Event Description
Through an interdisciplinary approach, the Latin American Natures in Times of Environmental Crisis event series interrogates how people from different positionalities in the region address pressing environmental issues. Over three installments throughout the academic year, we will hear from scholars who, in their forms of researching, writing, and engaged scholarship, are studying struggles for territorial and water rights, dignified livelihoods, food sovereignty, and environmental knowledge. This series emphasizes how approaching these pressing environmental problems involves an articulation of humans and more-than humans. This installment has two components: a hybrid in person/online talk (April 10), and a workshop (April 11) led by the guest speaker and open to graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and faculty who sign up. The lecture-workshop framework allows participants to collaborate with and learn from our invited speaker how to advance research on nature and politics in Latin America.
This in-person workshop aims to bring together graduate students, postdoctoral researchers, and early career faculty investigating more-than-human politics in Latin America. This workshop will explore ways to bring other living entities into our analyses of Latin American politics to illuminate the complex relations of human and non-human worlds without falling back on easy symmetries or analogies. Our goal is to think with ethnographic forms that bring the non-human to politics in ways that challenge what we think of as standard political categories like interest, action, agency, and alliance. In preparation for the workshop, participants will write a short introduction to a non-human being that lives in or near their field research site in the form of a short speculative fiction. In a second exercise, we will seek out ethnographies of non-humans that experiment with voice to enable new forms of analysis.
Speaker
Kregg Hetherington is Associate Professor in the Departments of Sociology and Anthropology at the Concordia University. He is a political anthropologist specializing in environment, infrastructure, and the bureaucratic state. Hetherington’s 2020 book, The Government of Beans, begins with the question of how to understand soybeans as the most significant political actor in Paraguay over the last two decades. The book employs multiple narrative strategies to try to rethink what government is in the age of runaway monocrops. His current research, in a very different site, looks at the way different forms of water participate in urban life in Montreal. Both of these projects, while engaging with anthropocenic changes at planetary scales, are fundamentally about the intimate cosmopolitics of everyday life, of ecological relations and regulatory action.
Cosponsors
Presented by the Latin American & Caribbean Socionatures Working Group, with cosponsorship support and funding from the CLAS Event Series Grant.