PAScapes invites attendance at the Conference The Landscapes of Waste: Ecosocial Perspectives, bringing together scholars from diverse disciplines to examine waste landscapes in (post)authoritarian settings through historical, philosophical, and sociological lenses
This conference will convene a select group of invited scholars to engage in critical reflection on waste landscapes within (post)authoritarian contexts. Bringing together philosophers, historians, organization scholars, and sociologists, the event aims to examine the spatialities, landscapes, and heritage practices that intersect with questions of authoritarianism, particularly through the lens of technocratic approaches to industrial and nuclear waste.
Waste will be explored as an ecosocial marker situated at the crossroads of disciplinary perspectives and functioning as a crucial diagnostic of contemporary conditions. Discussions will focus on how technologies and industrial infrastructures shape landscapes; how the technological and industrial dimensions of construction, maintenance, abandonment, memory, and disaster inform our relationship with the environment and milieu; how they contribute to the atmosphere and texture of lived experience; and how emerging challenges and encounters with waste and disasters reshape our modes of being-in-the-world.
The conference will take place at Vilnius University, Faculty of History, Room 211, on 17–18 December 2025.
We share below the conference programme:
Wednesday, 17 December 2025
09.30-10.00 Welcome
10.00-11.00 Mintautas Gutauskas, The Insignificance and the Sublime of Waste
11.00-12.00 Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, From Castle Mounds to Landfill Mountains: The Politics of Inheritance and Destruction in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Waste Landscapes in Lithuania
12.00-13.30 Lunch break
13.30-14.30 Axel Andersson, The Pharmacological Cairn: Nuclear Waste and the Centralized State
14.30-15.30 Victoria Donovan, ‘Toxic Commoning’ in Ukraine’s Industrial Borderlands: Making Waste Culture in Lysychansk, Mariupol, and Siverskodonetsk
15.30-16.00 Coffee break
16.00-17.00 Marko Marila, The Principle of Hope in Environmental Art
17.00-18.00 Francisco Martinez, Digging Shadows: The Ecological Memory of Soviet Modernity
18.00-20.00 Reception
Thursday, 18 December 2025
09.00-10.00 Patrick Zapata, Authoritarian Waste Regimes and the Politics of Commoning. Learning from the case of Nicaragua’s La Chureca
10.00-11.00 Kristupas Sabolius, On Compost-ability
11.00-11.30 Coffee break
11.30-12.30 Vaiva Daraškevičiūtė, Beyond the Visuality of Anthropocene Landscapes: Waste, Abjection, Uncanny
12.30-13.30 Saulius Geniušas, Phenomenology of Solastalgia: From Transcendental Homelessness to Transcendental Placelessness
13.30-14.30 Lunch break
14.30-15.30 Svitlana Matviyenko, “Donetsk Chornobyl:” The Deep Time of Warfare
15.30-16.30 Nicolas De Warren, Living Alone in a World of Wounds: Life in the Aftermath in Kimura Yūsuke’s Sacred Cesium Ground, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, and Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic
16.30-17.00 Wrap up / Reflection
Speakers and abstracts
Mintautas Gutauskas
The Insignificance and the Sublime of Waste
The possibility of disposing of waste, exporting pollution and disasters to remote areas, known as “no-man’s land,” is a characteristic of contemporary throw-away culture. Here, waste is a clear phenomenon: based on symbolic systems, waste is matter out of place (Mary Douglas, Gay Hawkins). Waste, trash, garbage, litter are marked by their insignificance. But the Anthropocene perspective reveals that there is no outside. Waste affects other living beings, returns in various forms, and poses different dangers. The critique of anthropocentrism and the Capitalocene (J. W. Moore) reveals that the management of social order always implies certain forms of inequality, oppression, or exploitation – someone is an end, someone is reduced to a means – cheap nature, cheap labor, cheap places. Waste practices and management can be interpreted as a form of resourcisation, as some places and environments become the “resource” for storing waste. Waste assumes clear ethical and political dimensions and begins to take on significance not only on a technological level but also for interspecies relationships and narratives of identity within communities, societies, and other groups. Some of the waste becomes sublime due to its vast quantities (the Great Pacific garbage patch, textile waste in the Atacama Desert) or its danger (chemical, nuclear waste). It overwhelms our ability to conceive of its temporality and spatiality, requiring a different relationship with space and time, a different perspective for interpreting ourselves.
Mintautas Gutauskas is Professor at the Institute of Philosophy, Director of the Institute of Philosophy, and Senior Researcher at the Excellence Centre (Post)authoritarian landscapes. His current research interests include the Anthropocene and anthropological difference, critique of anthropocentrism, liminal subjects, animality, eco-phenomenology, and philosophy of waste. Published monographs: Spaces of Dialogue: A Phenomenological Approach (2010, in Lithuanian), Human and Animal. Anthropological Difference in Phenomenological Hermeneutical Philosophy (2021, in Lithuanian), Transformations of Nature: Modernity and the Anthropocene (2021, in Lithuanian, with D. Bacevičiūtė, V. Daraškevičiūtė, G. Cuozzo).
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė
From Castle Mounds to Landfill Mountains: The Politics of Inheritance and Destruction in Late Soviet and Post-Soviet Waste Landscapes in Lithuania
This paper explores the governmental and cultural imaginaries of open landfill sites in Lithuania, from the 1960s to the 2020s. It tracks the history of household and industrial waste management that formed part of Soviet industrial and consumer society. Against this historical context, I detail how landfill sites became key actors in popular culture and public debates on environmental destruction and lives, wasted under communism, particularly during perestroika in the late 1980s and early 1990s. The images of landfill sites, however, were deployed in public discourses not only as landscapes of resistance to dysfunctional state socialist modernity, but also as a critique of the ethnic nationalism movement. Furthermore, the imaginary of the mountain acquired an important political meaning as an epochal symbol in Lithuanian national discourses, ranging from the bronze age and medieval castle hills to landfills and, finally, culminating with the low level radioactive waste storage sites. I argue that the nexus of waste landscapes and wasted post-socialist lives constitutes an important example of the politics of materiality and infrastructure in the context of the Baltic independence movement, connecting the ideas about inheritance, technology and nationalism.
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė is Professor in Criminology and Sociology at Kingston University London and Visiting Research Fellow at PAScapes, Vilnius University. She is the author of The Will to Predict: Orchestrating the Future Through Science (2023) and The Power of Systems: How Policy Sciences Opened Up the Cold War World (2016), both with Cornell University Press, and co-editor of The Struggle for the Long-Term in Transnational Science and Politics: Forging the Future (2015). Prof Rindzevičiūtė has published many articles on Soviet and post-Soviet cultural policy and museums in the Baltic sea region, focusing on the processes of nation-building and de-Sovietisation. She combines Science and Technology Studies with historical sociology and intellectual history. In the recent years Rindzevičiūtė has developed a novel research agenda into nuclear cultural heritage with her own work exploring the role of museums and heritage in the transformation of nuclearity in the UK, Lithuania and Russia. Her research has been funded by the EU JPI-CH, the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Baltic Sea Foundation in Sweden and the Swedish Foundation for Humanities and Social Sciences.
Axel Andersson
The Pharmacological Cairn: Nuclear Waste and the Centralized State
The establishment of post-war nuclear power (and weapons) systems can be understood as an epiphenomenon of that period’s centralized industrial states – both in the West and outside. Not all centralized industrial states developed nuclear power (or weapons), but not only did such development only occur in such entities – they did so with the direct oversight of the states. Reading nuclear technology “epiphenomenologically” can both link it to Paul Virilio’s concept of “l’accident” (the nuclear plant invents the nuclear catastrophe) and use it to critique Virilo’s mystification of beginnings. By focusing on the aesthetic dimension of what Virilo called the œuvre inconsciente linked to l’accident, we can approach the near-eternal trace of nuclear power, radioactive waste, as a site where we with our senses are invited to sensorially experience the centralized state long after its dissolution. The role of art in relation to nuclear waste tends to be invoked for its use as preserving memory (or even worse: communicating a warning). What happens when we see the waste and the landscape it produces – pharmacologically both, literally, toxic and curative (in its construction of a future horizon) – as unconscious works to be experienced as art?
Dr. Axel Andersson is senior lecturer in Art History at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm as well as the institute’s Deputy Vice-Chancellor for Research. He holds a PhD in History from the European University Institute in Florence. He is a member of the steering group of CAPIm (Centre for Art and the Political Imagination). Andersson is the author of five monographs as well as several anthologies on art, colonialism, criticism, critical theory, and the philosophy of technology. Previous research has moved around the question of colonialism and its links to Western concepts of nature, focusing on European exoticism and primitivism in the post-war period, the exchange of body techniques across colonial boundaries, violence and negotiations in colonial contact zones and the prehistory of Romanticism. The work has been informed by a keen interest in historiography and the formal potentials and limits of essayistic figurations in the field of history. He has also analyzed the aesthetics and philosophy of nuclear waste in the book Absolute farmakon (2019). Andersson is currently working on collaborations with a number of artists engaging with off grid art practices that re-negotiate nature as a part of the “art-world”.
Victoria Donovan
‘Toxic Commoning’ in Ukraine’s Industrial Borderlands: Making Waste Culture in Lysychansk, Mariupol, and Siverskodonetsk
Drawing on Patrick O’Hare’s framework of ‘waste commoning’, that is the ways that people collectively manage, reclaim, and revalue waste outside of capitalist logics, this paper explores the idea of ‘toxic commoning’ in Ukraine’s industrial borderlands before the full-scale invasion. Focusing on three cases of industrial waste reuse – fishing in the wastewater of the Azovstal plant in Mariupol, curating in derelict industrial warehouses in Lysychansk, and community archiving the leftover ‘trash’ of Soviet industry in Siverskodonetsk – the paper will suggest that industrial waste in Ukraine’s east was not only a source of pollution and social stigma, but also a site of creative innovation and community making. The paper will draw on ethnographic research and analysis of literary and cultural texts from industrial contexts in Ukraine and beyond to situate the regional practices described in a broader cultural context. It will argue that subjects in heavily industrialized, culturally stigmatized, and economically underserved regions have often found ways to ‘make waste culture’, transforming peripheries into centres, and trash into treasure.
Victoria Donovan is a Professor of Ukrainian and East European Studies and the Director of the Centre for Global (Post)socialisms at the University of St Andrews. She works at the intersection of heritage studies, urban history, visual anthropology, and the public humanities. Her work has received grants and prizes, including a British Academy Rising Star Engagement Award, an AHRC/BBC New Generation Thinker award, and in 2023, in partnership with the Centre for Urban History in Lviv a European Heritage Award/EuropaNostra Award for Citizens’ Engagement and Awareness Raising. She is the author of Chronicles in Stone: Preservation, Patriotism, and Identity in Northwest Russia, published with NIUP imprint at Cornell in 2019; the co-author with Darya Tsymbalyuk of Limits of Collaboration: Art, Ethics, and Donbas, published by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung in 2022. Her newest book Life in Spite of Everything: Tales from the Ukrainian East, was published with Daunt Books Publishing in April 2025.
Marko M. Marila
The Principle of Hope in Environmental Art
When international mining companies rushed to prospect for uranium in Finland in the early 2000s, regional anti-uranium mining social movements formed in different parts of the country. Among the activists was Finnish sculptor Pessi Manner (1969–2015) whose commissioned large-scale anti-uranium mining rock carvings – located in areas with high uranium concentration – remain the movements’ most enduring legacy. In this talk, I first analyse Manner’s protest pieces in light of theories on prehistoric rock art and argue that, in using rock as his art medium, Manner was able to elicit and intensify in his audiences feelings of belonging to a landscape in need of protection. Secondly, through a discussion on the points of connection between extractivism and land art practice, I argue that, contrary to the common critique, Manner was not simply marking uranium deposits for future exploitation, but instead instilling hope into the bedrock.
Marko Marila is associate professor of heritage archaeology at the University of Turku, Finland, and research fellow at Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy. With a Phd in history and philosophy of archaeology, Marila’s recent research has dealt with the history of uranium mining and the heritages and arts of anti-nuclear anti-uranium mining activism in Finland. In his creative work, Marila often combines archaeological sensibilities with the practices of contemporary art. Marila, M. & Andreoletti, T. 2025. Yellowcake: A performative (an)archaeology of uranium. In Shadow Archaeologies: In the Shadow of Antiquity or For Other Modes of Archaeological Worldmaking, edited by A. Nativ & G. Lucas, pp. 164–182. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781032644448 Marila, M. 2024. Rocky legacies of Finnish anti-uranium mining social movements: The rock art of Pessi Manner. Finnish Journal of Contemporary History 3(2), 32–61. https://doi.org/10.61559/lh.145345 Marila, M., Klaubert, H., Novac, S., Sievers, A., Öhnfeldt, R. & Storm, A. 2024. Nuclear Natures: A Concept Explored in Six Briefs. NiCHE: Network in Canadian History & Environment. https://niche-canada.org/nuclear-natures/
Francisco Martínez
Digging Shadows: The Ecological Memory of Soviet Modernity
This paper discusses the ecological and social consequences of mining in Eastern Estonia, a region affected by a century of extractivist activity. The irreversible destruction of the natural landscape of Ida-Virumaa evidences the mineral, logistic, and military character of Soviet modernity but also of the Anthropocene overall, which presents resource exploitation as an inevitable element of progress and civilization. The research comprised an expanded ethnography in order to make the alienating reality of mining analytically available to the senses. I created two art installations based on the gesture of letting post-industrial waste “speak” for itself, thus blurring the boundaries between nature and culture and between matter and telling. This collaboration with the territory enacted a disobedient epistemology through more-than-human aesthetics. As a series of decomposing objects, the ethnographic matter generated in the experiment invite us to think with ecological traces that are the witnesses of the unrepresentable – infrastructural harm, environmental pollution, stigma, collective lost, the social void and military resonances.
Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic research. His research was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. He currently works as a Ramón y Cajal Senior Research Fellow at the University of Murcia, Spain. Martínez is the author of four monographs and has edited numerous volumes and theme issues. His new book, The Future of Hiding, is published by Cornell University Press. His work is known for its critical insights and experimental style. The eleven exhibitions he has curated showcase his innovative approach and ability to convey complex ideas to diverse audiences. For more info, see https://fran-martinez.com
María José Zapata Campos & Patrik Zapata
Authoritarian Waste Regimes and the Politics of Commoning. Learning from the case of Nicaragua’s La Chureca
In (post)authoritarian contexts, waste governance often serves as a tool of control, shaping both urban landscapes and the lives of those who depend on discarded materials. This paper examines the case of La Chureca, the largest open-air dump in Central America, and its transformation under Nicaragua’s authoritarian regime through a World Bank–funded waste management project. Framed as a modernising intervention, the project introduced a technocratic model of enclosure—erasing informal infrastructures, displacing waste pickers, and reconfiguring the dump into a sanitised landfill. Yet, amid this spatial and institutional restructuring, waste pickers engaged in everyday acts of resistance, reclaiming spaces, materials, and collective identities. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, we explore how these practices of commoning contested the state’s depoliticised vision of waste, preserving alternative socio-ecological relations in a tightly controlled political environment. We argue that La Chureca reveals how waste landscapes in authoritarian settings become battlegrounds over visibility, access, and value, and how grassroots resistance can disrupt the smooth functioning of technocratic waste regimes.
Key words: City organising, informal settlements, sustainable development, waste management, local governments, scandology, organization theory, management, sociological institutional theory, wastocene, labour market integration.
Patrik Zapata is a Professor in Public Administration at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Patrik’s research interests concern waste, circular grassroots, and sustainable organizing of cities. He has led several comparative international research projects on sustainable cities and waste, in East Africa, Latin America, and Europe. He currently leads a research communication project informed by participatory innovative videos on sustainable waste governance (FORMAS, Sweden, 2020–23), and one research project on Labour market integration and local governance (Swedish Research Council, 2020–23). He has also organized several international conferences on Waste in Social Sciences. Zapata’s research on waste, waste prevention, commoning and grassroots innovations is published in management, environmental, public administration, and urban geography journals.
María José Zapata Campos is Professor in Business Administration at the School of Business, Economics and Law, at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. Maria holds a PhD in Sociology with specialization in urban and organizational sociology. Her research in waste studies focuses on the intersection between civil society and local governments in Sweden, East Africa, and Latin America from an action-research perspective. She has co-edited with Michael Hall the volume Organising Waste in the City:International Perspectives on Narratives and Practices (The Policy Press, 2015). In recent years Zapata Campos has contributed to the field of commoning theories and waste studies through several book chapters and articles published in journals such as Urban Studies, Environment and Policy A and C, or Urban Geography. Currently, she leads the research project Circular Grassroots Innovations for Sustainable and Inclusive Urban Transitions (FORMAS, Sweden and the European Union, 2024–26).
Kristupas Sabolius
On Compost-ability
Waste and wetland share a common genealogy within what might be termed the ill imaginaries of wasteland. As John Scanlan notes, the etymology of the term waste in Old and Middle English did not originally refer to a specific object but rather to a condition of land or environment “that was unsuitable to sustain human habitation”—or, as I would add, to a milieu in conflict with the conditions of human existence. Wasteland, then, is conceived primarily as a domain of nature understood as inhospitable, that is, unfit for human habitation. Vittoria Di Palma has analyzed the archetypal intertwining of wetlands (bogs, fens, swamps) with wastelands, describing them as “desolate, marginal, and unproductive regions” that could be “redeemed” through the “civilizing” forces of technology, private property, and agricultural development. What is more, Greg Kennedy rightly observes that sensu stricto waste does not exist in nature, since “ecology teaches that on the macro level nature wastes nothing.” In this talk, I propose to examine waste and wetland through the lens of the compossibility of coexistence. The parallel between compossibility and compost-ability becomes particularly salient here. Compost is now regarded as the most respectful form of waste management insofar as it adheres to a clear, life-oriented criterion: it creates a favorable milieu for the emergence of new forms of existence. From this perspective, compost may be understood as an instance of a compossible ontology. This proposal may be further refined by introducing the notion of negotiation within the context of milieus—a process through which diverse forms of life and abiotic environments are continuously mediated and recalibrated.
Kristupas Sabolius is professor of philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of Vilnius University (Lithuania) and Principal Investigator at (Post)Authoritarian Landscapes Research Center. His recent publications include Immaginazione. Al di là dell’antropocene (Imagination beyond the Anthropocene, 2024, Castelvecchi editore); On the Real (ed. 2021, LAPAS books), Matter and Imagination. Hybrid Creativity between Science and Art (2018, Vilnius University Press, ed.), as well as numerous essays signalizing the contradictory function of imagination at the intersection of western and non-western thought.
Vaiva Daraškevičiūtė
Beyond the Visuality of Anthropocene Landscapes: Waste, Abjection, Uncanny
In my presentation, I will discuss landscapes of waste beyond the perspective of visuality. I will start with the concept of the transfiguration of landscape as proposed by Philippe Descola. Descola suggests reconceptualising the notion of landscape not through a Western, ocularcentric approach, but as a multidimensional process that requires dismantling the dichotomy between nature and culture. This constitutes a fundamental shift in perspective: rather than being subjected to an external, aestheticizing gaze, the landscape is considered an active environment co-constituted by the interactions of both human and non-human agents. However, it is evident that the physical and semantic structures of Anthropocene landscapes are composed not only of living beings and natural elements, but also of waste. Waste has become an active agent in the transformation of the Earth’s surface, playing a significant role in the global environment. Consequently, the question that must be posed is: how will humanity learn to coexist with waste? In the Anthropocene, waste – particularly non-biodegradable and nuclear waste – functions as a marker that highlights the limits of our entanglement with “otherness”. The paradox is that, although waste is a by-product of human activity, it remains largely beyond human control. This has a disturbing effect on our sense of comfort and the perspective of the future. The presentation will analyse the aspect of waste’s uncontrollability (the inability to visualize, Mirzoeff 2014), drawing on the concepts of abjection (Julia Kristeva 1982) and the uncanny (Timothy Morton 2013).
Vaiva Daraškevičiūtė is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Philosophy and a researcher at the (Post)Authoritarian Landscapes Research Centre, Vilnius University (Lithuania). She is a co-author of the collective monographs Transformations of Nature: Modernity and Anthropocene (Ed. M. Gutauskas, 2021, in Lithuanian) and Post-secular Condition (Ed. T. Sodeika, 2022, in Lithuanian). Daraškevičiūtė has numerous publications in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy of art, and visual studies. Recently, her research interests have focused on the situation of the Anthropocene, seeking to explore it from a philosophical perspective.
Saulius Geniušas
Phenomenology of Solastalgia: From Transcendental Homelessness to Transcendental Placelessness
This paper offers a phenomenological analysis of solastalgia, a concept coined by Glenn Albrecht to describe the existential distress caused by negative environmental changes experienced while staying in one’s own environment. It critically examines the concept’s paradoxical nature, addressing ambiguities related to its scope, sensory and cognitive foundations, and temporal dimensions. Distinctions are drawn between perceptually based, cognitively based, and combined forms of solastalgia, as well as between solastalgia directed at the present, past, and future environments. The paper challenges the description of solastalgia as “homesickness at home,” proposing instead that it reveals a deeper condition of transcendental placelessness, a novel form of existential displacement arising from the degradation of the environmental conditions necessary for place-making and habitation. Drawing on György Lukács’s concept of transcendental homelessness, the paper situates solastalgia within the broader context of evolving transcendental topographies, highlighting its significance as a disclosive emotion of late modernity. Finally, it reflects on the implications of this analysis for understanding our epoch characterized by environmental crisis, while cautiously recognizing the potential for a new epoch of ecological harmony, termed the Symbiocene.
Saulius Geniusas is professor and chair of the Department of Philosophy at The Chinese University of Hong Kong. His main philosophical interests lie in phenomenology and hermeneutics. Geniusas is the author of various books, including The Origins of the Horizon in Husserl’s Phenomenology (Springer 2012), The Phenomenology of Pain (Ohio University Press, 2020/22), and Phenomenology of Productive Imagination (Ibidem Press, 2022). He is also an editor and co-editor of numerous volumes, including Stretching the Limits of Productive Imagination (Rowman & Littlefield 2018) and Varieties of Self-Awareness: New Perspectives from Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, and Comparative Philosophy (Springer 2023). He has also published more than eighty articles in various philosophy journals and anthologies. Geniusas has been awarded various research fellowships and grants. Some of his books have also been awarded international prizes.
Svitlana Matviyenko
“Donetsk Chornobyl:” The Deep Time of Warfare
This presentation traces the layered histories and contemporary resonances of the 1979 industrial underground nuclear explosion beneath the Ukrainian city of Yunokomunarivsk, known as “Object Klivazh.” In the aftermath of the Chornobyl catastrophe, this 530th nuclear explosion on the territory of the USSR came to be referred to in popular discourse in Ukraine as “Donetsk Chornobyl,” situating the event within a broader history of Soviet wastelanding practices. Drawing on the notion of “vertical occupation” as an enduring ecological footprint that imposes a necropolitical regime on the conditions of geo-somatic communities, I examine how the legacies of Soviet wastelanding are reactivated in the current war. The case of Object Klivazh compels us to expand the conceptualization of war beyond its visible surface fronts – to reckon with deep temporalities, subterranean infrastructures, and the slow unfolding of toxic durations. Waste emerges here not as collateral, but as an active agent – both in the time of so-called peace and as a constitutive element of warfare itself.
Svitlana Matviyenko is is an Associate Professor of Critical Media Analysis in the School of Communication and Associate Director of the Digital Democracies Institute, Simon Fraser University. Her research and teaching, informed by science & technology studies and history of science, are focused on information and cyberwar, media and environment, critical infrastructure studies and postcolonial theory. Matviyenko’s current work on nuclear cultures & heritage investigates the practices of nuclear terror, weaponization of pollution and technogenic catastrophes during the Russian war in Ukraine. Matviyenko is a co-editor of two collections, The Imaginary App (MIT Press, 2014) and Lacan and the Posthuman (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She is a co-author of Cyberwar and Revolution: Digital Subterfuge in Global Capitalism (Minnesota UP, 2019), a winner of the 2019 book award of the Science Technology and Art in International Relations (STAIR) section of the International Studies Association and of the Canadian Communication Association 2020 Gertrude J. Robinson book prize.
Nicolas de Warren
Living Alone in a World of Wounds: Life in the Aftermath in Kimura Yūsuke’s Sacred Cesium Ground, Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, and Strugatsky Brothers’ Roadside Picnic
I am interested in the aftermath of ecological disasters, namely, in how life-worlds that have experienced either a catastrophic event or a “slow disaster” can continue to survive in a condition in which pollution and waste cannot be entirely cleaned-up or returned to its prior condition. I will explore this theme through contemporary literary imaginations of ecological disaster (Fukushima, Bhopal) and connect my discussion to Glenn Albrecht’s conception of the homesickness felt while still at home after ecological disasters, or solastalgia. The broad theme of my interest is thus, as it were, weltliche Weltlosigkeit.
Nicolas de Warren is a professor of Philosophy and Jewish Studies at the Pennsylvania State University. He has published four books: Husserl and the Promise of Time (2010), A Momentary Breathlessness in the Sadness of Time (2018), Original Forgiveness (2020), and German Philosophy and the First World War (2023). He is currently working on two book projects: a phenomenology of the afterlife that examines different senses in which, whether individually, collectively, or historically, the dead haunt the living; a study of the impact of the First World War on Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu. He is in the final stages of completing two co-authored books: The Erosion of Trust and Truthfulness in the Age of Democratic Uncertainty and We Nuclear People: Responsibility for Nuclear Waste in the Vastness of Time. He has published widely in the areas of phenomenology, ethics, 19th and 20th century philosophy, aesthetics, political philosophy, and literature. Among his most recent published papers: “Cash Rules Everything Around Me: Georg Simmel’s The Philosophy of Money” (2024), “‘Grand, Ungodly, God-Like Man’: On the Symptomatology of Fanaticism” (2023), “On the Many Senses of the Political in Sartre’s Writings” (2023), and “Where were you when I laid earth’s foundations? Levinas and The Book of Job” (2022). He has also edited a number of volumes, most recently: Phenomenologies of the Digital Age: The Virtual, the Fictional, the Magical (2024) and The Routledge Handbook of the Philosophy of Europe (2021).
Conference organisers:
Marija Drėmaitė, Vilnius University / PAScapes
Eglė Rindzevičiūtė, Kingston University / PAScapes
Mintautas Gutauskas, Vilnius University / PAScapes
Contact person: Lijana Minikovič lijana.minikovic@if.vu.lt
