Posted in News on Feb 28, 2025.
The Multidisciplinary Environmental Studies in the Humanities (MESH) Symposium 2025, in association with the Sydney Environment Institute, takes storytelling as a site for the exploration, enactment, and unsettling of entangled human and nonhuman lives in the horizon of rapid environmental change.
Particular focus is the complexity and stakes of narrating multispecies and intergenerational histories and futures, spaces of (unevenly) shared living and dying, in a time of escalating extinctions, ecological unravelling and climatic disruption.
How might paying attention to the ways in which other species experience and craft their worlds open up new possibilities for co-existence in catastrophic times? And what kinds of future imaginaries and educational practices might be conducive to enhanced disaster preparedness, risk reduction and transformational resilience?
Bringing together perspectives and approaches from across the environmental humanities and social sciences, we examine the forces, commitments, and assumptions that shape such stories; the institutions and regimes of knowledge and expertise that underlie them; the media and genres through which such stories are told and circulated; the ideologies that articulate themselves through these accounts and their silences; as well as the responsibilities and limitation of telling others’ stories, human and not.
Keynote Speakers
Thom van Dooren
(Humboldt Research Prize Fellow of MESH, Professor of Environmental Humanities in School of Humanities, University of Sydney)
Alexa Weik von Mossner
(Associated Professor of American Studies at the University of Klagenfurt, and a Visiting Professor at the University of Freiburg)
More information will be published soon, so save the date and visit the MESH website for further announcements and updates.
Save the Date! July 11-12, 2025.
