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:
Commoning #5: Commoning the Anthropocene
067: Use as Stewardship with Natalie Ban
IJC #2: Overlapping resources and mismatched property rights with Karen Bradshaw
066: Ecosystem services and community-based research with Marta Berbes
Insight #28: Anna-Katharina Hornidge on social constructivism
065: Food systems, communicating science and taking care of yourself in academia with Luis Alexis Rodríguez-Cruz
064: Where does wild catch end and aquaculture begin? with Josh Stoll
Insight #27: Kennith Wallen on science communities
Commoning #4: Fisheries and aquaculture commons with Erik Thulin, Jessica Blythe and Caroline Ferguson
IJC #1: Traditions and Trends in the Study of the Commons, Revisited
Commoning # 3: The Commons in Space with Alice Gorman and Akhil Rao
063: Social network analysis with Ramiro Berardo
062: Ocean governance, unsustainable science and the Stockholm Resilience Center with Henrik Österblom
Insight #26: Emily Darling and Georgina Gurney on inclusion and transdisciplinarity
Insight #25: Ina Möller on constructing governance objects
061: Theory of science and transdisciplinarity with Joerg Niewoehner
060: Sustainability science education and research with Emily Boyd
059: Food and conservation with Brent Loken
Insight #24: Sonya Graci on sustainable hotel certifications
058: Science cooperation and knowledge sociology with Anna-Katharina Hornidge
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