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:
090: Histories of disease and its links to urban planning with Aditya Ramesh
089: Biocultural relationships with Noa Kekuewa Lincoln
IJC #4: Historical commons in the Low Lands with Maurice Paulissen
088: Institutional and behavioral economics with Achim Schlüter
Insight #33: Irina Rafliana on the importance of language
087: Complexity and the commons with Simon Levin
Insight #32: Helen Rozwadowski on the ocean as a mirror
086: Environmental history with Mahesh Rangarajan
Insight #31: Chris Weible on the value of studying the policy process
085: Vulnerability and adaptation with Hallie Eakin
Insight #30: Cassandra Brooks on marine protected areas and international geopolitics in Antarctica
084: Seeing like a Pastoralist with Mark Moritz
Insight #29: Emma McKinley on the Marine Social Science Network
083: Participatory governance with Daniel Decaro
Commoning # 9: That reminds me
82: Community-based conservation in north-east India with Aparajita Datta
81: Ecosystem services with Nejem Raheem
NI#6: Enabling infrastructures of care in academia with Ramya Ravi
80: Analytics of the Commons with Arun Agrawal
79: Fisheries catch shares and indigenous governance with Courtney Carothers
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