Continuing our exploration of the multiple ecologies of the contemporary, the Slow Reading Group will be tackling Bruno Latour’s "Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime". The group have only read the first four sections of the text, so if you are new to the group please join us, we will do a recap.
Before his recent and untimely death Bruno Latour had been known particularly for his work in the study of science and technology, being closely associated with Actor Network Theory. In the last decade of his life he turned more directly to questions about ecology. Down to Earth, originally published in French in 2017, the year after the election of Donald Trump, is one of Latour’s more explicitly political books and it explores politics in the context of ecological degradation on a planetary scale.
As with all our previous Slow Reading sessions, we will be reading Down To Earth together, out loud and slowly. No special expertise is needed to participate in these sessions other than in interesting in contemporary ecolological issues, reading with others, and a willingness to discuss ideas.
The Slow Reading Group is an informal space for collectively reading meaningful texts that open out the ideas and themes from our research-based events at Nottingham Contemporary and the Three Ecologies Research Group at the University of Nottingham. Informed by Félix Guattari’s notion of the Three Ecologies - the idea that our environmental crisis relates to our contemporary capitalism - and by theories of decolonisation and intersectionality, the reading group invites you to plot connections between these fields, combining academic and everyday approaches to research.
A PDF copy of the text will be sent to all participants before the event. Other sessions Mon 17 July, Mon 18 Sep, Mon 16 Oct, Mon 20 Nov, Mon 18 Dec. All sessions online.
This session has been organised by the Centre for Critical Theory alongside Nottingham Contemporary.