2–3 October 2025
Room U0.1, Building U, UOC Campus, 52 Carrer Perú, Barcelona
Categories: Humanities and socio-cultural activities
Tags: Ambeintales, environmental arts, devices, environmental humanities, environmental media, STS
Organised by: CareNet and UOC
Modernity turned the world into a place of exploration and exploitation. But the earth and the atmosphere, the oceans and the biosphere, not to mention the complex networks of infrastructure we inhabit, are no longer merely the settings for human cultural and political life.
The landscapes of the Anthropocene confront us with a series of tasks that go beyond the paralysing imperatives of modernity: how can we appreciate the complex interdependencies that underpin contemporary worlds? A good example of this is the frequent urban and maritime heatwaves that create countless perfect storms in conjunction with our patterns of urban settlement. How can we grapple with the complexity of entities, relationships, processes and transformations that often overwhelm our inherited cultural and political institutions? What worlds do these institutions carry, and how can we come to terms with this legacy?
In this gathering, we propose to tackle this task in an experimental and collective manner, addressing what we provisionally call ‘environmental devices’. Drawing inspiration from science and technology studies and, in particular, from the expanded concept of mediation introduced by environmental and elemental media studies, environmental devices aim to be a way of directing attention and creativity towards techniques and mediations that sustain and articulate environments and landscapes.
In the seminar, we welcome various proposals addressing mediations and initiatives that seek to rework the landscapes of the Anthropocene at this critical juncture: spaces of urban shade and heat, devices for engaging with storms and flood-prone urban areas, ways of coexisting with toxic micro-particles suspended in the atmosphere, preparation for mega-fires, projects seeking to establish new relationships with bodies of water altered by anthropogenic pressure, approaches to the biome’s renewed social life, and various multi-species encounters beyond language.
By placing these environmental devices at the centre, in this seminar we wish to highlight the different ways of embracing epistemic and political dispositions for an unprecedented shared inquiry: how might we inhabit the planet, in its irreducible plurality, whilst addressing the question of care – what does it mean to ‘take charge’ – of these mediations?
Programme and abstracts in PDF: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1f8ZWKKgHw4k1IxDBAq4mcBqjx2ovpN3d/view?usp=sharing
