Please don't forget to sign up to Valerie's part of the course too since it a joint class the https://base.uni-ak.ac.at/courses/2023S/S01496/

Apprenticeship to glaciology
What can we unlearn and learn from being with a glacier? We will consider the glacier in the theoretical framework of multispecies studies and feminist anthropology, as an ‘entity’ that has ‘distinctive ways of life, histories, and patterns of becoming and entanglement’ (van Dooren et al. 2016), but also as a ‘disturbance-based’ ecological site where various ‘world-making projects’, ‘lifeways and nonliving ways of being’, overlap (Tsing 2015).

The objective is to conduct ethnographic field research guided by myself (artist) and Lindsey Nicholson (glaciologist) to learn from the glacier in August 2023. This seminar aims to prepare all participants for the field trip. We will discuss the difficulties of knowing the glacier and interacting with it in a non-exploitive way, but nevertheless searching for being affected, recalibrating thought patterns and habitual reactions to achieve unconventional data collection.

Bibliography:

Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015)
van Dooren, Thom van, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster, ‘Multispecies Studies: Cultivating Arts of Attentiveness’, Environmental Humanities, 8.1 (2016), 1–23 <https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3527695>

An update and more information will follow soon!

Please note: I am waiting to hear from the department if we can use this seminar to re-start the BIPOC Artist Talks & Studio Visits seminar in a reduced format this semester already as was requested by you! If this is the case the glacier project outlined below will still take place in the same way (you will just get 2 ECTs for it officially rather than 4 ECTs) In any case, please don't forget to sign up to Valerie's part of the course too since it a joint class the https://base.uni-ak.ac.at/courses/2023S/S01496/

80% attendance and active participation