Biodiverse Anthropocenes profiling theme presents: Special Guest Seminar with Visiting Fellows

Our guest speakers are Dr. Hannah Stark and Dr. Thomas Parsons.

Dr. Hannah Stark is a critical and cultural theorist and Humanities scholar, and published author from the University of Tasmania, Australia. She is particularly interested in how feelings circulate in public and can be mobilized as a political resource for articulating new modes of diverse and multi-species sociality and new futures in the Anthropocene.

"Extinction in Public."
Extinction occurs within a complex affective economy in which a range of negative emotions are expressed and exchanged: rage, hopelessness, fear, grief, anxiety, desolation, trauma, loneliness. Grief has emerged as a dominant and powerful emotion in contemporary environmental discourse. This project aims to conceptualise eco-grief as a cultural and political phenomenon with a public life. In this way it builds on the framing of eco- and climate anxiety, climate trauma and pre-traumatic stress disorder, Anthropocene disorder, and solastalgia, which pathologise grief as a private emotion within individual psychology. Offering a different account of how emotions circulate and are exchanged, this project draws on examples from art, museum and zoo displays, protests, performances, ceremonies and rituals, and memorials to examine how public affects can be mobilised as a potent catalyst for environmental action. In this way, this project finds a sense of hope for the dynamic public cultures formed in and through the extinction crisis.

Dr. Thomas Parsons is a molecular evolutionary biologist and forensic scientist. His previous work as Director of Science and Technology at the International Commission on Missing Persons, helped identify approx. 20,000 missing persons from armed conflicts. He is now focused on molecular evolution in natural systems, working as a Research Associate at the Smithsonian Institution.

"Studying genetic variation: large-scale forensic missing persons identification, and biodiversity monitoring in the field."

The presentation will describe how integrated forensic science, including large-scale database-driven DNA matching, has resulted in thousands of missing persons identifications. Today, the intersection of ancient DNA and genomics is helping to expand the frontier of missing persons applications to extremely highly degraded human remains, for example from the Vietnam War, and matching them to distant relatives. In other frontier applications, third generation DNA sequencing is now enabling DNA labs to be established in remote locations directly within biodiversity hotspots to feed global databases, and to allow monitoring of potential zoonotic pathogens circulating in areas at the interface between human and animal populations