Terrestrial Politics in Uncertain Times
ICS Conference 2023
25-27 October
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Information for attendees
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About the event
We invite you to join the Institute for Culture and Society, alongside prominent scholars, practitioners, and artists, for a collective three-day event (25–27 October 2023) to address the unprecedented yet interlinked challenges of our times.
The climate crisis breaches basic categories of thought. The primary coordinates – society and culture, environment and economy, human and non-human – no longer orient the composition of the world amid profound disruption and transition. Despair and horror punctuate the emergence of what Bruno Latour termed ‘the new climate regime’. How to respond? How do we come down to earth where ‘ecological’ concerns coincide with ‘social’ concerns for more liveable futures?
Recent studies indicate four in five people have been directly impacted by climate change related natural disasters in Australia. What sort of disciplinary resources do we have available to address and make intelligible the horror and devastation of species depletion and environmental degradation? In the realm of the formal production of knowledge, the divide between STEM disciplines and the humanities and social sciences is itself a product of settler colonialism and industrialization. Crafting trajectories beyond this divide also means encountering cultures and cosmologies where such epistemic dislocations of this kind were never operative in the first place.
The collective work of cultivating a ‘difference which makes a difference’ (Bateson) entails producing shared matters of concern. The integrity of soils, qualities of atmosphere and ocean, the durable futures of material and energetic infrastructures – these are among the cast of elements and conditions key to questions of futurity that bind the current conjuncture with generations to come.
The Institute for Culture and Society stages this event to explore how we can engage analytically and politically with ‘common cosmological concerns’ (Latour). Leading scholars, practitioners, and artists join this collective experiment in devising new concepts to address the unprecedented challenges that demand attention.
Recordings
Conference Highlights
Keynote Talks
Dipesh Charakabarty
Sophie Chao
Stephen Muecke
Day 1: After the Fire, Beyond the Waters - Thriving Future
Auntie Sharon Riley
David Conyers
Day 3: Energy // Transition
Darren Sharp
Marie Bargh
Q&A Panel Darren Sharp, Maria Bargh, Declan Kuch
Program
Day One| 25 October | Lithgow, NSW
10:00am - 12:30pm | After the Fire, Beyond the Waters - Thriving Future | Auntie Sharon Riley, Jason De Santolo, David Conyers | Chair: Stephen Healy
1:30pm - 3:30pm | Lithgow Regional Futures - Workshopping transition | Louise Crabtree-Hayes, Neil Perry, Michelle Maloney | Chair: Cameron Tonkinwise
Day Two| 26 October | Powerhouse Museum, Ultimo
10:00 am - 12:30pm | Postgraduate Masterclass with Maria Bargh and Kelly Dombroski | Masterclass with postgraduate students around key issues on terrestrial politics and higher degrees research.
3:30pm - 5:30pm | Keynote: After Latour, Legacies and Trajectories | Stephen Muecke, Sophie Chao, Dipesh Chakrabarty(by video) | Chair: Gay Hawkins
5:30pm - 6:30pm | Reception
Day Three| 27 October | Powerhouse Museum, Ultimo
Matter of Concern, Elemental Politics
9:00am - 10:30am | Energy // Transition | Maria Bargh, Darren Sharp | Chair: Declan Kuch
11:00am - 12:30pm | Earth // Off-Earth Politics | Screening of The Archival Futures Collective’s Outer Space Film Quartet and Q&A with filmmakers Ceridwen Dovey and Rowena Potts in dialogue with Juan Francisco Salazar | Chair: Deborah Lawler-Dormer
1:30pm - 3:30pm | Care // Health | Emma Power, Miriam Williams, Kelly Dombroski | Chair: Heather Horst
