10-11 July, Ecology, aesthetics and everyday cultures of modernity

As the Anthropocene charges ahead with its bewildering array of challenges, and numerous debates on ecology and the environment gather steam, it becomes impossible to think of our contemporary existence without paying attention to the presence and legacies of the natural world. This environmental heritage is not only configured ideologically and politically by human beings, but also habitually and aesthetically. Here, the concept of aesthetics operates much more capaciously and ubiquitously than only conveying ideas of taste or judgment, additionally signalling the sensorial, the embodied and the lived. Thinkers working across the disciplines of new materialism, anthropology, sociology, art history, cultural studies, geohumanities, craft studies and environmental humanities have been drawing attention to the dynamic intermingling of natural and cultural spheres, often through the lens of the aesthetic everyday.

This workshop brings together scholars from various areas of interest to deliberate the linkages between ecology, everydayness and aesthetics. Taking the modern period from the 19th century to the present as its broad temporal context, the event sheds a critical and creative light on the manifold ways in which the modern world experiments, challenges and accommodates socio-cultural expressions of ecological aesthetics.

 

 

 

You may also download the book of abstracts as well as the bionotes of speakers and respondents.

 

Please click here to view an online photographic exhibition by the workshop organiser Siddharth Pandey, titled ‘Highland Homes: Picturing Dwelling in the Western Himalayas.’ The exhibition is an affiliate event to the workshop, and can best be viewed on a laptop or desktop computer.