HUMANNATURE LECTURE SERIES at the Australian Museum
Sydney Environmental Humanities Lecture Series, 2019
International scholars explore the most pressing issues of our day
in this thought-provoking eight-part evening lecture series.
Thurs 14th March, 2019. Following on from its sold-out season in 2018, the Australian Museum HumanNature evening lecture series returns in 2019 with leading scholars and cultural activists discussing and debating some of the most important issues of our time.
From climate change and our melting polar caps, the HumanNature series explores the role the humanities play in addressing environmental and social problems: combatting climate change through cooperation and collaboration; the role of politics in the melting of icebergs, sourcing green commodities and living with the rhythm of nature.
The HumanNature Lecture Series presents:
TUESDAY 30 APRIL, 6pm. Lesley Green – Is Green the new White?
Lesley Green, University of Cape Town, South Africa, considers how environmentalism squares with anti-racism and social justice in the sourcing of ‘green’ commodities from the sands of South Africa.
TUESDAY 14 MAY, 6pm. Craig Santos Perez – Environmental justice and the power of the Pacific word
Experience the award-winning eco-poetry of Craig Santos Perez, University of Hawaiʻi, as he reflects on the vital role of Pacific literature in Oceania’s environmental movements. Can literature play a significant role in raising awareness and inspiring activism?
TUESDAY 25 JUNE, 6pm. Macarena Gomez-Barris – The Occupied Forest
Venture into the cacophonous space of the forest with Macarena Gómez-Barris of the Pratt Institute, Brooklyn USA, as she considers its contested conceptual, indigenous and potentially regenerative narratives.
TUESDAY 20 AUGUST, 6pm Katherine Gibson +Juan Francisco Salazar – Lessons on resilience from a bamboo bridge
Katherine Gibson and Juan Francisco Salazar of Western Sydney University, explore what it might mean to live with the rhythms of nature, and with each other, in resilient community economies.
TUESDAY 22 OCTOBER, 6pm. Mark Carey- The Culture and Politics of Ice
University of Oregon’s Mark Carey explores the fundamental role of glacial ice in global economics and politics and within our imaginative, historical and colonial narratives. Much more than just a barometer for climate change or pristine nature, glacial ice has been an elemental force in human history, fundamental to global politics and central to the quest to make oceans, mountains and the polar regions safe for global markets.
TUESDAY 12 NOVEMBER – Andrea Gaynor – Armoured histories: radical remembering for the Anthropocene
Hold the past to account with Andrea Gaynor, University of Western Australia as she proposes ‘radical remembering’ to actively confront the challenges of the Anthropocene. Climate breakdown, annihilation of entire species, dwindling topsoil and fresh water, food shocks and plastic oceans led 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg to admonish the assembly of wealthy and powerful at the 2019 World Economic Forum to ‘act as if our house is on fire. Because it is’.
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