In this episode, Hita speaks with Dr. Sarah Bezan who is a scholar of environmental humanities currently employed as a Lecturer in Literature and the Environment at the Radical Humanities Laboratory at University College Cork in Ireland. Previously she was a post-doctoral Research Associate at the Leverhulme Centre for Anthropocene Biodiversity in The University of York in the United Kingdom. In this conversation, they chat about how participating in a paleo dig and uncovering a Mosasaur skeleton sparked in her a curiosity that led to her current engagement with making sense of extinction. They speak about artistic representations of extinct animals such as Harri Kallio’s representations of the dodo bird on an island in Mauritius or Mark Dion’s Ichthyosaur installation, and how they manipulate imaginaries surrounding the temporal and spatial boundaries of the extinct species. In describing these imaginaries, they discuss the idea of animal atopias, a term she coined to refer to those placeless places surrounding extinction, where the animal exists not on a spatially defined space but a constructed one, evoking a nostalgia for what once was. They discuss about Sarah’s experiences on the Galapagos Islands where she studied the taxidermic specimen of Lonesome George, the last representative of the Pinta island tortoises and her observation that the extinct body is essentially an exploded one raising questions about what it means to be the last representative of a species and the responsibility that death places upon such individuals. They reflect upon how practices of taxidermy and museum curatorship are essentially performative, designed to evoke a specific emotion or knowledge, rendering them hyper visible, while subsuming others. They discuss de-extinction projects such as the Jurassic World like attempts at reviving the woolly mammoth or even theoretical ideas of re-creating Neanderthals as proposed by George Church are all ways in which we attempt to revive prehistoric fantasies of the human – a fantasy nevertheless that is separate from the idea of the modern human. The conversation concludes with some reflections on interdisciplinary research and the responsibility that early career scholars are placed with when attempting to straddle multiple schools of thought.
Sarah’s personal website: https://www.sarahbezan.com/
Some of the references we cite during the conversation are listed below:
111: Fisheries policy and catch shares with Dan Holland
IJC#10: Picking a bone with Elinor Ostrom? A conversation with Landon Yoder & Courtney Hammond Wagner
110: Carbon markets with Danny Cullenward
109: Forests as pathways to prosperity with Daniel Miller
Insight Episode #45: Courtney Carothers on the importance of indigenous knowledge systems
108: Localizing development with Esther Zeledon
107: Zoning policy with William Fischel
Insight Episode #44: Derek Kauneckis on watersheds and smart tech
106: The Surrounds with AbdouMaliq Simone
105: The Rights of Nature with Julia Talbot-Jones
IJC#9: Magical realism, water and power with Valentina Fonseca Cepeda
IJC#8: Blockchain networks as knowledge commons with Ilia Murtazashvili
Insight Episode #43: Hillary Angelo on social imaginaries
104: Creating Knowledge for Change with Sharachchandra Lele
103: Gathering tides with Mehana Blaich Vaughan
Insight Episode #42: Graeme Cumming on scale mismatch and mismanagement
IJC#7: Sacred groves (or commons with a difference) with Samuel Adeyanju
Insight Episode #41: Sara Meerow on the concept of resilience
102: Rights for Rivers with Erin O’Donnell
Insight Episode #40: Bridie McGreavy on the importance of indigenous perspectives in Maine shellfish fisheries
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