Talk: Astrida Neimanis
Under conditions of anthropogenic climate change, colonialism, militarism, and global capitalism, the oceans are seriously distressed. This includes populations of cetaceans worldwide, caught in fishing gear, led astray by acoustic pollution, or otherwise stranded outside of their natural habitats. Cetacean bodies, dying or already dead, wash up on human shores, and ask of us some kind of response. In some cases, dead animals will come into the care of scientists, who perform necropsy or virtopsy. Drawing on preliminary research undertaken with international artist Patty Chang and wildlife pathologist Aleksija Neimanis, this talk considers care for the dead in a time of endings. What can the dead teach us about their often inaccessible worlds, about scientific practice as ritual and spiritual connection, and about caretaking as proxy kinship? What might we learn from cetaceans about endings, at a time when so many beings are stranded, far from the times, places or conditions that they had come to know as home? What can we, the living, give back?
This event is part of the 2021 Critical Poetics Summer School, organised by the Critical Poetics Research Group at Nottingham Trent University in partnership with Nottingham Contemporary and Curated & Created at NTU.
About the event
Online. Free. Live Stream.
You can access this event through this webpage and on the Nottingham Contemporary YouTube channel.
There will be automated live captioning for this event.
A transcription will be available for download on this webpage afterwards.
We are unable to provide British Sign Language interpretation for this event.
A recording of the event will be available afterwards.
The duration of the event is 1.5 hours. A rest break is not included.
Astrida Neimanis is a cultural theorist working at the intersection of feminism and environmental change. Her research focuses on bodies, water and weather, and how they can help us reimagine justice, care, responsibility and relation in the time of climate catastrophe. Her most recent book, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (2017), is a call for humans to examine our relationships to oceans, watersheds and other aquatic life forms from the perspective of our own primarily watery bodies, and our ecological, poetic and political connections to other bodies of water. Often in collaboration with other researchers, writers, artists and scientists, Neimanis’ work features in academic publications, exhibitions and catalogues. She has recently joined UBC Okanagan on the unceded Syilx and Okanagan lands, in Kelowna, Canada, as an Associate Professor in Ecofeminism and Environmental Humanities.
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