Start
2 Dec 2025 @ 5:00:pm
Finish
2 Dec 2025 @ 7:00:pm
Location
Auerbach Library, MESH, Köln
Event Link
Event Details
This series of events, taking place on December 2 & December 9 & December 17, 2025 | 17:00 – 19:00, is co-organized by Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH) and the HESCOR research hub on the coupled evolution of human and Earth systems.
The aim is to explore interdisciplinary avenues from within the humanities toward a “humanities-induced” Earth System Science (Simon and Thomas, 2022) – i.e., a perspective on the functioning of the planetary system that takes into account observations and insights from the humanities, including on the role of human agency and multispecies relations.
In the environmental humanities in particular, the deepening planetary polycrisis of the 21st century has been diagnosed as indexing a crisis of human planetary habitation – the ways, that is, in which the majority of humans have come to inhabit and relate to their environments, and how dominant modalities of habitation (fail to) acknowledge the presence and needs of other beings. The polycrisis, in this view, pertains to how many of us have come to live together with other animals, plants, fungi, and microbes, and how modern lifeways have tended to undercut the conditions of planetary habitability for an increasing number of nonhumans.
The evolution of life on Earth (biosphere) is critically propelled by the making and unmaking of patterns of habitability, clearing the path for particular multispecies constellations while disrupting or undoing others. Conditions of habitability are not simply given, however, they are co-made by humans and nonhumans, affecting, and playing out on, different temporal and spatial scales. Habitability is also shaped by how humans and nonhumans arrange themselves within broader multispecies neighborhoods, and how these are negotiated in the first place. Discussing planetary habitability and multispecies coexistence can therefore not be separated from a situated politics of more-than-human life.
The HESCOR MESH Vision Forum Session explores these themes through the lens of planetary philosophy, Anthropocene history, and multispecies archaeology.
Dr Iwona Janicka, Dr Zoltán B. Simon, Prof Dr Hannah Chazin
