Research Methods in Landscape and Urban Studies: Writing Urban Landscapes of the Anthropocene

Abstract

This course addresses the specificity of writing about the urban, landscape, and territory in the Anthropocene. The seminar surveys key writings, ideas, and figures in the Anthropocene debate in conversation with critiques from environmental humanities and postcolonial studies.

Objective

Anthropocene has emerged as a contested yet transdisciplinary term to describe the planetary condition under climate change and environmental catastrophe. While being attendant to its critiques, the Anthropocene discourse provides researchers from critical landscape and urban research to engage with a diversity of fields such as earth sciences, art, environmental humanities, agrarian, literary, and cultural studies. This course addresses the specificity of writing about the urban, landscape, and territory in the Anthropocene. The seminar surveys key writings, ideas, and figures in the Anthropocene debate in conversation with critiques from environmental humanities and postcolonial studies. A number of invited guests working at the forefronts of Anthropocene research will bring seminar participants into their research and writing process. Additionally, the seminar will offer a number of hands-on critical writing and peer-review sessions to help the seminar participants develop and work with the allegories of the Anthropocene. Typically, the seminar sessions will alternate between inputs by invited guests, reading and discussion sessions, tutorials, and peer-review. The invited guests will provide a behind-the-scenes look into their writing process, including how they structure their arguments, organise their sources and materials, and find inspiration in their writing process. During the first half of the tutorial sessions, the seminar participants will discuss and debate a requisite reading followed by a writing tutorial and feedback session based on the texts. The seminar participants can choose to present the work developed during the seminar at the LUS Doctoral Crits organised at the end of the semester.

Content

The seminar would be organised the following sessions and will culminate with LUS Doctoral Crits organised at the end of the semester: 24.02 Introduction – Writing in the Anthropocene - Nitin Bathla 03.03 Botanical City - Sandra Jasper 10.03 Histories of Settlement workshop - Hollyamber Kennedy & Anooradha Siddiqi 17.03 Landscapes in deep time: Nuclear Waste and the Swiss Alps - Rony Emmenegger 31.03 Landscapes of the empire - Hollyamber Kennedy 21.04 Territories of Swiss Colonialism - Denise Bertschi 28.04 A guided walk through the multispecies landscape of Zurich- Flurina Gardin 05.05 Geological Filmmaking - Laura Coppens 12.05 Landscapes of fossil capitalism - Giulia Scotto 19.05 LUS Doctoral Crits

Resources