LAEHR is warmly inviting abstracts to our open panel „Diffracting Ways of Living: Practices and Politics of Habitability in a More-than-Human Worlds“ @ STS Hub 2025 Berlin, 11-14 March 2025.
The deadline for submission is 31 Oct 2024.
Abstract
Habitability as a central term in the Anthropocene can be immensely productive for STS. It allows for diffracted thinking through times and scales, full of “interfacial oscillations among that which is experienced as habitable or uninhabitable, as a kind of regionalizing of relationships between life and nonlife”, as explored by AbdouMaliq Simone (2016: 135). Habitability blurs ontological certainties and easily exceeds fields: the biom, the house, the infrastructure, the city, the planet. This panel discusses habitability as both a relational concept and a phenomenon of more-than-human engagement. We aim to bring together ethnographic STS work, that grapples with the current or imminent destruction of entire ecosystems and critically engages with socio-material experiments for healing, repairing, caring, resurgence, sustenance. By seeing ourselves and our research practices implicated in the politics of habitability (Langwick, 2018), this panel also tackles the question of how do we as STS scholars address habitability today and further how the concept of habitability can help us to see and conceptualize forms of living. We invite contributions that recast the challenge as one of ecological scale (Papadopoulos, 2022). This includes perspectives of eco-feminist, postcolonial, and disability studies which investigate situated practices and experiments in rendering spaces (co-)habitable.
Chair: Laboratory for Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations (LAEHR)
The Laboratory: Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations (LAEHR) brings together scholars with an interest in ethnographically inquiring into how the multiple entanglements of material worlds and social practices shape the ways people live their lives. The lab is based at the Institute for European Ethnology at Humboldt University Berlin. LAEHR members Britta Acksel, Petra Beck, Desirée Hetzel, Fotini Takirdiki and Milena Bister, head of LAEHR, chair the panel.
Please send your paper proposal, including a 200-word abstract and a 75-word bio, to: milena.bister@hu-berlin.de
Further details about the STS-Hub 2025 can be found here: https://sts-hub.de/25/
We are looking forward to submissions!
