Tuesday 22 October 2024, 5pm - 7pm BST
Online and in person
Speaker: Saskia Cornes (Duke University)
For those wishing to attend online, please register via Eventbrite.
This is a hybrid event. Dr. Cornes will be speaking from Toronto. Those in Oxford, however, are warmly encouraged to participate together and in person at TORCH, where Barbara Stiubiener Abrahao, DPhil candidate in Anthropology will provide in-person comments on Cornes' talk.
Wine and snacks will be served.
Biography: Saskia Cornes is an Assistant Professor of Practice at the John Hope Franklin Humanities Institute at Duke University, and Program Director of Duke Campus Farm. Her teaching and research work together to rethink our relationship to food, and to the land and people that grow it. A Renaissance scholar by training, Cornes holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, where she focused on the culture of agriculture in 17th century England.
“Building Soil is Building Community: Working with More-than-Human World”
Dr Cornes will share her work teaching and learning with post-plantation soils in the American South. She posits a role for agricultural praxis within academic spaces in building both a renewed care for our remaining soils, and a haptic understanding of key theoretical concepts in the environmental humanities, including interspecies being, natureculture, and (ecological) care. Thinking with Maria Puig della Bellacasa and her “thick impure involvement” in the complex, underground worlds of soil, she claims campus farms and gardens as critical infrastructure for navigating outside of apocalyptic and utopian narratives of climate futures, and for building what the emerging field of soil humanities have called “soil publics.”
Environmental Humanities, TORCH Hubs
