Bartlett Research Conversations: The Age of Wildfire

This is a free event. No booking is required.

About

The wildfires currently burning across the planet are one of many indicators that we are now in a moment of crisis. Professors Lesley Lokko and Kathryn Yusoff explore how interdisciplinary research across cultures can create a new opportunity to re-think epistemological boundaries and categories at a time when the decolonisation of canon seems both inevitable and prescient. They consider how lives and life-forms – historic, contemporary and future – occupy different positions of cause and effect, agency and possibility.
 
Hosted as part of The Bartlett School of Architecture, PhD Research Conversations, this event will be chaired by Professor Jane Rendell. Light refreshments will be provided.
 
Funded by The Bartlett Ethics Commission.

Speakers

Lesley Lokko is an architect, academic and author of eleven best-selling novels. She is currently Head of School at the Graduate School of Architecture, University of Johannesburg, and will take up the position of Dean of Architecture at the Spitzer School of Architecture, City College of New York in December 2019. 

Lesley is the editor of White Papers, Black Marks: Race, Culture, Architecture (University of Minnesota Press, 2000); editor-in-chief of FOLIO: Journal of Contemporary African Architecture, and is on the editorial board of ARQ (Cambridge). In 2004, she made the successful transition from academia to novelist with the publication of her first novel, Sundowners (Orion 2004), a UK-Guardian top forty best-seller, which has since been followed by ten further best-sellers, all translated into fifteen languages. 
 
Kathryn Yusoff is Professor of Inhuman Geography at the School of Geography, Queen Mary University, London. Her research focuses on earth sciences, geophilosophy and political aesthetics in the Anthropocene, in conversation with black feminist theory. 

Kathryn’s recent publications include, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (University of Minnesota Press, 2018), a Special Issue on ‘Geosocial Formations’ (2017) for Theory, Culture and Society and ‘Geologic Realism’ (2019) in Social Text. She is currently finishing a book on ‘Geologic Life’ that addresses the geologies of race under colonialism and their afterlives in the grammars of materiality in the Anthropocene.

Access

All our event spaces are accessible. For any additional support or information, please email or call 020 3108 7337.

Image: California wildfires, 2019. ©Open source