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You will be contacted within 48 hours of the event with the Zoom link for this event. Please be aware tickets will close an hour before the event start time.
The developing climate crisis forces all disciplines to re-examine their core assumptions. We face an imperative to reconsider, across timescales, relationships between humans and the environment. This conference invites researchers to develop new perspectives in light of this crisis and to draw inspiration from post-humanist approaches and from the work of indigenous scholars and artists. We will approach trees as trees - both as individuals and as collectives, prioritising their perspectives and arboreality within their distinct ecosystems and environments. Moving beyond previous work that has situated trees within human narratives, this conference will attempt to consider ‘tree-ish’ thinking within a broad range of subjects, from the Humanities to the Social and Natural Sciences. Taking this perspective will allow us to examine how trees, across space and time, have engaged with and formed networks alongside humans and nonhuman others.
Trees have been significant to many human societies, but seldom in the same way. In a Western context, they have spoken to communal cosmologies and stimulated scientific and personal discoveries, served as markers to establish imagined and practical boundaries, and acted as frameworks for representing emotions, genealogy, and human inter-connectedness. However alongside and within this, they have often been reduced to passive objects upon which human agency is enacted. Much of this can be attributed to the Western separation between nature and culture, and our disassociation from our surrounding environments. Our conference will explore the idea that trees and other nonhumans are active, cognisant, and intentional beings- an awareness that has all too often been lost.
Programme:
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9:00 - 10:00
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Welcome & Panel Discussion
Laura Rival- University of Oxford
Monica Gagliano- Southern Cross University
Michael Bintley- Birkbeck University of London
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10:00 - 10:45
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Bo Zheng - the Political Life of Plants
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10:45 - 11:00
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Morning Break
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11:00 - 12:00
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Working with Trees
Sarah Abbott (University of Regina) - (Re)planting Tree-Human Relations: Respect, Reciprocity, Communication, Collaboration
Sumin Myung (Johns Hopkins University) - Enrooting Climate Change: Trees, Field Sciences, and Semiotechnologies of Life in South Korea
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12:00 - 12:30
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Creative Session
Ganga Limbu (KTK-BELT studio), ‘Library of Indigenous Knowledge’
Becky Lyon, ‘Bodies of Arboreal Time’
Christina Della Giustina (Slade School of Fine Art, UCL and University of the Arts, Utrecht), ‘You are variations: a provisional résumé’
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12:30 - 13:00
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New Approaches to Trees in the Humanities
Khanh Nguyen (Aarhus University), ‘Representing Otherness: Arboreal Temporality in Richard Powers' The Overstory’
Laura Pustarfi (California Institute of Integral Studies), ‘Phenomenology as a Way of Relating to Arboreal Others’
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13:00 - 14:00
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Lunch break
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14:00 - 15:30
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Forests
Amy Cutler (Goldsmiths University) - ‘The New Humanitrees: Empathy, Harm, and Forest Cities’
Rhea Shah - Decolonizing the Forest: Re-establishing the Solega’s Jungle
Varna Venugopal (Indian Institute of Technology) - ‘“A mangrove forest is a universe unto itself”: Relocating Swarmy Arborealities in the Anthropocene’
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15:30 - 16:00
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Trees in Oxford and Beyond
Beverley Lear (University of Oxford), ‘A Career in the Presence of Trees’
Alice Little (Writer in Residence, Wytham Woods, University of Oxford), ‘Woodland Words: creative writing at Wytham Woods’
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16:00 - 16:20
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Afternoon Break
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16:20 - 17:20
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Trees and Colonialism
Camilo Arango Duque (Universidad EAFIT) - ‘The Blow of the Axe and the Echo of the Forest: Revisiting colonial foundation myths from a critical environmental perspective’
Ram Shergill (University College London) – ‘The Critical Posthuman Tree’
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17:20 - 18:00
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Humans, Trees and Urban Spaces
Clare Blackwell (University of Oxford), ‘Street Trees: Isolation and Care in the Urban Forest’
Emma Kaufmann LaDuc and Lauro Nächt (Vienna University of Technology), ‘Indicative Ecologies’
Olga F. Koroleva (Global Research Network / QMUL), ‘Soft Forest’
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18:00 - 19:00
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Optional Additional Discussion Session
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Click here to see the call for papers
logo © Eleanor Baker
Environmental Humanities, TORCH Programmes
