Please join us for the second keynote of the Un/Predictable Environments: Politics, Ecology, Agency digital conference.
Hilary Cunningham Scharper, University of Toronto, Canada
Bio: Dr. Hilary Cunningham Scharper is both a cultural anthropologist and a Canadian novelist. Her academic interests encompass multi-species ethnography, critical animal studies, sentient landscapes and land ethics. Her ethnographic practice engages with visual, sensory and arts-based methodologies. Writing as Hilary Scharper, she also publishes literary fiction. Her recent novel Perdita is the first of a series of “eco-gothic” stories set in the Great Lakes.
Abstract: Critically addressing issues of authorial power and the asymmetries of representation has a long tenure in anthropology. But what if that experimentation is extended to more-than-human worlds? What kinds of conversations might evolve, especially those informed by the unpredictability, urgency and escalation of anthropogenic climate chaos? With human/morethan- human relationships stretched to breaking-points, what forms of collaboration might ensue?
Dear Forest is a walk-in-a-dark-woods—both ethnographic and fictional—and explores “author-ity,” and “relational-research” in a world where the possibility of unlimited human/nonhuman “co-constitutions” can no longer be taken-for-granted.
Thursday, May 20, 2021
11:15 am – 12:15 pm PDT
Online via Zoom
Free
This conference is co-hosted by the Public Humanities Hub at UBC-Vancouver and the School of History, Anthropology, Philosophy and Politics at Queen’s University Belfast, in collaboration with the University of Allahabad. With support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Council Canada.