Politics of Planetary Care: Moving Beyond Humanism
Department of Anthropology
Main Quad - Building 50
Room 51A (Colloquium Room)
This talk will discuss how we might care in ways that go beyond its humanist forms, which include protection, rescue and sympathy. Starting with a discussion of the expansion of humanitarianism to non-humans, the talk will then explore how this expansion might lead the way into non-humanist forms of care.
Miriam Ticktin is an Associate Professor of Anthropology in the New School, who received her PhD in Anthropology at Stanford University and the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France (after an MA in English Literature from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.) Her research has focused in the broadest sense on what it means to make political claims in the name of a universal humanity. Her most recent book, Casualties of Care: Immigration and the Politics of Humanitarianism in France, takes undocumented immigrants as the subject of extensive ethnographic research. Her newest project looks at emerging political and scientific technologies mobilized in the name of suffering -- expanding humanitarianism to ecological and planetary levels -- and how these help to redraw the boundaries between humans and non-humans, and new forms of political inclusion and exclusion. Her website is here: http://www.newschool.edu/nssr/faculty.aspx?id=16338