent Spring
Kyle Powys Whyte
Alfred North Whitehead / The Concept of Nature  



The Memory of the World: Deep Time, Animality, and Eschatology is available from University of Minnesota Press.

“The Memory of the World achieves two important things: it steers our understanding of Merleau-Ponty toward a temporal interpretation of his thought and, at the same time, it uses that reading to make a critical intervention amongst theories of environmental apocalypse. Ted Toadvine’s concept of ‘biodiacritics’ should lead to a reorientation of the ‘eschatological imagination,’ producing effects in knowledge that are as insightful as they are impactful. This is a wonderful book that is a pleasure to think alongside.”
—John Ó Maoilearca

Deconstructing deep time.

Minerals Online Roundtable I: ‘Extraction, Infrastructures, and Networks’

Online: October 17, 2024

The first roundtable in our online series for 2024/25 invites a critical examination of the intersecting themes of extraction, infrastructure, and networks in literature across various genres and periods. We aim to explore how different narratives engage with, ignore, or sidestep various infrastructures—such as railways, steamship networks, and telegrams—that facilitate the extraction of natural resources (including land, water, minerals, coal, and oil) and support the movement of labour and goods integral to global extraction.

The discussion seeks to uncover how literary cultures or histories both challenge and reinforce the capitalist and imperialist foundations of these global networks that facilitate extraction, often at the expense of local communities and ecosystems. We aim to deepen our appreciation of the complex ways in which texts engage with extraction and its connections with infrastructures, particularly in the context of contemporary discussions such as decarbonisation, degrowth, and localisation.

Speakers:

Dr Dominic Davies, Senior Lecturer in English, Department of Media, Culture, and Creative Industries, City University of London

Dr Nicola Kirkby, City University of London

Associate Professor Aims McGuinness, History Department, Dolores Huerta Research Centre for the Americas, Latin American & Latino Studies, UC Santa Cruz

Dr Sarah Comyn, Project PI

Dr Ge Tang, Postdoctoral Fellow, UCD (Chair)

Minerals Online Roundtable I - Extraction, Infrastructures, and Networks

Luke Casserly is a multidisciplinary performance maker from Longford, Ireland.

His work weaves together ecological research, autobiography, sound art, and site as a way of carving out space for new possibilities to emerge between live performance and physical landscape. His projects have brought audiences through city streets, back gardens, train stations, beaches, and a bog in the Irish Midlands. These have led to the creation of a network of wildflower meadows across Ireland (1000 Miniature Meadows, 2020–23), the planting of 1,000 indigenous trees (Root, 2021), and the development of an organic perfume made using botanicals from the Irish bog (Distillation, 2023). Often using autobiography as a starting point, his work attempts to open new conversations around humanity’s impact on the environment. He is interested in making work with a positive environmental legacy beyond the moment of live encounter with an audience, creating gentle, subversive interventions in response to the climate crisis while avoiding the anxiety, greenwashing, and didacticism that often surrounds the topic in contemporary society.

In 2024, he was appointed as a Biodiversity Artist in Residence at Dublin City Council. For more information go to Luke's website: https://www.lukecasserly.org

In episode 1 of Extracts Luke talks to hosts Sarah Comyn and Megan Kuster about his work.

The music is from the South African performance art ensemble ‘The Brother Moves On’. We gratefully acknowledge the UCD Humanities Institute and UCD’s College of Arts & Humanities Research Strands Seed Funding scheme for funding this project.

Extracts - Episode 1. Luke Casserly

Recordings of academic lectures and papers from workshops, conferences and seminars in the University College Dublin Humanities Institute. The Institute provides a creative architectural and conceptual space for interdisciplinary research in the humanities and allied disciplines.

The podcasts are recorded and managed by Real Smart Media. https://soundcloud.com/real-smart-media

New tracks tagged #Environmental Humanities