The next Slow Seminar: Reading More-than-Human Worlds will be

Monday January 6 2020, 3.00-5.00 pm

Nobelparken (Jens Chr- Schous Vej 3), Building 1453, Room 415.

As usual there will be coffee, cake and a bit of fruit - courtesy of the Anthropology Research Program

The reading will be:

Hoover, Elizabeth. (2017). The River Is in Us: Fighting Toxics in a Mohawk Community. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota.

The book is available for online reading and partial download as PDF through the Royal Danish Liberary (when their technical issues with their new system are fixed).  It can be purchased as an eText book online.

Hoover’s ethnography, which was recently awarded the 2019 Julian Steward book award, explores how an Akwesasne community in upstate New York partnered with scientists and developed grassroots programs to fight the contamination of its lands and health. Hoover offers an important intervention in the environmental justice literature — forcing a shift from an equity framework to one that considers sovereignty.  Hoover blends her scholarship with a model for community engagement. Particularly in light of the repeated calls to “decolonize” methodology, Hoover actually shows what this would look like — beyond just calls to do so. 

At the last Slow Seminar, we discussed taking on a more ethnographic kind of text - after the more theoretically driven books of the last two Slow Seminars.  Hoover's book promises to deliver on this score, and particularly the effort (or promise) to "decolonize" ethnographic methods is worth exploring in detail.  "The River is in Us" might also allow us to think about how to locate the place of "toxins" in the debate about multi-species worlds that the Slow Seminars explore. 

Have a great holiday and a Happy New Year.

See you in the beginning of the next decade

Pierre, Michael, and Nils

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The Slow Seminar: Reading More-than-Human Worlds runs on a monthly basis and hopes to bring together old friends of AURA, new fans of CEH as well as students and staff interested in more-than-human worlds - not only at Aarhus University but also (through video-conferencing when possible) at UCSC, at Cape Town University, and elsewhere.