"The Coming Catastrophe": Kathryn Yusoff on "The Inhumanities"

The coming catastrophe poses a challenge to thinking. Only recently have the interrelated events of human-induced climate change and mass extinction begun to unfold as a global media event of proportional magnitude. The proliferation of discourses around impending anthropogenic doom seems to have reached a virtual tipping point, from which there is no return to a “business as usual”-attitude. As the environmental conditions on which all human life depends change in ever more alarming rates, there seem to be few aspects of life, of policy making, and of theoretical work, that can remain unchanged. Scholars in the field of cultural and media theory, particularly in Weimar, are used to observing phenomena of change in terms of their historical becoming. While the identification of the historical causes (and causers) of anthropogenic change is decisive for the assessment of “what there is to be done”, the current situation is unique in that it also challenges habitual modes of thinking and forces us to train our eyes on the things to come.

As a part of this semesters "Bauhaus.Module", the lecture series "The Coming Catastrophe" invites everyone to Kathryn Yusoff's upcoming lecture titled "The Inhumanities".

Kathryn Yusoff is a professor of Inhuman Geography at the Queen Mary University of London. Her work is centred on dynamic earth events such as abrupt climate change, biodiversity loss and extinction. She is interested in how these “earth revolutions” impact social thought. Broadly, her work has focused on political aesthetics, social theory and abrupt environmental change.
“As the Anthropocene proclaims the language of species life – anthropos – through a universalist geologic commons, it neatly erases histories of racism that were incubated through the regulatory structure of geologic relations.” (Yusoff, 2018)

Topic: "The Inhumanities"
Date: 5th November 2019
Time: 19:00-20:30 Uhr
Location: R 015, Bauhausstraße 11