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- Convenors:
-
Petr Gibas
(Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences)
Karolína Pauknerová (Charles University)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Stream:
- Posthumanism
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 23 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
Anthropocene has made us more aware of the limitations of anthropocentric prism. Landscape can offer us one tool to re-work our anthropocentric pre-conceptions. This panel calls for contributions exploring changing landscapes that allows us to question the status quo.
Long Abstract:
Landscape represents a widely used, often ambiguous and at times contested concept employed across a number of disciplines. It is a dynamic and multi-layered concept with different scholars emphasising its various facets due to its descriptive as well as theoretical salience. Anthropocene has made us more aware of the limitations of anthropocentric prism in social sciences and humanities. Landscape can offer us one tool to re-work our anthropocentric pre-conceptions by connecting us to the very material, more-than-human milieu we (co-)inhabit, (co-)create and research.
What makes landscape distinctive both conceptually and empirically is its certain plasticity. In disciplines preoccupied with the human we see the growing emphasis on an explicit empirical as well as conceptual engagement with non-/more-than-human. Although the plasticity of the conceptualisation(s) of landscape can be seen as a weak spot with other concepts having been pushed to the fore instead (e.g. space and spacing, assemblage), in our panel, we propose to stay with "landscape" and use its plasticity for an exploration of the changing world in which we find ourselves.
This panel calls for contributions exploring changing landscapes including liminal, peripheral, post-military, post-industrial and other that allows us to question the status quo and explore its changes. We want to encourage discussion on topics including:
- (accelerating) changes to past and present landscapes
- growing emphasis on an explicit engagement with non-/more-than-human
- modes of scholarly exploration (empirical research, conceptual and theoretical engagement, methodological concerns)
We aim at drawing together empirical, methodological, theoretical and experimental contributions.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 23 June, 2021, -Paper short abstract:
On the basis of case studies I argue, that if the term Anthropocene emphasises human activity as a dominant influence on the environment, it is possible to theorize this current era as anti-Anthropocene from a local perspective, as the local human agency does not impregnate landscape any more.
Paper long abstract:
Based on two case studies I argue, that local communities are leaving Anthropocene era, rather than entering it. The first case study is based on fieldworks carried out in Yakutia between 2002 and 2015. Local Sakha ontology understands landscapes as live entities, very similar to humans. In the last 100 year, this intimate relationship between humans and landscapes deteriorated, and now locals no longer understand the behaviour of landscapes, and they cannot communicate with them. They are left alone. And their human landscape now fades into the unknown wilderness.
Just as in the case of Őrség region in Hungary, where traditional local agriculture and dwelling pattern resulted in a special landscape. Dispersed hamlets created in this region an archipelago of socio-natural domains, where humans and non-humans created a web of relationships. Socio-economic and ecological changes detached local population from their landscapes in the last 80 years, and locals are no longer able to manage their landscapes. Now their voice is increasingly marginal in local discourse about landscape management, tourism and sustainable farming.
Anthropocene is the period when human agency has become an influential geophysical force, hence putting an end to the division between human and nature, On the basis of these two case studies I argue, that if the term Anthropocene emphasises human activity as a dominant influence on the environment, it is possible to theorize this current era as anti-Anthropocene from local perspective, as peripheral communities get increasingly detached from their landscapes. Landscape becomes unknown and unmanageable Nature.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Ida-Viru County, Northeast Estonia, and explores the possibilities and practices of reclaiming a post-industrial and post-socialist landscape via tourism.
Paper long abstract:
This paper draws on preliminary findings from ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Ida-Viru County, Northeast Estonia. The seaside region, once a major oil shale producer in the Soviet West, is nowadays an Eastern periphery of the European Union. Oil shale extraction in Estonia peaked in 1980s, but decreased in the 1990s due to post-Soviet restructuring of the industry. Although oil shale is still being produced in Estonia in large quantities, leaving the land perforated by underground mines and elevated by semi-coke dump hills, its limited reserves and the impact of mining on the environment force the country to think of alternatives of land use.
In academic literature, concepts such as reclaiming, re-cultivating and re-wilding are used in discussions about industrial landscapes. This paper maintains the context of capitalism and economic rationalism and explores the possibilities of post invasive-land-use focusing on the tourism industry and its strategies. Drawing from interviews with representatives of local tourism companies and participant observation during tours to the industrial region, this account focuses on specific local responses to socioeconomic demands, looking at how the locals understand, strengthen and mediate their relationship with the land they inhabit by negotiating the past and imagining the future of the peculiar artificial landscape in tourism narratives and practices. Considering the representations of landscape alongside with its social, cultural and political dimensions offers a possibility to examine how is the anthropocene experienced, understood and mediated in the post-socialist setting.
Paper short abstract:
This talk deals with eschatology and the Carthulucene in the realm of vehicle and road infrastructure ecologies. Hitchhiking, as a landscaped form of resistance and mobile transgression, serves as a type of serious play when driving through the cultural inroads of ride-shares in the COVID era.
Paper long abstract:
There are a lot of 'rules' broken and Memento Mori features in auto-stopping. From vanishing hitchers, through to the uncanny aspects of fear, danger, environmental concerns and the search for liberation from social constraint through adventure – death-memory is never very far away from spontaneous roadside lift solicitation. Memento mori is interesting because it is about remembering, about death/escatology and it is inherently material. As such, it is a memorialisation format that lends itself well to landscape studies, to phenomenology and to better understanding a practice that is both about textual/audiovisual representation as well as a hybrid human-technology form of action. A practice of the embodied imagination, hitchhiking is itself increasingly memorialised because it is seen as an endangered transgression and a dying out form of displacement. Hitching is thus a social and spatial memento mori for an era of the 'Carthulucene', when counter-culture wasn't commodified or as cynically narrativised. Is it thus useful to ask whether we should see the autostop phenomenon as a tristesse topic? The sadness here residing in that it hasn't been adequately studied in the humanities or social sciences. Not, at least, until that time when it might possibly be driven to extinction by the fear that strangers are not just potential axe murderers, but carriers of contagious viral pathogens.