Close
How to Talk About the Weather - The Bartlett International Lectures
17 November 2021, 6:00 pm–7:30 pm
This event is free.
Event Information
Open to
- All
Availability
- Yes
Cost
- Free
Organiser
-
The Bartlett School of Architecture
About
Streamed live on The Bartlett School of Architecture's YouTube channel, this event will be a discussion with speaker Astrida Neimanis, The University of British Columbia Okanagan.
This event forms part of The Bartlett International Lectures Autumn 2021.
This autumn and spring, each of the International Lectures will be curated by one of the school's programmes to inspire, invent, imagine, and provoke. This event is curated by Architectural History MA.
Abstract
How to Talk About the Weather
Once upon a time, talking about the weather was a neutral way to pass the time while sharing space with strangers at a bus stop or in the grocery queue. Things have changed. Not only has weather—and climate change specifically—become a highly politicised topic, but opportunities for chit-chat with people who are not our friends, family or colleagues are also shrinking. Exacerbated by social isolation in the age of COVID-19, one might worry about the atrophying of our social muscles, particularly when it comes to talking across difference. Infrastructures for climate change mitigation most often reference seawalls, solar arrays, and better HVAC, but building, repairing and maintaining social infrastructures are also crucial tasks. Drawing on the work of The Weathering Collective (2015-present), this lecture explores notions of stranger intimacy (Berlant 2016), the ecology of cruising (Ensor 2017), and feminist infrastructures for better weathering (Hamilton, Zettel and Neimanis, 2021) as urgent aspects of world-building in a time of climate catastrophe.
Speaker biography
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', 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, Astrida’s work features in academic publications, gallery exhibitions and catalogues, and as part of public workshops and events. Astrida recently joined UBC Okanagan on the unceded Syilx and Okanagan lands, in Kelowna, BC, Canada, as an Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Ecofeminism and Environmental Humanities.