Page Comparison

Morning all all 🌳 The UoY Learning and Teaching fund scheme is now open for applications, and there's plenty of seminars and events to keep you busy

Chloe Mitchell - PA to HoD

Not-Just-Human Cultural Restoration: Opportunities for a Law Beyond the Human

Date / time: Monday 27 Nov 2023 / 13:00

In person venue: Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity, Top floor, Berrick Saul Building, Campus West

• Click here to join the LCAB talk on Zoom
• Meeting ID: 961 6675 0675 
• Passcode: 641881

Speakers: Joshua Sterlin - McGill University / Emille Boulot - University of Tasmania

Blurb: Contemporary legal governance is built upon an ontological bifurcation that assumes a divide between nature (the beings and earth systems on which we depend and with whom we relate) and humans (our internal political sphere). The ‘environment’ is abstracted and reified from the social context, becoming passive, and without agency, becoming an object for extraction. Environmental law, built upon these foundations largely specifies “allowable harm rather than adjudicating on mutually enhancing relations” (Boulot and Sterlin 2021:1). But what if we were to have a legal system that sought to foster and govern ‘mutually enhancing relations’ between the non-human and human? What would this look like?

In response to the substantial harms caused by extractivism, there have been calls for, and increasing practices of, restoration, rewilding, and rehabilitation. It is also clear that we need to not only restore the ecosystems in which we are enmeshed, but also our own social, political, and legal systems so as to adapt them to living in a wilder world. Restoration is a practice that necessarily involves active management and engagement with the social ecologies, where practitioners acknowledge and seek to remediate past damage rather than simply forestall future damage. When practiced in a way that recognizes the place of the human within social ecologies it has the potential to ‘decenter’ the subject of environmental law, eroding the ontological bifurcation described above. As such it holds out prospects for relations which are life sustaining, which is the motivating focus of our case study for identifying associated opportunities for environmental law and governance. This presentation will set out a detailed research proposal which aims to examine restoration examples across Western states to ask what are appropriate modes of living and governing in more-than-human worlds, and what are appropriate legalities in this process?

Bios: Joshua Sterlin is a PhD candidate at McGill University in Canada, and is a member of the Leadership for the Ecozoic project. His scholarly training is in anthropology, holding an Msc in People and Environment (Anthropology) from the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. His research ethnographically focuses on the growing nature-connection movement in North America, examining the means and methods in which these modern groups are attempting to ‘rewild’ not only themselves, but their cultures. He has extended this research studying the rewilding of Western cultures, and thinking animacy otherwise, by applying this lens to the genre of horror, as well as to the development of a law beyond the human. Joshua is a recipient of the Graduate Excellent Award, the Transnational Environmental Law best article prize for 2022, and a board member of Hunter-Gatherer Research. When not doing all the above, you can find him canoeing Québec’s north. You can reach him at: joshua.sterlin@mail.mcgill.ca 

Emille Boulot is a Lecturer at the Faculty of Law at the University of Tasmania, Australia. She has completed her PhD at McGill University in Canada, and is a member of the Leadership for the Ecozoic project. Emille is also an Australian lawyer and holds a Master’s degree in Environmental Governance. Her research interests encompass a diverse range of topics, including environmental law and regulation, regulatory theory, interdisciplinary policy research and Indigenous legal rights. Emille is a Lionel Murphy Postgraduate scholar, a board member of the Australian Environment Review, and a research fellow with both the Earth System Governance Project and the Ecological Law and Governance Association. Along with Joshua, she is the recipient of the Transnational Environmental Law best article prize for 2022. Emille enjoys biking, hiking, and spending time at the beach with her dogs. You can reach her at: emille.boulot@utas.edu.au 

Research Coding Club - Intro to Version Control

Date / time: Wednesday 29 November / 14:00-16:00

In person venue: James College PC Room G/N/169

Online link: You can also join the Research Coding Club session online by clicking this link.

Next Wednesday, Research Coding Club will be running our perennial hands-on introduction to version control. Version control is a really useful skill for software development, whether you're writing small analysis scripts or huge HPC simulations. In this session we'll cover the basics of using git for your own projects, as well as the popular GitHub service for collaborating with others. Whether you're a complete beginner or just need a refresher, everyone is welcome!

Feel free to bring along your own laptop -- if you do, please install git beforehand. If you prefer to use a GUI, then I recommend installing Github Desktop. You might also find it useful to sign up for GitHub before the session starts.

Dr Peter Hill (he/him) - EPSRC Research Software Engineering Fellow - York Plasma Institute

Ghost Signs: Preserving faded history and public memory

Date / time: Thursday 30 November / 12:00-13:00

In person venue: ENV005 (Environment & Geography lecture theatre)

Speaker: Tyson Mitman - York St John University

The Ghost Signs Project looks at the faded signage that exists around us in York, and attempts to use it to better understand York's commercial history, how it has developed, and how these developments can inform how the life, culture, commercial values, and aesthetics of the city has shifted over time. This project has just been funded through Historic England, and is in its very early stages. This talk will discuss the inspiration for the project, the research in its current stage, and what the goals of the project are. The purpose of this is to encourage the audience to engage with the city in a new way, both ideologically and visually. The encouraged shift in perspective will hopefully inspire the audience to reimagine the city as a kind of open-air museum to itself that helps connect public space to public and personal memory, which makes the everyday experience of the city more interactive and special.

The Ghost Signs seminar will also be on Zoom, but we do encourage you to attend in person if you possibly can - it's always nice to have a good turnout for our visitors!