Käte Hamburger Lecture with Fellow Sana Chavoshian
WHEN
WHERE
Innovation Center, Campus Saarbrücken, Building A2 1, seminar room 3.05.1
LANGUAGE
ENGLISH
PROGRAMME
The Käte Hamburger Centre for Cultural Practices of Reparation (CURE) and the CEUS | Cluster for European Studies warmly invite you to attend the next Käte Hamburger Lecture at Saarland University. This series allows fellows from the centre to share their latest research perspectives on cultural practices of reparation. After the lectures, audience members will have the opportunity to engage with key topics in more detail during a public discussion session.
Sana Chavoshian: A Mesopotamian Re(s)pair: Dusty Experimentations in the Marshes Amidst War and Sanctions
What is the role of photosynthesis in native and indigenous reparational politics? How does dust in the wind unsettle the nature/culture binary and underpin the emergence of new atmospheric collectives? In her presentation, Sana Chavoshian places this dust-wind at the centre of an ethnographic engagement with multi-species encounters and affective resonances that shape a green future in the dried-out beds of the Mesopotamian Marshes located in the war-torn borderlands of Iran and Iraq. While reviving the marshlands was an internationally funded project after the fall of the Ba’th regime in Iraq, supported by several European initiatives, the conservation of the Iranian side of the marshlands is faced with restraining economic sanctions. Chavoshian’s research shows how the oil-rich marshlands have become a laboratory for ecological experiments shaped by the devastation of war and the pressures of sanctions. In these zones, engineers, scientists, environmental activists, farmers, and traders cooperate and compete to control the air. Drawing on the processes of respiration and photosynthesis, Chavoshian explores the contours of greening from plantation to rehabilitation and revival as they elude particular habitual knowledge and sensory practices. Social life here grows in the fractures and wreckage of structurally violent worlds, where militarised biospheres produce far-reaching ecological effects.
The Käte Hamburger Lectures provide deeper insight into the centre’s ongoing research, convey these ideas to the wider university community, and invite the public to engage in meaningful discussions on cultural practices of reparation.
Registration for online participation: kontakt@khk.uni-saarland.de
