Nature-Thinking. Bauhaus-Hopkins Summer Lab on Comparative Thought

Nature-Thinking

Bauhaus-Hopkins Summer Lab on Comparative Thought

Weimar, June 18th – 21st, 2025

A joint conference of the Department of Comparative Thought and Literature, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, and the Research Training Group Media Anthropology, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar.  

Conveners:

Jane Bennett (Johns Hopkins University); Christiane Voss (Bauhaus University Weimar); Lorenz Engell (Bauhaus University Weimar)

The event is not open to the public. Attendance may be possible on request. Please contact: [email protected]

Website:www.uni-weimar.de/grama

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There are so many ways to hear the word “nature.” An incomplete list:

Nature, some say, is what appears, as a given world of entities and potentials; it encompasses all organic, inorganic and non-organic things, as well as the more elusive currents, atmospheres, virtualities, intensities.

Nature, some say, is a primordial or mythical unity, or an expression of God(s) or Gaia.

Nature, some say, indexes the sites of relentless exploitation and ecological collapse produced by global capitalism.

Nature, some say, shows itself to be profoundly relationally and accessible only through mediations; we can encounter it only through perception, intuition, imagination, and various kinds of aesthetic and techno-scientific entanglements.

Nature, some say, is an illusionary projection of representational systems or a useful/violent fiction.

Nature, some say, is no more than a term of contrast – the other to humanity, culture, technology, civilization, meaning.

Some say we have reached the end of “nature,” the final erosion of the value of the concept.

The Bauhaus-Hopkins Summer Lab on Comparative Thought for its inaugural year of 2025, wonders whether the “nature” can or should be dispensed with. Is there something valuable about the chronically over- or under-determined figure of nature? Can it teach us anew about ourselves and our existential entanglements? What concepts and images and narratives and performances can today mark and illuminate contemporary experiences of the vitalities, necessities, creativity, violence, beauty, porosity, and inexactitude of the more-than-human world? What do and could we want to know about “nature” on an intuitive, imaginative, and experiential level? Can processes of naturalization and denaturalisation be engaged in ways that lead beyond the logics of capitalism, colonialism, anthropocentrism?

Our hypothesis is that thinking “nature” is everything but outdated. The 2025 Bauhaus-Hopkins Summer Lab on Comparative Thought will convene faculty and doctoral students who seek affirmative, idiosyncratic, and yet non-naïve, speculative approaches that might help us respond to the political, theoretical, aesthetic, pragmatic, and epistemic challenges facing the interdisciplinary humanities today.

Schedule:

Wednesday, June 18, 2025:

Venue: Goethe and Schiller Archive, Jenaer Straße 1, 99423 Weimar

9:30-9:45: University President Peter Benz & Christiane Voss: Welcome address

Chair: Ekkehard Coenen

9:45-10:30: Christiane Voss: The Kitsch-Factor in Nature-Thinking

10:30-11:15: Jane Bennett: Nature as Process and Sweeping as Acting

Coffee break

Chair: Ulrike Wirth

11:30-12:15: Vanessa Franke: The Earth on the Horizon. On (Extra)Terrestrial Perspective with Samantha Harvey’s Novel "Orbital" (2024)

12:15-1:00: Rhiannon Clarke: (Un)natural Landscapes, Feral Archive: Lorca’s Legacy, on and off the Page

Lunch break

2:00-4:30: Mats Werchohlad: Mediating Atmospheres. A Walk through the Park on the Ilm

Thursday, June 19, 2025:

Venue: Goethe and Schiller Archive, Jenaer Straße 1, 99423 Weimar

Chair: Jens Kraushaar

9:30-10:15: Charlotte Bolwin: Towards a Digital Aesthetics of Nature: Artistic Transformation of the Natural World in the Scope of Technological Transformation

10:15-11:00: Brahim El Guabli: Rethinking Nature through Arid Lands: Saharanism and its Impacts

Coffee break

Chair: Isabelle Castera

11:15-12:00: Laurien Wüst: The Second Nature of Technology: On Benjamin’s Distinction between First and Second Technology

12:00-12:45: Astrid Deuber-Mankowsky: Acting into Nature versus Play and Experimentation: Arendt and Benjamin on the Relationship between Nature, History and Technique

Lunch break

Chair: Niklas Becker

2:00-2:45: Diego León-Villagrá: Figurations of ‘Malignant Nature’ in 20th and 21st Century Illness-Thinking

2:45-3:30: Jennifer Gosetti-Ferencei: Thirteen Ways of Thinking About a Blackbird: The Meaning(s) of ‘Nature’

Coffee break

3:45-4:45: Héctor Canal Pardo: Presentation of original handwritings from the Goethe and Schiller Archive

8:00:   Filmscreening: Taming The Garden (Salomé Jashi, CH/GE/DE 2021), Lichthaus Cinema, Am Kirschberg 4, 99423 Weimar

Friday, June 20, 2025:

Venue: Lounge in the University Library, Steubenstraße 6, 99423 Weimar

Chair: Lorenzo Gineprini

9:30-10:15: Jessica Croteau: Democracy for Decline: Democratic Transience for an Earthly Politics of Decay

10:15-11:00: Martin Siegler: The Porous Media of Nature

Coffee break

Chair: Christof Windgätter

11:15-12:00: David DeBole: Ogallala Dreams: On the Value of Other-than-Conscious Thought in Political Resistance

12:00-12:45: William E. Connolly: An Ecology of Nonhuman Modes of Production

Lunch break

3:15-6:15: Guided tour of the Buchenwald Memorial

Saturday, June 21, 2025:

Venue: Lounge in the University Library, Steubenstraße 6, 99423 Weimar

Chair: Jasmin Degeling

9:30-10:15: Siyu Xie: Nature’s Orientalism versus Productive Ambiguity

10:15-11:00: Katrin Pahl: Auntie Earth: With Thomas Köck toward a Pedologic of Mutual Agency

Coffee break

Chair: Katharina Otto

11:15-12:00: Jennifer Culbert: Still Life: Natural Law and the Art of Man

12:00-12:45: Lorenz Engell: Nature as Trans-D(io)ramatic Experience

Lunch break

Chair: Sebastian Lederle

2:00-2:45: Anne Merrill: Tracing Tor House, “Tor House,” and Torrid Zone

2:45-3:30: Jörg Paulus: Nature’s Paperwork

Coffee break

3:45-4:45: Concluding discussion