ECOPRAXIS: CRITICAL THEORY AND PRACTICES IN THE ANTHROPOCENE LAB

The research seminar aims to integrate doctoral students into a research environment that offers them the opportunity to develop and apply methodological knowledge and to have hands-on contact with research tools such as databases or specialized libraries. By outlining recent developments in contemporary arts, critical theory, and postcolonial and indigenous studies, the course connects these areas of research to political ecology while critiquing these developments and seeking to identify alternatives for the production of knowledge in the present. The innovative component of the course lies in the fact that it is a laboratory rather than a conventional course: Students will be asked to reflect on, elaborate, create, and present their work and hypotheses about our times. Throughout the course, we will seek to formulate hypotheses about future research perspectives, including the future of images and their political implications from gendered, postcolonial, and ecological perspectives. This curriculum unit is in dialogue with several other curriculum units in NOVA’s Social Sciences and Humanities programme and is an interdisciplinary seminar taught in English. The lecturer, Giovanbattista Tusa, has worked on radical politics, cinema, ecocriticism, ontological realism and animal studies.