Event Details

In this seminar series, ‘Conversations in Political Ecology’, speakers from different backgrounds engage in dialogue around a number of contemporary political ecology approaches and applications.

Political Ecologies of the Post-Secular: Living with Ghosts and a Stratovolcano

About this Event

Drawing on their respective art-based, activist and academic experiences, the speakers will be talking about the challenges of living in historically charged and physically dangerous environments. In the shadow of Merapi volcano, they reflect on what it means when spirits, ghosts and deities co-inhabit with ‘scientific’ ways of understanding a dynamic landscape.

Speakers

Mira Asriningtyas

Mira is an independent curator and writer. She is the co‐founder of LIR Space, an art space in Yogyakarta, Indonesia which stages multi‐disciplinary collaborations aimed at fostering transgenerational transmission of knowledge, memory, and history. In 2017 she initiated the site‐specific project "900mdpl" in her hometown Kaliurang, beneath the active volcano Mt. Merapi, which engages local and international artists in the creation of a socially engaged archive to preserve the collective memories of local people. www.miraasriningtyas.com; www.900mdpl.com; www.lirspace.net

Adam Bobbette

Adam is a geographer and postdoctoral fellow in the New Earth Histories research program at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. His current work looks at the transformative influence of Javanese Islam on the modern geosciences. He is completing a book on the politics of volcanoes, mysticism, and science in Java since the late 19th century. He is a cofounder of Kebun Lithos/Lithic Garden, a research and activist foundation near the crater of Mt. Merapi.

Moderator

Nigel Clark

Nigel is a human geographer and chair of social sustainability at the Lancaster Environment Centre. He recently co-authored (with Bronislaw Szerszynski) the book Planetary Social Thought: The Anthropocene Challenge to the Social Sciences