Deep Sustainability: Contemporary Debates on Animism and the Decolonization of Science
A lecture by Florentine Maier as part of the Lectures for Future series, hosted by Kunst und Bild | Kontextuelle Malerei und Kunst und Bild | Zeichnung.
Numerous researchers from the fields of ecology, social sciences, economics, and the humanities identify the dualism between nature and culture, with its view of sustainability exclusively from the perspective of human benefit, as the root cause of the multiple crises of the anthropocene.
Current research findings from disciplines as diverse as animal and plant ethology and anthropology open up alternative perspectives on the relationship between humans and the other-than human world. At the same time, social and economic sciences are calling for the decolonization of knowledge and research methods. Dominant Western knowledge systems are to be questioned and space created for plural perspectives, especially indigenous knowledge systems based on a relational worldview in accord with other-than-human forms of life.
This lecture will trace the central lines of these current debates and develop a proposal for a fruitful coexistence of different modes of knowing.
The lecture will be in English.