All School Seminar:

Catalog description

We will return to and consider together these terms and others as ways of locating or "framing" socio-ecological life. What are the implications of understanding socio-ecological life in these terms (and/or others)? This is a broad topic that has been addressed by many scholars. This class will not offer a comprehensive history, but rather a way of understanding the specificity of the ways some contemporary political and aesthetic practices have reworked or departed from these terms. So we will review some of the history of the enclosure and appropriation of communal space made possible by the imposition of the economic framework of private property. We will also review some of the history of the partitioning, political administration and policing of space by states through the emergence of international law. And we will consider some attempts to revisit these histories in Western science and philosophy. At the same time, we will look at very different ways of understanding the ground or space or material contours of socio-ecological life that are fundamental to communal, indigenous, pastoral, and exilic/diasporic social formations, among others. Finally, will look at documentation of some recent projects—political and aesthetic—that maneuver, elude, or make use of the contradictions in these terms, or that attempt to sustain or imagine and activate other forms of socio-ecological life without them. We will consider the work of writers like: John Locke, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Samera Esmeir; Wen Liu; Anooradha Siddiqi; Renisa Mawani; Isaac Newton; John Bell; Karen Barad and Nathaniel Mackey. We will also consider work by groups and artists such as: The Freedom Farm Cooperative, The EZLN and Zapatista Caracoles; Sandi Hilal and Alessandro Petti; Jorge Furtado; Hélio Oiticica; Denise Ferreira da Silva and Arjuna Neuman; Beatriz…