Time: 4:30pmVenue: David Sizer Lecture Theatre, Bancroft Building, Mile End Campus, Queen Mary University of London
Professor Myra Hird is the recipient of a Visiting Leverhume Professorship and will be talking about her recent work in waste studies on the theme of "Inhuman Epistemologies". She will be joined by a panel, including Professor Nigel Clark (Lancaster University), Beth Greenhough (Queen Mary University of London) and Dr Jamie Lorimer (Oxford University). The event will be chaired by Dr Kathryn Yusoff (Queen Mary University of London).This lecture considers possibilities for, and challenges of, social scientific engagements with inhuman materialities. Refracting her own evolving research methodology through an interdisciplinary lens focused on the inhuman, relationality, and materiality, Professor Hird will tease out and question the ontological and epistemological foundations upon which her engagement with the pressing environmental concern of waste draws sustenance. She will then consider what inhuman relations she navigates in laboratories (chemistry, biology, geoscience, and civil engineering), field sites (dumps, incinerators, waste lagoons, landfills), texts, and other sites, and what implications these relational configurations have for learning how to inherit and inhabit our ecological lifeworld.Myra J. Hird is Professor and Queen's National Scholar in the School of Environmental Studies, Queen’s University, Canada (www.myrahird.com). Professor Hird is Director of Canada’s Waste Flow, an interdisciplinary research project focused on waste as a global scientific-technical and socio-ethical issue (www.wasteflow.ca), and Director of the genera Research Group (gRG), an interdisciplinary research network of collaborating natural, social, and humanities scholars focused on the topic of waste. Hird has published eight books and over fifty articles and book chapters on a diversity of topics relating to science studies.Nigel Clark is Chair of Social Sustainability at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University. He is co-editor of Material Geographies (2008), Extending Hospitality (2009) and Atlas (2012) and author of Inhuman Nature: Sociable Life on a Dynamic Planet (2011). He is currently working on ideas about geologic politics, planetary capitalism and geo-social formations.Beth Greenhough is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography at QMUL. Her research draws on a combination of political-economic geography, cultural geography and science studies to explore the social implications of scientific innovations in the areas of health, biomedicine and the environment. Her current research interests include geographies of health and the biosciences, the global circulation of bodily commodities, the spaces of medical research, public health practice and environment-society relations.Jamie Lorimer is a lecturer in the geography department at the University of Oxford. His research, teaching and writing explores environmentalism after the Anthropocene. Recent foci include rewilding, the microbiome, elephants and animals on film.Kathryn Yusoff is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Geography at QMUL. Her work focuses on political aesthetics and environmental change. She is currently working on questions of the Anthropocene and a book about "Geologic Life".