Unearthing Multispecies Intellectual History Workshop - Autumn 2023

  
A two-day interdisciplinary workshop
16 November 2023: Nobel Park, Aarhus University
17 November 2023: Moesgaard Campus, Aarhus University
Supported by Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society and the Aarhus University Research Foundation
 

The Workshop Aim

The aim of this closed workshop was to gather a group of historians, geographer, botanist, physicist, archaeologist, and religion specialist of various regions (currently include northeast and southeast Asia, Europe, Africa, Australia, Latin America) who are all interested in exploring what happens when epistemological recognition of multispecies entanglement entres the research and writing of intellectual history. While works of intellectual history have predominantly revolved around human-only narrative, there are historical human actors who perceive the nonhuman organisms as their crucial part of environment where ideas emerge. Michael Marder, for example, illuminated case studies in the field of European philosophy in The Philosopher’s Plant (2014). Similarly, there are increasing interests among contemporary scholars who study the planetary past to interrogate how human entanglement with the nonhuman organisms contributed to the rise of their epistemological experience in specific historical time and space. Emerging initiatives such as the Journal of the History of Ideas’ blog series on the Nonhuman Intellectual History (2022) are some of such initiatives.

Building on the workshop group’s diverse expertise in knowledge and sense-making rooted in numerous locals and various disciplines, we asked questions including and not limited to:

• What becomes at stake in the process of conceptualization and translation when present-day scholars as well as historical actors negotiate epistemologies and ontologies of state science and indigenous knowledge of multispecies habitat?
• What kind of novel methodologies do we arrived at in the above process?
• How can conscious engagement with sensory experience of ‘the environment’ in the present time open useful intellectual imagination for scholars to better understand ideas of the past situated in the past of the same local?
• How did the distinct characteristics of language(s) used in a specific local—how they capture the culture’s epistemology and ontology, for instance—impact historical actors’ experience of multispecies entanglement?
• How do we, as contemporary scholars negotiate the above in different disciplinary knowledge production that all carry historical past?
    

Participants

Mary Hilson (History, Aarhus University); Diego Molina (Geography, Royal Holloway, University of London); Georg Fischer (Brazilian Studies, Aarhus University); Jeremy Farr (Anthropology, CSIRO); Rithma Kreie EngelBreth Larsen (Intellectual History, Aarhus University); Aike Rots (Religion, University of Oslo); Sonia Contera (Physics, University of Oxford); Nick Shepherd (Archaeology & Heritage, Aarhus University); Ryan Mealiffe (History, University of Oxford); Hatib Kadir (Global Studies, Aarhus University); Eiko Honda (Japan Studies, Aarhus University)