The Lab is excited to announce our second public event in this winter term 2026/27 series:
Book talk:
“The Unlively: Protesting Fossil Fuel Pollution with David Buckel” (Routledge, 2026), with author Sofia Varino (Lab Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations, HU Berlin)
The Unlively: Protesting Fossil Fuel Pollution with David Buckel examines air pollution and extinction by looking into how they might contribute, conceptually and politically, to a queer ecopolitics of death. It focuses on the figure of David Buckel, an American LGBT rights lawyer and environmentalist, who self-immolated to protest fossil fuel pollution in 2018. The author considers Buckel’s death as an act of political protest, whereby a (singular) living body attacks itself as a response to the (collective) extinction of non/human life forms. The book mobilizes the materiality of death and non/human extinction, proposing the concept of the “unlively” as that which negates life or is incapable of vitality, to account for Buckel’s self-immolation as well as the deadly effects of fossil fuel air pollution.
Sofia Varino is an author and academic based in Berlin. With a focus on political ecology and planetary health, their research and teaching interests include environmental and medical humanities, queer and feminist epistemologies, and transnational American studies. They are the author of The Unlively: Protesting Fossil Fuel Pollution with David Buckel (Routledge, 2026) and co-author of Aquatopia: Climate Interventions (Routledge, 2023). They teach at Humboldt University of Berlin. BlueSky and Instagram: @sofiavarino // Website: sofiavarino.com
Moderation: Sabine Biedermann (Lab Anthropology of Environment | Human Relations, HU Berlin)
Thursday, 19. 11. 2026
10:15 – 11:45 am CET
Online on Zoom (link via sabine.bc@gmail.com)