​​Events

20.04.2022, Christopher Kelty (UCLA): Fixing the Future in Los Angeles or, Why Johnny Can't Problematize

This talk reports some absurdities of environmental governance in a particular place: Los Angeles, California. It focuses on three urban ecological and wildlife controversies: the environmental impact of feral cats cared for by humans, the secondary effects of anticoagulant rodenticides on predatory and scavenging birds and mammals; and the restoration of a wetlands sacred to local Native American peoples, degraded by both oil drilling and conservation. Central to all of them are techno-political tools: environmental impact reports, mitigation bank and credits systems, pesticide registration review. Each of these tools fix the future by defining the present and testing the impacts of different futures--evidence-based policy making. Yet as a pragmatic form, they do much more: they slow down the future in some ways, and speed it up in others; they instantiate certain pasts over others, and they become intense affective fields around which the possibility of argument unfolds. I argue that this does not always happen along predictable lines, serving as a bulwark against a damaging future in some cases and a roadblock to a desired change in others.

Fixing Futures: 

20 April : Christopher Kelty (University of California, Los Angeles)
               Fixing the Future in Los Angeles or, Why Johnny Can't Problematize

11 May: Andrew Barry, Evelina Gambino (University College London)
              The Labour of Capitalism

22 June: Andrea Ballestero (University of Southern California)
               Aquifers and Ethnography at the Edge of a Concept

13 July: Lucy Suchman (Lancaster Unicersity)
              Demilitarisation, open worlds, and reparative futures

Wed, 6-8 pm (ct)
Attendance on Campus Westend, Seminarhouse, SH 2.105 and online! 
Please register via ka-hiwis@em.uni-frankfurt.de

Governance, Deliberations and Conflicts in and of a More-than-Human-World

Dates:

• 28.04.2021 Prof. Dr. Martina Klausner
• 26.05.2021 Dr. Johanna Kramm
• 30.06.2021 Dr. Laura Otto
• 07.07.2021 Dr. Michaela Meurer, MA

More information to come soon.

The inaugural lecture by Prof. Dr. Martina Klausner "A More-Than-Digital Anthropology" will take place on April 28, 2021. We will provide information about the possibilities of attending in presence as well as virtually, in due time.