Sec­ond Col­loqui­um of the Inter­na­tional Doc­toral Pro­gram (IDK) “Rethinking Environment”

The event of the IDK “Rethinking Environment” kicked off in the Cen­ter for Cli­mate Resil­ience at the Uni­versi­ty of Augsburg. Laura Fum­agalli from Italy was the first to pre­sent her re­search; she fo­cused on nega­tive land­scape aes­thet­ics and the value sys­tem be­hind it. Max­imili­an Pieper fol­lowed right after, with a pro­ject tack­ling philo­sophi­cal ques­tions con­cern­ing tech­nolo­gy and pow­er, the theat­rical char­acter of productivi­ty, and the con­cept of ener­gy.

After lunch, the group re­joined to listen to Chris­tian Schnurr elabo­rating on si­lence and invis­ibility in pollu­tion dis­course, and to Lak­shmi Dilip­ku­mar, who shared her pro­gress on An­glo­phone ex­trac­tion novels from the Glob­al South. This was fol­lowed by a liter­ary stud­ies panel focus­ing on Lucia Medi­ci’s and An­ne-So­phie Balzer’s eco­criti­cism pro­jects, fea­turing cul­tural ecol­ogy in the novels of Rich­ard Pow­ers and poems on glaci­ers (so called Cryo­poe­sis).

On the next day, the collo­quium moved to the LMU main build­ing. The first set of presenta­tions start­ed with PhD stu­dent Fizza Ba­tool, who fo­cused on envi­ron­men­tal justice and her re­search trip to Paki­stan. Katharina Karrenbau­er redi­rected the audi­ence’s atten­tion to Ba­varia. Her quan­tita­tive re­search fo­cuses on social ine­quali­ty and indi­vidu­aliza­tion in sus­taina­bility ef­forts. The sec­ond panel com­bined ques­tions from an­thropology, geog­raphy, and sus­taina­bility: Lukas Emrich re­port­ed on his latest find­ings con­cern­ing alter­native hous­ing prac­tices and Chris­topher Klap­perich shared his latest in­sights about tree plant­ing initia­tives in the Phil­ippine For­ests.

After a lunch break, Livia Cahn dis­cuss­ed what we can learn from drill­ing cores while Floris Winckel dug into repre­senta­tions of snow­flakes. This was fol­lowed by Katie Kung‘s presentation on inva­sive spe­cies and ne­cropolitics, with a focus on Kud­zu. PhD stu­dent Jasmijn Viss­er, who is also an artist, closed the day with a medi­a-sup­port­ed per­for­mance lec­ture about cli­mate change.

The final day of presenta­tions took place in Augsburg. Elisa­beth Schuster dis­cuss­ed con­cepts of mobil­ity in the prima­ry class­room and Pia Wimmer talked about envi­ron­men­tal ethics and con­sumerism, topics that she had dis­cuss­ed in the “liv­ing lab” that she had con­duct­ed in a mid­dle school class­room. After cof­fee, PhD stu­dents and advi­sors re­sumed to listen to Felix Treutner elabo­rating on escha­tolo­gy, phi­loso­phy, and ethics. The histo­rian Sven Seel­inger con­clud­ed the collo­quium with a presentation about barbed wire. Like the first collo­qui­um, the event turned out to be a great op­por­tunity for the PhD stu­dents to prac­tice and demonstrate their re­search and sci­ence com­muni­cation skills. In their feed­back, the partic­ipants high­light­ed the friendly and sup­portive en­vi­ron­ment that made the collo­quium an en­riching and form­ative intel­lectu­al and per­sonal expe­rience.

Text: Kirsten Twelbeck, Eva Kran­nich, Inter­na­tional Doc­torate Pro­gram "Re­think­ing Envi­ron­ment“