Cohabitability with More-than-Human Worlds

10 October, 2024, 4pm
room 205, Národní 3, Prague 1

Free entry

In October, Iwona Janicka, the CETE-P Research Team Leader, will have an inaugural public lecture titled "Ecological Grand Narratives: Cohabitability with More-than-Human Worlds," in which she will present her research themes. You can learn about Janicka's research plans through this interview. 

Abstract:

Much of today’s philosophical reflection on climate change happens through small-scale narratives, whether scientific, literary or artistic. Even though these are crucial, they often struggle with the bigger question at stake: how to reimagine humanity’s place on our planet? How to enact a collective political change to realize a life-affirming future on Earth? This lecture makes two, somewhat provocative, claims: first, that we need to reclaim grand narratives for our ecological futures despite metanarratives’ bad reputation and, second, that grand narratives are a form of a cosmological rebooting that we need to undergo in order to create a better collective future. They fundamentally redraw our ontological maps making us capable of creating more habitable worlds for humans and nonhumans alike. This lecture will sketch the key concepts and parameters of emerging new ecological grand narratives, placing a special attention on ecofeminist philosophy. It will demonstrate how ecofeminists allow us to rethink the position of a human being on the planet and to conceive a more-than-human cohabitability on a grander scale. The talk contends that we need more ecofeminist, and more diverse, grand narratives with which to re-imagine our collective destiny.