Over the past two decades a large body of work in the humanities and social sciences has been combining philosophical insights from constructivism with a renewed focus on the materiality and agency of objects, things, systems, and nonhuman flows, substances and life-forms. This has been especially significant in the study of ecology, influencing the environmental humanities, environmental philosophy, and increasingly other social sciences including politics and international relations.

The purpose of this one-day workshop is knowledge exchange. It gathers together a small number of scholars in Australia working across a range of disciplines at the intersection of ecology and the new materialism. We aim to reflect on how new materialism assists (or holds back) our scholarly practice, and how it may be informing our thinking in regard to ethics, governance, narrative, and the intersection of social, cultural and natural spaces. We are interested in how such scholarly intersections can enhance awareness and reflexivity in relation to writing about—and intervening in practice—around ecological questions and processes at multiple scales and sites.

Speakers:

Dr. Umut Ozguc, UNSW Canberra

Dr. Nico Taylor, The University of Melbourne

Dr. Stefanie Fishel, The University of the Sunshine Coast

Dr. Astrida Neimanis, The University of Sydney

Dr. Christine Winter, The University of Sydney Professor Anthony Burke, UNSW Canberra

Dr. Anne O’Brien, Department of Environment & Energy

Dr. Marilu Melo, UNSW Sydney

Dr. Andrea Connor, The University of Western Sydney