Diasporic Natures Conference
Attendance is free but registration is essential, please sign up here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1337177466799
In recent years, land has once again become a highly relevant topic in debates across the humanities and the social sciences. At the moment of climate crisis, how can it be determined what uses the land can be put to, and what counts as exploitative and extractive practice? At a moment of post- and decolonial reckoning, how can it be determined who owns, the land, and what rights ownership actually entails? Diasporic Natures addresses these issues through the perspective of mobility. What work does the concept of the land do in a world where people, migratory birds, ideas, material resources, rivers, and, the Earth itself are consistently on the move? How can one understand claims to locality, indigeneity and place-based knowledges through a discourse of diasporas? This international conference will debate these topics through bringing together interdisciplinary experts from science studies, anthropology, geography, sociology and history.
Programme:
Wednesday, 21 May
9.00 - 9.15: Introduction
9.15 - 11.30: Nature on the Move
Jenny Bulstrode, UCL STS, There are Spiders in the Sugar
Dani Inkpen, Mount Allison History, Footprints in the Snow: Thinking through the Yeti as Diasporic Nature
Sayana Namsaraeva, Cambridge SocAnth, Taming a 'Militant River': Buddhist, Imperial and Soviet modernization projects in harnessing supernatural forces of the Selenge River
Prerna Singh Bindra, Cambridge Geography, No passports required: Wildlife Without Borders
11.30 - 13.00: Lunch and Museum Visit
with Josh Nall, Director of the Whipple Museum
Please sign up for the tour! Spaces are limited.
13.00 - 14.45: Sciences and Collections on the Move
Rosanna Dent, Cambridge HPS, Archival Migrations: Anthropometric Images in Dispersion and Return
Liana Chua, Cambridge SocAnth, Reflections on the Skeat Collection at MAA
Projit Mukharji, Ashoka History, Exogenous Natures: Torrential Zoology and the Anthropologies of Mobility in Inter-war British India
14.45 - 15.15: Coffee
15.15 - 17.00: People on the Move
Austin Zeiderman, LSE Geography, Navigating Racial Ecologies: Labour, Mobility, and Freedom on Colombia’s Magdalena River
Zeina Al-Azmeh, Cambridge Sociology, Yaaser Al-Zaiat and Leen Kayali, Land in Exile: Displacement, Estrangement, and Finding Home in Nature
Irit Katz, Cambridge Architecture, Between Migration and Inhabitation: The External and Internal Spatial Movements of People on the Move
17.00 - 19.00: Book Launch: Edwin Rose, Reading the World
Location: Whipple Museum
To attend the book launch, sign up here:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/book-launch-edwin-rose-reading-the-world-2025-tickets-1323691529999
Thursday, 22 May
9.00 - 10.45: Travelers' Knowledges
Dora Vargha, Humboldt University History and Medical Humanities, Medics on the Move: Hungarian physicians, global solidarity projects and the limits of brotherhood
Staffan Müller-Wille, Cambridge HPS, The Prince of Lapland and the Prince of Botanists Tour Europe
Marton Farkas, Harvard - Paris Dauphine, Diasporic Grammar: Wolfgang Steinitz’s Runic Parallels
10.45 - 11.15 Coffee
11.15 - 13.00: Circulating Asia
Zoltan Biedermann, UCL Portuguese and Brazilian Studies, From Kynetic Power Projection to Global Hegemony: the Early Modern Origins of a Modern Problem
Sujit Sivasundaram, Cambridge History, Sand Engineering, City Making and the Dredging of the Indian Ocean
Zhiyu Chen, Cambridge HPS, Home Sweet Home: The Chinese Origins of the Batavian Sugar Boom, 1650–1750
13.00-14.00: Lunch
14.00 - 15.30: Roundtable around James Scott, In Praise of Floods
Maan Barua, Cambridge Geography
Mary Brazelton, Cambridge HPS
Ling Zhang, Cambridge FAMES
Simon Schaffer, Darwin College
16.00 - 18.00: Related HPS Department Seminar
Sadiah Qureshi, Manchester History, Pinosaur redux: Whose Lives Count in Histories of Extinction?
Location: Hopkinson Lecture Theatre, HPS Department
