Extraction and Its Ecologies: Inhabiting Fragmented Landscapes of Health
Fragments of the Forest Workshop
03.04.2024 – 06.04.2024
Location: Evangelische Akademie Tutzing, Schloss-Str. 2+4, 82327 Tutzing, Germany
Organizers: Gregg Mitman and Emmanuelle Roth
The workshop is sponsored by the European Research Council (ERC) Advanced Grant, “Fragments of the Forest” and the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society (RCC).
How do we account for the massive disruption and reordering of lived landscapes wrought by extractive industries around the world? International mining consortiums seize land and pollute water and soils to find raw materials, while replanting forests for their environmental mitigation programs. Monoculture plantations drive the extinction of plants and animals while promising free care to the people that work in their enclave. Surveillance programs take blood samples from humans and animals in disease hotspots while running education sessions about the dangers of bushmeat hunting. Habitats are fragmented, profits are stolen, the health of all things is imperiled—is it so?
Ecological understandings of health have come (back) to the forefront since the COVID-19 pandemic. After decades of work on global health, health must now be addressed as “One,” as “Planetary,” as “Eco.” But what does it mean to think about health across issues as diverse as environmental pollution, species extinction, zoonotic disease outbreaks, and land desecration? In attending not to universalities, but to specific ecologies of extraction—from forests to plantations, from mines to biomedical laboratories—what different alliances among living and non-living things, epistemologies, materialities, toxicities, temporal and spatial scales, and affects and aesthetics come into view?
For the full schedule of the workshop, please download the PDF linked below.
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- Extraction and Its Ecologies Workshop Schedule (140 KByte)