Event details

Speaker:
Birgit Schneider (University of Potsdam)

About the workshop:

We invite you to join us for a workshop exploring the imaginaries of future landscapes, focusing on the intersection of technology, nature, and energy in contemporary fictional and urban planning settings. If anthropologist Amitav Ghosh (2016) is correct in affirming that the climate crisis is also a crisis of culture, and thus of imagination, it is central to examine how the relationship between nature and built environments has been conceived in the face of anthropogenic climate change. The session will critically explore the concept of "technofix”, which refers to the reliance on technology to solve complex environmental and societal problems, often without addressing the underlying causes. Alternatively, we seek to explore with a balanced, critical view, what may be technology's role in shaping the future through tentative re-entanglements of the organic and the inorganic. Participants will discuss the forms and the design of imagined future technospheres, exploring actual energy landscapes and geoengineering plans, such as large-scale carbon capture projects and solar radiation management. The discussion will include recent European legislative efforts to create spaces that allow nature to thrive, exploring the ideas of renaturing and renaturalising anthropogenic environments.

What: Short impulse talk by Prof. Dr Birgit Schneider (University of Potsdam), followed by a World Café dynamics to collectively discuss images of the future and imagine future technospheres.

Registration: The number of participants is limited, and registrations will open soon. If you're interested in the workshop, you are encouraged to contact Eduardo Luersen (eduardo.luersen@uni-konstanz.de) in advance.