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:
IJC#6: Social-ecological fit in Wisconsin lakes with Dane Whittaker
Insight Episode #39: Kimberley Peters on the changing governance of the oceans
099: The politics of environmental access and risk with Jesse Ribot
Science and Practice #3 Stories of a chronicler with Arati Kumar Rao
Science and Practice #2: Applying behavior science for conservation with Erik Thulin
Insight Episode #38: Emily Boyd on the challenges and benefits of interdisciplinary training and sustainability science
098: A biography of Water with Giulio Boccaletti
097: People, Science and Cross-Disciplinary Research in Conservation with Ghazala Shahabuddin
096: Institutional diversity and the evolution of water markets with Dustin Garrick
095: Agrarian reforms and the property rights gap with Mike Albertus
Insight Episode #37: Henrik Österblom on unsustainable science
Science and Practice #1: Conservation and social science with Nathan Bennett
Insight Episode #36: Brent Loken on how food production and animal conservation are related
094: Protected areas with Dan Brockington
093: Complexity and the Subaks of Bali with Steve Lansing
Insight Episode #35: Jessica Gephart on seafood trade discrepancies
092: Sustainable development with Kaitlin Cordes
091: Marine conservation in Haiti with Jean Wiener
IJC#5: Guiding would-be institutional crafters with Jim Sinner
Insight #34: Beatriz Dos Santos Dias on modeling and historical ecology
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