Event

← Back to calendar

Liana Chua: What does care take? Saving and sequestering in an age of mass extinction

Date
Apr 5 , 2024 

Social and Cul­tur­al Anthro­pol­o­gy Lab (SCALA) sem­i­nar series in the Raven­na cam­pus of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bologna


„What does care take? Sav­ing and seques­ter­ing in an age of mass extinction”

Liana Chua (Tunku Abdul Rah­man Uni­ver­si­ty Asso­ciate Pro­fes­sor in Malay World Stud­ies, Depart­ment of Social Anthro­pol­o­gy, Uni­ver­si­ty of Cam­bridge) with the GLO and POKOK project teams
Fri­day 5th April 2024
12:00–13:00 (CET)
On Zoom (link below)

Liana Chua SCALA Sem­i­nar 5th April 2024

What does it take to care about and for (non)human oth­ers at a time of sus­tained envi­ron­men­tal cri­sis? What does it mean to be a care-tak­er? And what do pro­grammes and prac­tices of care take – as in demand, claim, or extract? I explore these ques­tions by draw­ing on my col­leagues’ and my recent mul­ti-sit­ed research on the glob­al nexus of orang­utan con­ser­va­tion – a sprawl­ing mul­ti­species field teem­ing with con­cerns over who/what cares for orang­utans, and how. Tak­ing a crit­i­cal rela­tion­al view of how mul­ti­ple forms and reg­is­ters of cross-species care play out – par­tic­u­lar­ly in the fraught fron­tier zones of rur­al Bor­neo – I fore­ground the con­tin­ued impor­tance of careful(l) ethno­graph­ic engage­ment in nuanc­ing and ‘unset­tling’ (Mur­phy 2015) hier­ar­chies of care in both con­ser­va­tion and academia.

Liana Chua (she/her) is a social anthro­pol­o­gist with long-term research inter­ests in eth­nic pol­i­tics, Chris­tian­i­ty, devel­op­ment, envi­ron­men­tal trans­for­ma­tions and more-than-human land­scapes in Bor­neo. She cur­rent­ly works on the social, polit­i­cal and aes­thet­ic dimen­sions of the glob­al nexus of orang­utan con­ser­va­tion in the age of ‘the Anthro­pocene’, notably through the Glob­al Lives of the Orang­utan project (ERC 2018–23). Her pub­li­ca­tions include The Chris­tian­i­ty of Cul­ture: Con­ver­sion, Eth­nic Cit­i­zen­ship, and the Mat­ter of Reli­gion in Malaysian Bor­neo (2012) and sev­er­al co-edit­ed col­lec­tions, includ­ing Who are “We”? Reimag­in­ing Alter­i­ty and Affin­i­ty in Anthro­pol­o­gy (with Nayani­ka Math­ur, 2018), and “Wit­ness­ing : Truths, Tech­nolo­gies, Trans­for­ma­tions” (with Omri Grin­berg, Cam­bridge Jour­nal of Anthro­pol­o­gy, 2021).

Zoom reg­is­tra­tion link: https://unibo.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZMrf-CsqDsvGdLrDqOl7V4Q_9zaL6PQZfv0