Planetarity: Some Tools for Thinking About the Earth with Tim Waterman

Tuesday July 16th
Doors & drinks 6.30pm; Talk starts 7pm.

How can we replace the neo-liberal idea of “globalisation” with other ways of thinking about global connectedness and our place in the world?

Tim Waterman, professor of landscape at the Bartlett and author of The Landscape of Utopia, will present some new tools to help us reimagine “planetarity”: earthliness, worldliness, and globality. His talk will take in maps and Utopia, colonialism and protest, enclosure and the commons, as well as the romantic and the poetic as different ways of thinking about the planetary.

He’ll also discuss the notion of “double consciousness”, a term first used in 1903 by WEB Du Bois to describe how Black Americans were forced to see the world and themselves through the eyes of a white supremacist society. This double consciousness also applies to our contradictory experience of the natural world. Landscapes, transformed by colonialism and imperialism both past and present, are where power and financial relationships are played out on a global level. Yet at the same time they are also the setting of everyday lives and everyday experience.

Tim's talk will offer fresh insights for anyone trying to find alternative ways of conceiving, working with, caring for and "commoning" our Earth, while grappling with the predicament of climate and nature breakdown.

Followed by a one-pot vegan supper and discussion.

This is an updated version of the talk Tim gave in the Kairos tent at Green Gathering festival last year.

Kairos, 84 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4TG

Doors open at 6.30pm for drinks. Talk starts at 7pm.

£8 Kairos Club Member, £15 Non-member, £10 Struggling financially, £20 Supporter. Food complimentary.