Multispecies Worldbuilding by Elaine Gan, Tuesday 8 December, 8pm, 2020

Join us for a lecture by Professor Elaine Gan who will speak about current research and projects; the time of technologies, matter, memory in rice; her multispecies world-building podcast; and telling digital stories with chestnut trees. Gan will discuss how the research thinks through modes of onto-epistemology (which can be defined as, "the inseparability of ethics, ontology and epistemology when engaging in (scientific) knowledge production, with scientific practices, and with the world itself and its inhabitants – human and non-human beings that intra-actively co-constitute the world" (Barad, 2007, p. 90).

Elaine Gan's transdisciplinary practice combines methods from the arts, humanities, and social/natural sciences to engage more-than-human socialities. Through writing, drawing, media, and ethnography, Gan researches historical materialisms and temporal coordinations that emerge between organic, machinic, and cinematic assemblages. Gan teaches at New York University and leads the Multispecies Worldbuilding Lab, a podcast that raises critical awareness about climate change through interviews and sound compositions that listen for untranslatable voices of worlds otherwise. Gan is co-editor of Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene (2017) and is presently writing about rice, realism, and change. Gan lives in the grand old cities of New York and Manila.

This talk is hosted by i-DAT and the Department of Design at Linnaeus University, made possible by an internationalization grant to promote interdisciplinary research and pedagogy through multi-species relations. Part of a larger project organised by Dr. Helen Pritchard (i-DAT) and Cassandra Troyan entitled, "Multispecies Methods for Solidarity Stories — Using Multispecies Storytelling for Sustainable Change by Engaging with Decolonial and Anti-Racist Strategies" in which we seek to use interdisciplinary methods as part of a virtual lab, to allow writers, scholars, artists, designers, and theorists to engage and collectively build practices and ways of rethinking how we imagine our role as humans in connection with other species.