The Insect Entanglements workshop takes place this Friday 19 June. The workshop is organised by CEH members Eline Tabak and Maia Dixon, and will be hosted via Zoom. You can sign up to attend the workshop through the link in Eline’s tweet below.
https://twitter.com/elinetabak/status/1265260368458285056
The full conference programme is available to download here, and to whet your appetite we’ve reproduced the introduction from the CfP below.
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Insect Entanglements
Insects are everywhere, our (human) lives entangled with them, and yet we know surprisingly little about them. In the introduction to Insectopedia, Hugh Raffles writes the following:
For as long as we’ve been here, they’ve been here too. Wherever we’ve travelled, they’ve been there too. And still, we don’t know them very well, not even the ones we’re closest to, the ones that eat our food and share our beds. Who are they, these beings so different from us and from each other? What do they do? What worlds do they make? What do we make of them? How do we live with them? How could we live with them differently? (3)
These critters have been around longer than we have. They come in so many configurations — different shapes, sizes, and ecological functions. We encounter insects as part of a collective, or as lone individuals. Yet, there is still much to learn about them and, considering their newly realised precarity, the ways in which we can live affirmatively with them.
In the words of Deborah Bird Rose (2013): ‘We live in a time of almost unfathomable loss, and we are called to respond.’ How does one respond to the insect—whether as a taxonomic rank, a certain species, a figure or story, or even the single individual that buzzes and keeps you up at night. What shapes do insect entanglements take in a time of significant biomass and diversity loss, dominated by several flagship species? After all, as Eva Haifa Giraud argues (2019), with (any) politics of entanglement also comes a reality of exclusion, asking us to pay careful attention to those ‘frictions, foreclosures, and exclusions that play a constitutive role in the composition of lived reality.’ These are, of course, only suggestions for topics that are certainly not meant to limit presenters’ areas of research and creativity.
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Giraud, E.H. 2019. What Comes after Entanglement? Activism, Anthropocentrism, and an Ethics of Exclusion. Duke University Press.
Raffles, H. 2011. Insectopedia. Random House.
Rose, D.B. 2013. In the shadow of all this death. In J. Johnston and F. Probyn-Rapsey, eds. Animal Death. Sydney University Press.