Arendt On Earth
I served as the Project Director of Arendt on Earth: From the Archimedean Point to the Anthropocene, an interdisciplinary, cross-institutional symposium series supported by a grant from the Humanities Without Walls Consortium's grand research challenge, "The Work of Humanities in a Changing Climate". The project took the concept of "Earth" in the thought of Hannah Arendt as a frame, impetus, and provocation to think what we are doing in a changing climate. Our purpose is not only to foster deep interpretive engagement with Arendt’s work, but to envision how the humanities can promote public comprehension of the interconnected crises that threaten to overwhelm us: rapid, unpredictable climate change; the rule of instrumentality over science; the lurch of capitalism from crisis to crisis; global catastrophes of poverty, displacement, statelessness and rightlessness; the “defactualization” of the world and the corruption of truth in politics; and the crises of legitimacy, power, and freedom that face democratic peoples and polities today.
Arendt on Earth convenes a series of workshops with the themes:
II. EARTH & EXPROPRIATION (Nov 22, 2019)
III. TECHNOLOGIES & INSTRUMENTS (April 16, 30 & May 7, 2021)
IV. CRISIS (Nov 5, 19 & Dec 12, 2021)
Each workshop is devoted to intensive discussion of papers contributed by invited scholars and project members, which are circulated to all project participants, connecting scholars across themes, disciplines and locations. The aim is to open up unanticipated opportunities for collaboration, and the project is designed as an experiment in inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration, the terms of which remain in flux for the humanities and social sciences.
People
The Arendt on Earth Collaborative is Mary G. Dietz (Northwestern), Laura Ephraim (Williams), Dipesh Chakrabarty (Chicago), Samantha Frost (UIUC), Nancy Tuana (Penn State), Patchen Markell (Cornell), Linda Zerilli (Chicago), Ayten Gündoğdu (Barnard), Peg Birmingham (DePaul), and Benjamin Lazier (Reed).
