Loss, Recovery, Reclamation: Re-thinking the Modern World

WORKSHOP LEADER: Dr Kate Smith

Recent interventions in debates on climate change, by post-humanist scholars such as Timothy Morton and Donna Haraway, have placed renewed focus on questions of extinction, loss and absence. Such discussions have highlighted how individual and group responses to loss have important (and imminent) ramifications for contemporary society. They also indicate the pressing need for a fuller understanding of historical responses to different types of loss. Seeking to address questions of extinction, loss and absence, this workshop will create a temporary community of scholars from different disciplines, career stages and institutions to interrogate processes of preservation, reclamation, reinvention and repair across time. Participants will be asked to consider how responses to loss and absence might be identified in their own disciplines and will challenge them to examine the spaces and moments in which the insights of others could prove productive.

Internal attendees:

Vanessa Heggie (Primary Care Clinical Sciences), Christopher Donaldson (English), Susannah Thorpe (Biosciences), Richard Clay (Art History), Sadiah Qureshi (History), Matt Houlbrook (History), Daniel Reynolds (Centre for Byzantine, Ottoman and Modern Greek Studies), David Gange (History), Phil Jones (Geography), Emma Login (Law) and Oliver Herford (EDACS).

External attendees: 

Dr Michelle Bastian (Art and Architecture, Edinburgh)

Dr Anna Maerker (History of Medicine, KCL)

Dr Simon Werrett (Science and Technology Studies, UCL)

To register to attend this workshop please email Sarah Jeffery.