Empire and Ecologies: Transimperial, transhistorical & transregional natures (17th to 21st century)
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Empire and Ecologies: Transimperial, transhistorical and transregional natures from the 17th to the 21st century took place on 1st and 2nd of July 2021 and was funded by the UCD Humanities Institute Seed Funding Scheme and the European Research Council through the SouthHem Project.
Panel 1 focused on Creative Praxis and featured poet Ian Davidson who presented on 'From a Council House in Connacht - A Creative and Critical Reading' and artist Amy Cutler who presented on 'A Video Book of Orchids'. The panel was preceded by some opening remarks from symposium organisers Sarah Comyn and Megan Kuster.
Panel 2 — Disaster and Environmental Crises was convened and chaired by Ailise Bulfin and featured:
Steve Asselin who presented on ‘The Providential Genocides: Nature as an Agent of Imperial Racial Logic in Fin-de-Siècle Apocalyptic Fiction’
Anjuli Raza Kolb presented on ‘Epidemic Ecology (What is a Forest Fire)’
Jade Munslow Ong & Matthew Whittle presented on ‘Species Extinction and/as Colonial Bio-disaster’
Panel 3 — Ancient Nature and Modern Imagination was convened and chaired by Giacomo Savani and Matthew Mandich, and featured
Svetlana Hautala, who presented on ‘“As Already Dioscorides Knew”: On the Afterlives of Ancient Botany’
Christopher Schliephake presented on ‘Water Ecologies and (the Persian) Empire: From Herodotus to Wittfogel’
Matthew Mandich presented on ‘Imperialism, Extraction, and the Economy: Re-creating Rome in the early United States’
Panel 4 — Biodiversity and Indigenous Knowledges was convened and chaired by Megan Kuster
The speakers were Emma Powell & Miranda Johnson who presented on ‘Inside (and outside) the bubble of empire: A dialogue on the New Zealand Realm’.
Yunci Cai presented on ‘The Eco-Politics of Indigenous Activism in Sabah, East Malaysia’
Artemis Caine presented on ‘Which Lens? On Biodiversity and Worldviews’
Lachlan Fleetwood presented on ‘“Useless and incapable of being made useful”: Imperial Environmental Imaginaries and Indigenous Topographies of Afghanistan and the Pamirs’
Panel 5 — Blue Humanities was convened and chaired by Hannah Boast and featured Ellen Howley who presented on ‘Sea Craft: The Watery Poetics of Ireland and the Caribbean’
Tomas Buitendijk – ‘Body Become Sea, Sea Become Body. Ecological Cyborgism in Amy Sackville's Orkney (2013)’
Bernadette Fox – ‘Samuel Beckett’s Scavenging Seagulls & Sinking Boats: Transcending Waste in The End’
The symposium concluded with a Roundtable on Methodologies on Extractivism,
The roundtable featured Sukanya Banerjee (Berkeley), Elizabeth Miller (UC Davis), Jennifer Wenzel (Columbia), Simon Jackson (Birmingham), Katayoun Shafiee (Warwick)
The roundtable was chaired by John Brannigan.