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:
078: Collaboration and sustainability transformation with Guido Caniglia
077: Hyper-managed systems with Derek Kauneckis
NI #5: Opening Pandora’s box with Malini Ranganathan
076: Greening better with Hillary Angelo
NI#4: Building interdisciplinary collaborations with Georgina Cundill Kemp and Praneeta Mudaliar
NI #3: Negotiating interdisciplinary environments with Nanda Wijermans
NI #2: Working with disciplinary traditions with Vanesa Castán Broto and Jennifer Vanos
Introducing: Navigating Interdisciplinarity #1 with Svenja Hippel and Juan Nicolas Hernandez
075: Scale mismatches and theory building with Graeme Cumming
074: Urban resilience and green infrastructure with Sara Meerow
073: Polycentricity with Tomas Koontz and Praneeta Mudaliar
072: Changes on the land with Eduardo Brondizio
Commoning #8: Water Commons with Ruth Meinzen Dick, Tomás Olivier, and Edella Schlager
071: Environmental communication with Bridie McGreavy
070: California water management plans with Nicola Ulibarri
069: Tree planting and panaceas with Forrest Fleischman
IJC #3: Shades of Conflict in Kyrgyzstan with Beril Ocaklı
Commoning #7: Polycentricity with Elke Kellner and Andreas Thiel
068: Unpacking human geography with Kimberley Peters
Commoning #6: The Urban Commons
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