AMplify - Conversations at the Australian Museum

What are plants? What can they do? And how can we bring a feminist approach to our relationships to them?Listen as Catriona Sandilands explores our relationships with botanical others, including shifting understandings of what plants are and what they can do. In this time of accelerating environmental and social change, Sandilands asks: what might we learn, what new approaches and possibilities might become possible, through a feminist botany?Recorded 12th July 2018.HumanNature is a landmark lecture series at the Australian Museum that offers a range of talks by leading international scholars in the Environmental Humanities. It will draw on insights from history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and related disciplines and explore the important roles that the humanities can play in addressing some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our day.This Lecture Series is jointly funded and coordinated by the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum.

This event took place in the Hallstrom Theatre, Australian Museum, Sydney, on 12 July 2018.

Join Catriona Sandilands (York University, Toronto) on this adventure into the complex and fascinating worlds of plants.

Sandilands is particularly interested in people’s relationships with botanical others, including shifting understandings of what plants are and what they can do. In this time of accelerating environmental and social change—which is also a time of widening inequalities—Sandilands draws the insights of feminist thought and practice into this conversation to ask: what might we learn, what new approaches and possibilities might become possible, through a feminist botany?

For more than two decades Oron Catts (Director of SymbioticA, an artistic laboratory at the University of Western Australia) has been at the forefront of experiments in the manipulation of fragments of living systems for artistic ends. This lecture explores the role that art has played and continues to play in shifting understandings of what life is and does. Recorded 24th May 2018. HumanNature is a landmark lecture series at the Australian Museum that offers a range of talks by leading international scholars in the Environmental Humanities. It will draw on insights from history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and related disciplines and explore the important roles that the humanities can play in addressing some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our day.This Lecture Series is jointly funded and coordinated by the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum.

Live at the AM: HumanNature Lecture Series, Oron Catts by Australian Museum

Live at the AM: 2018 Eureka Prizes Launch by Australian Museum

Hear Mike Hulme, University of Cambridge, explores some of the many fascinating ways climates are historicized, known, changed, lived with, blamed, feared, represented, predicted, governed and, at least putatively, re-designed. Recorded 23rd April 2018.HumanNature is a landmark lecture series at the Australian Museum that offers a range of talks by leading international scholars in the Environmental Humanities. It will draw on insights from history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and related disciplines and explore the important roles that the humanities can play in addressing some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our day. This Lecture Series is jointly funded and coordinated by the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum.

This lecture took place at the Australian Museum on 23 April 2018.

How do different human cultures give shape and meaning to the idea of climate? Join Mike Hulme, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Cambridge, as he explores some of the many fascinating ways climates are historicized, known, changed, lived with, blamed, feared, represented, predicted, governed and, at least putatively, re-designed.

Understanding these complex climate cultures is, Hulme contends, essential to any adequate understanding of the politics of climate change.

HumanNature: The Humanities in a Time of Environmental Crisis lecture series investigates the increasing impact of crises such as climate change, mass species extinction, Indigenous dispossession, racism and the excesses of capitalism, and determine how to respond to the greatest global emergencies of our time.

Hear from Deborah Bird Rose from the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW, as she examines the intersection of humans, animals and landscape, and the fragility of their relationships in the face of environmental crisis and loss.

Recorded 8th March 2018.

HumanNature is a landmark lecture series at the Australian Museum that offers a range of talks by leading international scholars in the Environmental Humanities. It will draw on insights from history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and related disciplines and explore the important roles that the humanities can play in addressing some of the most pressing environmental challenges of our day.

This Lecture Series is jointly funded and coordinated by the University of New South Wales, Macquarie University, Western Sydney University, the University of Sydney and the Australian Museum.

How does giving and receiving take form in, and give form to, our living world? While most discussions of gift-giving focus on exchanges between humans, Deborah Bird Rose is also captivated by the many forms of connectivity and flow that are integral to ecological processes.

Drawing on her research with Indigenous people, Rose asks: what might it mean to understand gift giving as central to, and moving across and between, many systems of life; and what might it require of us, in this time of extinctions in which countless living forms and their possibilities for giving and receiving with others, are slipping away?

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Deborah Bird Rose came to Australia in 1980 to live with Aboriginal people in the hopes of learning about their relationships with country and other species. Instead of going home to the USA, she stayed to work with people on land claims and other decolonising projects. Her continuing commitment to social and ecological justice focuses on multispecies communities in this time of escalating violence and amidst the peril of extinction.

A prize-winning author, and co-founder of the international journal Environmental Humanities, Deborah is an Adjunct Professor in Environmental Humanities at UNSW. Her most recent books are Extinction Studies: Stories of Time, Death and Generations, co-edited with Thom van Dooren and Matthew Chrulew (2017), Manifesto for Living in the Anthropocene, co-edited with Katherine Gibson and Ruth Fincher (2015), and Wild Dog Dreaming (2011).

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What is the HumanNature Series?

In this landmark series of talks, we are proud to host a stellar line up of leading Australian and international scholars.

They will share with us their insights from history, literature, philosophy, anthropology and art to examine the significant interplay between the humanities and the environmental crisis we face today, including climate change, biodiversity loss and a wide range of other issues.

The icy expanses of Antarctica were an unforgiving frontier for early explorers. Among them was Sir Douglas Mawson, who faced frostbite, exposure and exhaustion in his journeys across the frozen continent. He passed some of his time writing love letters to his wife back home. But how did he stumble on a meteorite in all that ice and snow?

Behind every object is a story – join Charles Wooley and Kim McKay as they reveal some of the Treasures at the Australian Museum.