In this episode, Hita speaks with Dr. Sarah Bezan who is a scholar of environmental humanities currently employed as a Lecturer in Literature and the Environment at the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork in Ireland. Previously she was a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity in The University of York in the United Kingdom. In this conversation, they chat about how participating in a paleo dig and uncovering a Mosasaur skeleton sparked in her a curiosity that led to her current engagement with making sense of extinction. They speak about artistic representations of extinct animals such as Harri Kallio’s representations of the dodo bird on an island in Mauritius or Mark Dion’s Ichthyosaur installation, and how they manipulate imaginaries surrounding the temporal and spatial boundaries of the extinct species. In describing these imaginaries, they discuss the idea of animal atopias, a term she coined to refer to those placeless places surrounding extinction, where the animal exists not on a spatially defined space but a constructed one, evoking a nostalgia for what once was. They discuss about Sarah’s experiences on the Galapagos Islands where she studied the taxidermic specimen of Lonesome George, the last representative of the Pinta island tortoises and her observation that the extinct body is essentially an exploded one raising questions about what it means to be the last representative of a species and the responsibility that death places upon such individuals. They reflect upon how practices of taxidermy and museum curatorship are essentially performative, designed to evoke a specific emotion or knowledge, rendering them hyper visible, while subsuming others. They discuss de-extinction projects such as the Jurassic World like attempts at reviving the woolly mammoth or even theoretical ideas of re-creating Neanderthals as proposed by George Church are all ways in which we attempt to revive prehistoric fantasies of the human – a fantasy nevertheless that is separate from the idea of the modern human. The conversation concludes with some reflections on interdisciplinary research and the responsibility that early career scholars are placed with when attempting to straddle multiple schools of thought.
Sarah’s personal website: https://www.sarahbezan.com/
Some of the references we cite during the conversation are listed below:
FFM #4: Fisheries consulting with Andrew Johnson
126: Common Boundaries: The Theory and Practice of Environmental Property with Michael Cox and colleagues
125: Boundary spanning with Stephen Posner
124: Social capital and community resilience with Daniel Aldrich
123: Co-production and creativity with Josie Chambers
FFM #3: Mapping coastal fisheries with Paige Roberts
122: Decolonizing Conservation with Mathew Mabele
FFM #2: Reality-based fisheries policy with Bubba Cook
121: An end-of-year pod with the editors of the International Journal of the Commons
120: Land use, agriculture and the anthropocene with Billie Turner II
119: The Duty to Consult with Victoria A. Bikowski
FFM #1: Ocean policy with Elizabeth Mendenhall
118: Using games to teach about collective action and the commons with Eric Klopfer
Insight Episode #54: Dan Holland
Insight Episode #53: Dan Brockington on the myth of fortress conservation
Science and Practice #13: Land Conservation with Peter Stein
117: Coral reefs and collaborative science with Joshua Cinner
Insight Episode #52: Erin O’Donnell on the rights of nature
Insight Episode #51: Kaitlin Cordes on coffee and commodity chains
116: Stewardship salons and social science in the US Forest Service with Lindsay Campbell
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