ICS Seminar Series - Professor Deborah Bird Rose and Dr Thom van Dooren

Date: Thursday 24 April, 2014
Time: 11.30am - 1.30pm 
Venue: EB.2.21, UWS Parramatta South campus

Professor Deborah Bird Rose and Dr Thom van Dooren

Abstract

From flying foxes and monk seals to vultures and whooping cranes, over the past six years we have collaborated on a series of studies centred on endangered animal species. Our work has explored the ethical, political and broader philosophical dimensions of this ‘time of extinctions.’ Drawing ethnographic research with relevant individuals and communities into dialogue with biology, ecology and ethology we have explored what extinction means and how it is experienced inside entangled multispecies communities. This paper represents our first concrete effort to reflect on this body of research and the particularly ‘lively’ approach to understanding and writing into the world that we are developing. This is an approach grounded in at attentiveness to the evolving ethoi of diverse forms of human and nonhuman life; in an effort to explore and perhaps re-story the relationships that constitute and nourish these ways of life; and above all, in a commitment to the new forms of response-ability that curiosity about and with others can engender, even in dark times. 

Biographies  

Professor Deborah Bird Rose, FASSA, Environmental Humanities Program, University of New South Wales, investigates how we humans include and exclude other members of the family of life on earth in this era of extinctions. She is the author of numerous acclaimed books including, most recently, Wild Dog Dreaming: Love and Extinction, published by University of Virginia Press (2011). Her current research focuses on multisited, multispecies ethnographies in zones of extinction. With Dr Thom van Dooren she co-edits the new journal, Environmental Humanities. 

Thom van Dooren is a Senior Lecturer in Environmental Humanities at the University of New South Wales. His most recent research focuses on ethics and extinction and can be found in his forthcoming book Flight Ways: Life and Loss at the Edge of Extinction (Columbia University Press, May 2014). He is also co-editor of the international, open-access, journal Environmental Humanities.