Summer school: Tracing & dwelling in post-anthropocentric landscapes

This is a call for applications for a 3 day summer training school aimed at early and mid-career scholars from social sciences and humanities interested in onto-epistemological and methodological issues arising when social scientists and humanities scholars engage in studying landscape and the transformations therein.

The training school will take place from 12 to 14 August 2022 in Ralsko, the Czech Republic, and focus on exploring sites in the region impacted by long term exploitation by military and mining operations including underground mining and in-situ leaching of uranium. Participants will get a hands-on experience of the landscape and discuss and explore innovative methodological avenues for acknowledging and researching traces of past and present transformation in the post-mining, post-military landscape with multilayered histories and open futures.

To apply, please, send your CV (of up to 2 pages long) and a short motivation letter (of up to 1.800 characters) to Dr. Petr Gibas, the main event organizer: petr.gibas@soc.cas.cz no later than 30 May 2022.

The participation is free of charge and up to 10 participants’ travel and other expenses can be subsidized by the COST action TRACTS. Accommodation and travel from Prague to the venue and back will be organized collectively.

Training school rationale

Landscape as an ambiguous concept of a various degree of plasticity across social sciences and humanities allows for empirically rich, theoretically innovative and methodologically creative studies while keeping researchers in a close relation to the material world and the more-than-human aspects of people’s engagement with it and the scientific exploration thereof.

The training school focuses on conceptual and methodological issues related to more-than-human entanglements constitutive of landscape and ensuing challenges for research. The aim is to explore innovative methodological avenues for engaging with traces of transformation in/of a post-mining / post-military landscape.

What use do and should social sciences and humanities make of traces of the past and of potential futures when studying landscapes in transformation?

How we as scientists (and embodied beings) acknowledge, conceptualize and methodologically use more-than-human properties of landscapes?

Can scientists learn from artistic production and sensitivities to better grasp the more-than-human complexities of our milieus and in turn better trace what the more-than-human entanglements reflect about humans and societies of late global capitalism?

The training school is to allow space for creative re-thinking of research practices and methodologies by means of conceptual as well as hands-on explorations led by practitioners from academia and arts. In exploring the conceptual and methodological issues, the summer school also presents an opportunity to establish a collaboration with an aim of producing experimental as well as more traditional outcomes in the form of academic publications (e.g. a special journal issue) dealing with the topic of the training school.